Where the buck stops
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“You were on the Nimitz. You weren’t on the
Princeton. So, don’t act like you know what happened on the Princeton.
These are things that happened on my ship – my ship.”
This was Navy veteran Karson Kammerzell teeing off last month on Lt.
Cmdr. David Fravor, maybe the single most important eyewitness in the
long road toward de-stigmatizing the entire UFO issue. “So I don’t
wanna hear you, no matter how far up the chain of command you are,
bash my shipmates on my ship by saying
what they saw happen on their ship didn’t happen.
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By Billy Cox
De Void
11-23-20
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“Because, you got no room to talk, dude. You were on the Nimitz the
whole time.”
Hot damn!
A cryptological communications operator aboard the USS Princeton during the
fateful span of days in November 2004 compressed into what’s become known as
the Tic Tac Incident, Kammerzell is coming in late to this brouhaha. But, as
with a small but outspoken group of USN colleagues before him, Kammerzell
decided to join them in
telling Florida filmmaker Dave Beaty
that American taxpayers still haven’t gotten the full story about what
happened off the coast of Baja California 16 years ago.
To the extent that the Pentagon
finally and formally admitted
in April that it doesn’t know what Fravor and his “Black Aces” squadron aboard
the USS Nimitz encountered over the Pacific on 11/14/04, Kammerzell is
absolutely right – we don’t know the whole story. But how much of that mystery
is being deliberately shielded from public scrutiny?
Since the
NY Times broke the Tic Tac story, with its attendant revelations about the Defense Department’s Advanced
Aerospace Threat Identification Program, we’ve seen the momentum escalate in
ways no one could’ve predicted just three years ago:
In April 2019, the Navy made a public show of updating its pilot procedures
for reporting UFOs. Last summer, the DoD established its Unidentified Aerial
Phenomena Task Force “to detect, analyze and catalogue” UAPs/UFOs deemed
potential national security threats. In June, the Senate Intelligence
Committee introduced as part of its omnibus spending bill for 2021 a
provision for the military to publicly release its findings. When and if
Congress ever gets around to passing a budget, and assuming the Committee’s
mandate survives, the UAPTF will have 180 days to pony up. And lately, even
the venerable Scientific American is cheerleading for a rigorous,
transparent pursuit of the facts.
So lots of things are happening, but the corridors are still dark and we’re
all trying to find our way. Just ask Dave Beaty, who started a related
Facebook page immediately after the AATIP reveal. The chatter led to an earful
from one of the drama’s key players, retired Senior Chief Petty Officer Kevin
Day.
Day was anchoring the Combat Information Center aboard the USS Princeton, the
guided missile cruiser and comm hub of the carrier task force, when bogeys
began shadowing the exercises. Day’s big-picture framing helped inform Beaty’s
visual recreation of the incident, which fused stock footage with CGI, and
motivated him to contact the
To The Stars Academy.
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Filmmaker Dave Beaty cut out direct references to Lt. Cmdr. David
Fravor in his documentary on the Tic Tac incident after being
threatened with legal action/CREDIT: Dave Beatty
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Beaty asked for permission to use snippets of Fravor’s retelling of the
encounter, which were posted on the TTSA website. TTSA chief content officer
Kari DeLonge gave the green light for limited use, and Beaty dropped the
14-minute “The Nimitz Encounters” on YouTube in November 2018, where it
would draw 1.5 million views.
Shortly thereafter, Beaty was approached in writing by a TTSA lawyer demanding
the removal of those brief Fravor segments, as well as any implied affiliation
with TTSA. Beaty complied with re-edits, going so far as to delete Fravor’s
name from the current version. That one’s been up since 2019 and has garnered
more than 5.3 million views.
“It’s kind of stupid, really, to have to refer to him just as ‘the commander
of the Black Aces,’ but out of respect for his wishes, OK, fine,” says Beaty,
“I’ll just paraphrase everything he said and I won’t attribute it to him.”
The re-edited update, however, was expanded to 32 minutes in order to
accommodate additional voices who responded to Beaty’s appeal for more
participants and eyewitnesses. From the get-go, Fravor has been reasonably
perplexed over the ostensible lack of official interest in his squadron’s
documentation of the flying object(s) that zipped around the Pacific skies
like a cursor on a computer screen and rendered front-line carrier warplanes
obsolete. Yet, after listening to Beaty’s witnesses, the commander felt
obliged to push back.
“Position-wise, I’m probably, as commanding officer of the squadron, in the
top 20. Out of 6,000 (sailors). And no one came to talk to me,” Fravor told
Joe Rogan in October 2019. “No one came to take my tapes, no one showed up in
a suit, no one told me not to talk. No one talked to any of my air crew that
were involved in this, and there were six (fliers) involved.” And as Fravor
told a live audience attending the McMenamins UFO Festival five months
earlier, “Excuse my language, but it kinda pisses me off when people started
making stuff up.”
Presumably, those unnamed fabulists include Princeton shipmates Petty Officer
3rd Class Gary Voorhis, Leading Petty Officer Ryan Wiegelt and Petty Officer
3rd Class Jason Turner, along with Petty Officer Patrick Hughes, assigned to
the Nimitz. And now, more recently, the Princeton’s Karson Kammerzell.
Voorhis goes on camera to state that, after the incident, he was ordered to
turn over the Princeton’s Aegis 3-D radar system data tapes to two unknown
authorities who arrived by helicopter; furthermore, he was directed to reload
the CIC radio communication tapes because they’d all just been scrubbed of
recent content.
Wiegelt claims two unknown men wearing generic flight suits stepped off a
helicopter and tended to none-of-your-business on the Princeton before taking
off for the Nimitz. They later returned to the Princeton with unmarked bags,
and retired to guest quarters with a sentry posted outside.
While in the Ship’s Signal Exploitation Space aboard the Princeton, Turner
says he got a look at the Tic Tac sequence on the console, and that the video
was roughly 10 minutes long. Fravor says the video lasts maybe 1½ minutes, and
that allegations to the contrary are “bullshit.”
Back on the deck of the Nimitz, meanwhile, aviation technician Hughes says he
removed and secured memory cartridges from the all-seeing E-2 Hawkeye, which
was monitoring the chase scene from high above the action. Shortly thereafter,
Hughes said his CO, accompanied by two unidentified men, confiscated the E-2
“data bricks” and deposited them into bags, which left with the visitors.
Kammerzell decided to weigh in with Beaty only after discovering Fravor’s
dismissive comments from 2019.
Over the span of the Tic Tac affair, Kammerzell says he got a first-hand look
at a UFO from the deck of the Princeton one night. And it didn’t look a thing
like the oblong Tic Tac. It was a silent, triangular array of lights, flying
close, maybe no more than a mile away. In fact, he says the entire crew was
aware that something extremely bizarre was going on upstairs but nobody
freaked because the activity wasn’t threatening.
Kammerzell also said two superior officers were summoned to the Nimitz, where
they were instructed that the confusion was merely a “falling ice” phenomenon,
a line nobody believed. The day following the incident, Kammerzell added, the
boatswain’s mate charged with logging official records for the Princeton
discovered his notes from the prior day had been removed and replaced with a
sanitized version, in someone else’s handwriting.
None of these details made it into the
“Executive Summary,”
the unsigned and “unofficial official” accounting of the Tic Tac intercepts
prepared in 2009 and released to KLAS-TV journo George Knapp in 2018. But as
we follow the trail, Luis Elizondo, the man Fravor credits for persuading him
to talk to the Times, urges caution.
“David Fravor is a good man and a hero,” says the former director of the AATIP
project. “But yes, it’s possible the commander was out of the loop. He had
complete situational awareness of what was going on with his squadron. But
it’s not fair to say he necessarily had an awareness of everything that
happened.”
Is it logical to suppose that analysts poring over Tic Tac data
wouldn’t want to interview the aviators who actually acquired
that data? Not really. But when it comes to The Great Taboo, logic has never
been a co-pilot. In the meantime, Dave Beaty continues to work with other
retired Navy sources.
“In the beginning, I was thinking this thing was completely unknown, and
nobody seemed to have a clue within the military,” Beaty says. “But as more
people come forward, it seems to paint a different picture that leans more
towards the military knowing more about what’s going on with that event than
they’re letting on.”
Certainly, if they’re sitting on classified data, that much is indisputable.
At least now, with Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist running the UAP
Task Force, we know where the buck stops.
Here’s to clarity.
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