The reports of people that ACTUALLY WORKED back then on those ships, that participated in these events, are not "conspiracy theories". I think that is probably reserved for stories such as the Stoog... ops, PILOTS that flew over that area, actually saw Kurth's F18 instead of our Tic-Tac UFO.
I'm tending towards, if the Nimitz and/or Princeton received visitors who took away logs/ data storage, this might have been a relatively rare thing, enough to be noticed as such by the claimants. But clearly the commanders of those ships, and those responsible for maintaining physical security, recognised the legitimacy of the requests to hand over some materials. If the visitors to Princeton wore distinctive clothing, surely this reduces the likelihood of this being some sort of questionable covert operation.
Correction: only the Princeton received visitors who took away logs/data. Not the Nimitz (and Gary Voorhis thinks they came from the Nimitz to do that). That's one of the reasons why the people that claim there was a cover-up find odd that Fravor is so sure this wasn't the case. He wasn't on that ship, so why he wants so badly to push his UFO narrative and dismiss all others? Maybe because if this is further investigated, we would know more about it? And for those that asked about sources, you can easily find them, search all the names.
This is completely off topic for this thread, and has been for many posts. This thread considers the possibility that what Fravor saw was Kurth's F18. Kurth claims that he went to look around the area of reported radar contacts, somewhat unofficially. So, is it possible Fravor and others mistook Kurth's aircraft as they had no idea he was there and didn't expect him to be.
Sure. The possibility of looking at Kurth's F18 and thinking that was our Tic-Tac UFO is unsupported. The people that spread this are probably only trying to discredit these events, I don't think it's a good skepticism if we start to make baseless conjectures. There's no need for that, considering all discrepancies from it, and the lack of concrete data to back everything they say (conveniently not preserved).
Kurth arrived in the vicinity before Fravor and has said "I accepted their vector toward the Unidentified Contact. I had Fravor's flight on radar and was directly over the top of them when they were visually observing the Supersonic Tic Tac".
His jet wasn't manoeuvring erratically, Fravor and others would not have looked at him, and thought so wrong about what they were witnessing (also considering the entire event probably took around 2 minutes).
Commander Jim Slaight indicated that his jet was equipped with the APG-73 radar and he could not detect the target (Tic-Tac). Even if you replace said UFO with another F-18, the odds of a fighter radar not detecting are also high/possible.
Kurth left the scene without viewing the Tic-Tac he was directed towards. His Hornet's radar also failed to detect anything. As he came within 5-10 nautical miles of the location, was beginning to run low on fuel, and instructed to abort, because a pair of Super Hornets were going there.
One question that needs to be asked is this: if Kurth was first on the scene, did the Tic-Tac drop down on his approach?
There's also another important detail:
"FastEagle01" and "FastEagle02" were told by the USS Princeton to a heading of 270 degrees (due west), at a range of about 60 miles, and were given intercept coordinates at 20.000 feet. They proceeded with their APG-73 radar set to an envelope extending 20 miles in all directions (according to a June 28, 2018 interview from Fravor by Linda Moulton, on the KGRA radio).
The "envelope" thing matters because it establishes expectation and configuration, not confusion. The fighters were vectored to a known intercept point, set their radar for close-range acquisition and were actively searching for a physical object, not another fighter in formation.
If Kurth's F-18 had been within that envelope, above or below them by a few thousand feet and maneuvering around the same coordinates, then one of two things should have happened:
1) It should have been detected intermittently on radar;
2) Or it should have been visually recognizable as a Hornet;
Instead, neither occurred. This is not "radar blindness" anymore, it becomes systemic non-detection plus misidentification, which is much harder to defend.
Could it be that even inside the envelope, both a Tic Tac and an F-18 would be missed? Probably.
How? For Kurth's Hornet to remain undetected inside that envelope, additional assumptions are required:
- It must be in a persistent notch geometry;
- It must avoid presenting broadside aspects;
- It must avoid being visually recognized;
- It must coincidentally occupy the same intercept coordinates;
- It must maneuver in ways that visually mimic a featureless object;
One of these options is possible. All of them combined? I doubt it.
The envelope detail does not blow away the Kurth theory by itself, but it makes it harder to believe.
What about the Tic-Tac? Non-detection remains plausible because:
- Its motion was erratic;
- Its dwell time in any beam may have been short;
- Its RCS may have been unstable or aspect-poor;
- It may have crossed notch regions repeatedly;
In other words, the very behavior reported supplies mechanisms for radar failure.
Bottom line: all of the above does not guarantee detection, but it makes the Kurth F-18 hypothesis increasingly strained, while leaving the Tic Tac description internally consistent.
That would have been extremely interesting.
