PERSONAL

0

2,705

The Nimitz Encounter: We're Not Alone?

5 years ago2,392 words

Seems UFOs are real... question mark?

I'm currently waiting for a response to an email re Sindrel Song publishing, so there's nothing else I can really do with that at the moment. But this came up on my radar the other day, and I'm curious to share if you're unfamiliar with it, and to maybe hear some opinions about it.

I've been interested in UFOs/aliens - and anything paranormal, really - since I was little, though I've always tried to blend together open-mindedness with scepticism rather than going full-on with either. Kind of like if it's a spectrum, I wanted to be somewhere in the middle. I didn't want to dismiss things that could be real because of closed-mindedness, but I didn't want to be fooled by things that just weren't true either.

As I got older and I read more, my perception of UFOs and people who believe in them shifted further and further towards the sceptical end of that spectrum, and while I still retained an interest in them, it was more like a kind of not-so-serious eye-rolling, seeing the whole thing as 'what if' entertainment rather than actual fact.

But I experienced a strong shift in the other direction recently, and now I'm fairly convinced that there are technologies unknown to most of us directly interacting with the world in some form. I've already entertained the idea my whole life, but there's a difference between thinking that could be the case, and having good evidence that essentially confirms that this is literally, really the case. It's quite paradigm-shifting.



The thing responsible for this shift was an incident called the ∞ "Nimitz Encounter" ∞. To summarise, a couple of US Military ships and their associated planes encountered a bunch of 'tic-tac-shaped' UFOs out in the sea in 2004, during a training exercise. They picked them up on their sophisticated radars, tracked them for days, and a couple of jets actively engaged them, during which their systems were actively scrambled.

I've read about a number of cases like this in the past, where reliable sources like pilots or military personnel have talked about their encounters with UFOs, and they always seemed convincing to me in a way that some random person talking about their abduction experience or seeing a distant light in the sky never really was. But this is the first case I know of where there are literally thousands of witnesses, all of them trained military personnel, and several of them have come forward to talk in detail about their experiences. All of their stories are in agreement too.

There's a ∞ YouTube channel set up about it ∞, which includes a documentary about the incident, and interviews with several witnesses. The documentary has that hokey vibe you usually get from documentaries about paranormal topics that I think harms its credibility, but the people being interviewed seem convinced - and convincing - to me. The documentary's worth watching if you're unfamiliar with the incident, despite the production direction:



I first heard about this on this recent Joe Rogan podcast:



I became familiar with Joe Rogan when Jordan Peterson came up on this blog, and I was looking for videos of him to try and understand some of the things people were saying about him (I can't read his name now without cringing, thanks to how discussion about that went here). On first impressions, he (Joe Rogan) seems like the kind of person I'd usually dislike, and I expected to be put off, but I was pleasantly surprised. I won't be surprised though if other people have a negative opinion of him as they did with Jordan Peterson, especially since those two seemed to see eye-to-eye. I don't know the reputations surrounding people, so I judge them on what I see myself rather than how my associated group already feels about them.

In that two-hour-long podcast, he talks to Commander David Fravor, the pilot who engaged with this 'tic tac' craft. It's obvious that he's a trained military person and was competent at what he did, and it's just as obvious that he believes he saw what he saw. If he's not a credible witness, who is? He talks about both tracking it with technology, and watching it with his own eyes for quite a while.

The guy with him seems less credible, and the commenters both on the video and elsewhere seem to dislike him for that, saying he's harming Fravor's credibility through association. I can see where they're coming from.

They talk about a guy called Bob Lazar in that video, who also has experience with UFOs etc. My curiosity piqued, I found and watched the podcast with him:



This one was... hmm. Rogan didn't seem completely dismissive or sceptical, and it did sound as if he (Lazar) was sure of what he was talking about. It was also quite interesting how it seemed to line up with how Fravor described the UFOs' behaviour, which is also how they've been described in a lot of other accounts as well. He talked about working on actual alien ships at a military base near Area 51 called S-4, and some of the stuff regarding technology was interesting: he described the interior of a spacecraft in a way that sounded intriguing if nothing else, and I found the detail that none of the technology used wiring noteworthy considering he's apparently been telling this same story since before wireless technology was as common as it is now. But overall it comes across as quite outlandish and difficult to believe, since all we have to go on is his word that it happened.

So I looked into that a bit more. The Wikipedia page about him talks about legal troubles and false claims about education records, which is concerning. He claims in the interview that They - The Government - erased his education history to discredit him, but that seems all rather convenient. I found ∞ this article ∞, which I immediately disliked and was sceptical about because of the arrogant tone of the writer, though after reading the whole thing, it's a whole lot easier to assume Bob Lazar takes liberties with the truth to evade negative consequences than to assume he really did work on alien craft.

Interestingly - and you might know this already - it seems Bob Lazar is responsible for Area 51 entering the public consciousness as a place where UFOs are stored, from what I gather, and the interview Joe Rogan did with him was what sparked the 'Area 51 raid' meme thing that culminated in a disappointing number of Naruto-running internet dwellers freeing captive aliens and changing the world forever.

