There's the "June gloom" marine layer on June mornings, but the tic tac episode was on November 14 around noon. Fravor said visibility was very high, and the Weather Underground says conditions in San Diego were fair almost all day long, and only partly cloudy for a couple of hours at 2:51 PM and 4:51 PM.
That's a really odd thing for a professional fighter pilot to say.
It's also hard to reconcile this 8-10 seconds description with this tweet. She almost sounds like she's describing Fravor's descent _before_ the merge plot, but in that case, what would Fravor have been looking for? If Fravor had descended to look for a radar contact instead of a visual one, why would she have been so spooked?
We're getting a great look at it. This whole thing takes probably up to five minutes from the time we show up.
I suspect that is what she was jokingly referring to (I live in Santa Monica, up the coast.) But the weather is variable. Some days it's clear with visibility in the 50+ mile range. Sometimes it's hazy, sometimes foggy.
He also said, "You're talking fifty miles of visibility, and you can easily see an object that size easily out to ten miles, and it just disappeared in seconds."
There was 4 of us in the airplanes literally watching this thing for roughly about 5 minutes
So, unresolved.
Just had a nice text exchange with CDR David Fravor to try and sort out the time issue.
@MickWest
#ufotwitter
12:47 PM · Jun 14, 2021
His recollection: “Everything was slow and benign until I went nose low to get close and it went Poof.”
12:48 PM · Jun 14, 2021
“We saw it hovering and flew around the circle and then cut across to get closer. Based on a slow turn rate and slow descent I say roughly 5 minutes. Could have been less but it was way more than a few seconds.”
12:49 PM · Jun 14, 2021
I only had visual of Tic Tac for 8-10 sec from high cover. The time before that I was looking at lead aircraft (flying wing), looking for visual at the merge, looking at the churning water. Maybe his “time dilation” made 2-3 min feel like 5 and my 8-10 sec was at the tail end?
12:52 PM · Jun 14, 2021
So Dietrich suggesting "my 8-10 sec was at the tail end" does not really add up.And we see whitewater we just don't like if you see a seamount, you know, rock underwater when you're standing on the shore, and the waves are breaking over. And you're like, what is that? It's usually because there's a rock under the water. So it looks like that. But it's about the size of a 737. It actually kind of has a shape of like a cross, and it's pointing to the east. So you've got the long part going east west, and you got a couple things going north and south. So as we're looking at it, because that kind of draws our eyes, we're like, well, that's kind of odd. We look down and the WSO on the other airplane comes up and says, "Hey, Skipper, do you?" And that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I'm kind of looking at the same thing I got Dude, you see that? What is that thing? And what we see is this white Tic Tac looking object just above the surface of the water pointing north south and it's going north, south, east west. It's just radically moving forward, back left right at will and it's moving around the disturbance, the whitewater that we see
That's a very helpful interview. If she circled together with Fravor and she only took notice when he "cut across the circle" -- an aggressive maneuver that could've plausibly taken 10 seconds -- a parallax explanation seems even more likely.
do you have a link to the fox segment, i couldnt find his appearance on yt
Same.
I don't know about Slaight, that fragment of a sentence he was able to get out could really go anywhere if he'd been allowed to complete the thought. But it's interesting that each of the other three accounts is different.
As cited in posts above, the executive report mentions the Louisville was in the area conducting a 'live fire exercise', so it's possible the people who reassured Dietrich were lying or misinformed.
There is evidence that American subs deployed balloons in highly secretive operations (project Palladium). They wouldn't advertise it. If, as seems increasingly likely, we're looking at a near collision of whatever they were testing with a fighter jet, this could be a career ender for those responsible.
She said something like "they could rule out life fire from a submarine in this area" (paraphrasing).
Obviously purely conjecture: I find it a bit odd that if that is the case, no one has come forward to set the record straight, even anonymously.
yes. she said it was clear visibility but theres a "haze" at the distance where things get blurry.
Unfortunately not. It was rather an impromptu interview, and I didn't get to (or remember) everything
Interesting. I did a quick search about the kinds of balloons that get used for that sort of surveillance of operation, saw some tests from a company called Raven Aerostar that roughly fit the timeframe, looked them up and found this:
Those balloons are HUGE though. They start out partially inflated, and expand to something like 400 feet across. - but only at high altitudes. Not a contender.
Do you mean the specific example I found, all similar balloons from this company, or all balloons used for surveillance applications?
I mean NASA's superpressure balloons.
I thought the dementi was overly specific
However: that's an extraordinary dogfight and video.
Well, take a look at this:
