Thanks for sharing it here. There's an excellent JFQ article that discusses the broader implications for military joint force operations based on the Nimitz incident, which gives an interpretation very much in line with Dr Metzger's. It's not just the "NASA nerd", people interested in the military operational side also reach similar conclusions.
The military’s Aegis SPY-1 radar system can reportedly track an object as small as a golf ball, and the Aegis computer system can be programmed to ignore objects matching certain profiles. Thus, while the Princeton’s computers could easily detect small meteors, they should have filtered out astronomical phenomena such as the Taurids. However, despite its sophistication, neither the radar system nor its operators can be described as infallible. Aegis is something akin to Frankenstein’s monster, built as it is from many different constituent systems, including the SPY-1 radar itself, weapons control systems, navigation equipment, and various other integrated components. This introduces multiple potential failure points in the system’s hardware and software. As a result, Aegis has a well-documented history—however rare—of misidentifying or failing to identify aircraft operating in the vicinity of American warships. Assuming Aegis operated flawlessly, the system’s human operators would still represent its most common points of failure.
Consider the July 3, 1988, tragedy involving the USS Vincennes. While pursuing and firing on multiple Iranian gunboats in the Strait of Hormuz, the crew of the Vincennes detected a civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, shortly after it took off from the airport in Bandar Abbas. Like the IFF system failure that resulted in the Black Hawk shootdown incident 6 years later, the plane’s IFF computer was not working properly. Meanwhile, the ship’s brand-new Aegis SPY-1 radar system indicated that the plane was ascending in a commercial air traffic lane. Nevertheless, the crew of the Vincennes mistook the plane for a diving Iranian F-14 Tomcat and shot it down, killing all 290 people onboard. Human communications failures, misinterpretation of the Aegis data, and the IFF failure combined with the crew’s resulting unease to cause the disaster.
Returning to the Princeton, the ship’s November 2004 mission likely served as a shakedown cruise for the very same—albeit updated—equipment. Like the Vincennes, the Aegis systems that Day was working with had only recently been installed. It is probable that the radar system’s programming (or the operators’ training) was not fully prepared for the Taurids. Even if it was working properly, Day clearly ignored the [ice crystals] explanation proffered by his meteorologist when he dispatched the Black Aces to investigate the anomalous radar returns. Fortunately, the stakes in the Pacific were nowhere near so consequential as they were for the Vincennes. Nevertheless, this is troubling because some details associated with the Nimitz incident may indicate that Fravor narrowly avoided an accidental collision with the UAP he and Dietrich were dispatched to assess.
Consider Dietrich’s public comments: she suggests that the water below the Tic Tac–shaped UFO was churning violently, as if a submarine had just submerged. This is an important detail; it implies that the two pilots entered a weapons test site to investigate the Princeton’s UAPs. Indeed, according to the government’s unclassified executive summary from a 2009 report documenting the Nimitz incident, the USS Louisville, the Los Angeles–class submarine attached to the Nimitz battlegroup, was conducting weapons tests in the area. While the executive summary also states that no pilots would be vectored into a live-fire test site coordinated with the battlegroup, it acknowledges—just one sentence earlier—that Fravor and Dietrich were in fact directed into the area of the Louisville’s weapon test. Add to this the facts that the Tic Tac was reportedly a low-visibility aircraft capable of erratic, unpredictable high-G maneuvers, including aggressively gaining altitude, as well as the fact that it flew directly at Fravor’s plane before disappearing, and the suggestion that Fravor or Dietrich (like Mantell before them) placed their lives in danger chasing the Princeton’s UAPs becomes quite plausible.
Admittedly, this interpretation relies on the assumption that the Tic Tac was part of the Louisville’s weapons test. Yet even if that assumption is incorrect and the pilots instead encountered an interagency program, such as NASA’s unmanned X-43, or an asset belonging to one of the Navy’s other partners, the evidence points to the same important lessons illuminated by the Mantell, Vincennes, and Black Hawk shootdown incidents. That is, misidentification is a common problem that could lead to expensive or fatal accidents, like the loss of an aircraft or a pilot, and consistent and clear communication is required to prevent such accidents while operating jointly in a complex environment.