...I quickly checked to see if that's accurate, and I'm reminded of how hard it is not to be incredulous about all this UFO stuff. I was just reading an article about an alien called "J-Rod" who helped a former Area 51 worker develop biological weapons from alien viruses. Hmm. People get carried away, and weave these detailed universes of technical terms and paranoid government conspiracies... Though just because most of it is likely born of some kind of mental illness, that doesn't mean that everything remotely related is immediately false by association. Each claim should be considered on its own merits, or lack thereof.

I've looked into the Nimitz encounter to see if it's easily or thoroughly debunked like Lazar likely has been, but everything I've found is so flimsy compared to the primary claims. They seem to assume that these trained military people were incompetent - but that their armchair assessment that requires no revision of their beliefs is accurate, of course - or that there was some technical glitch, which wouldn't add up with how events have been described by the witnesses in their interviews.

It's never wise to blindly believe - or to disbelieve - things just because they fit with our preferred and/or established worldview, or don't. I'd love for Bob Lazar's story to be true, but there's enough to discount him that I have trouble accepting his claims. With The Nimitz encounter, though, it being the truth seems more likely to me than not.

It's also noteworthy that ∞ The US Navy recently confirmed that the Nimitz video - and some others - are real and show genuine Unidentified Aerial Phenomena ∞ (which is what they seem to be calling them these days, because of all the baggage associated with 'UFO').

If all this is true, then this means that there are craft out there with technology well beyond our own, interacting with the planet, and we can only speculate about what they're doing. Things like this don't confirm they're extraterrestrial, of course, but you'd think if it was experimental human technology, we'd have seen it being utilised in something in the 14 years since the Nimitz encounter occurred. There's no reason to assume that they're manned - or alienned or whatever - but they're apparently on a different technological level to what we humans possess, so they were probably made by something else.

Most of the mythology that's developed around greys and secret government facilities and conspiracies is very likely cultural, since it changes through time and it's possible to trace the origins back to some initial claim. I'm remaining neutral about all that, or if I were to sway in any direction, it'd be towards doubt, as I can't imagine so many people keeping a secret as well as they supposedly do. Interestingly, the Nimitz witnesses talked about some government people coming to seize all their data about the incident; I don't know what to make about that.



Speaking of UFOs and a profound shift in how I now perceive the world, here's a video in which artists attempt to draw Spongebob characters purely from memory:



These are characters they've seen many, many times before, probably quite recently, and as artists and animators themselves they'll have seen them in a way that really should help to remember and reproduce the details of their form. But the videos derive humour from how far off their drawings end up being.

Our memories aren't reliable at all. The unreliability of things like witness testimony - especially police lineups - was something covered in some detail on the psychology course that I did (I think this is the first time I've mentioned doing that course, isn't it?). Another thing I learned from that was that memories change a little bit every time they're recalled, so the more times they're remembered, the further they deviate from the original truth.

The Nimitz encounter was 14 years earlier than the time that those interviews took place. That's a lot of time for memories of the event to decay or warp.

But that doesn't seem to be enough to discount everything that they say. Several people all tell corroborating stories (though some minor details differing are likely due to memory fallibility), there's clear evidence (though you could say that, like pretty much all UFO 'evidence', 'clear' is a very inaccurate term), and the Navy has literally confirmed that it was a real event.



If this is a true story, and 'UAPs' are really out there, then that changes the way I have to look at the world. How can it not? With that in mind, I fell further down the rabbit hole, feeling it was important.

I saw another Rogan podcast, with a guy called Tom DeLonge, who I'd never heard of, but all the mentions of him make sure to describe him as a member of the rock band Blink-182. Who's now become obsessed with aliens.



This one is older than the others, and it's... strange. He comes across as a fairly typical 'UFO nut' type, full of outlandish claims and links to dodgy, unconvincing video clips. Rogan isn't convinced at all, and essentially mocks him when given the opportunity.

But weirdly, he talks about having formed a... thing, a company, called "To The Stars Academy", which aims to use various forms of media - books, films, merchandise, etc - to gradually reveal what The Government knows about aliens to the world, in a way that won't make them panic. In itself it sounds like nothing more than a kooky fantasy, but what makes it weird is that it seems he's got ∞ a team of people on board ∞ who at least sound like they've got a whole bunch of relevant qualifications in both scientific and military domains.

It's not clear to me what exactly they're doing or what they've done - it comes across as a scam to get people to pay to become shareholders, and some people have commented that it's nothing more than just that - but wouldn't it be so very strange if this, of all things, turned out to be the thing that opened all our eyes to the wider universe??

Some of the commenters on that video say they got there following a similar path to me, starting with the Fravor interview and looking backwards, and that this interview, which seemed so crazy when it was made, now has them wondering. I suppose that's how I feel, too; extremely incredulous, but... wondering. What if he's not talking absolute nonsense? I'm interested to see where it goes, if anywhere.



Perhaps the truth of extraterrestrial contact is something that'll be revealed to us within our lifetimes? Within a decade or two, even.

Or maybe this is all just fantasy and misinterpretation and I'm an idiot for even giving it a moment's thought?

What do you - who are more exposed to the news and the views of others than I am - think of all this? This Nimitz encounter specifically. If you're sceptical, why?


(Also, I've been bad at replying to comments recently. Depression's to blame, as usual. Perhaps I'll get around to replying to some on older posts, though I don't know. I've read them all though and they're quite interesting, as they often are.)