Several weeks ago, I posted about a New York Times’ article from May in which Navy fighter pilots described sharing airspace with objects that flew faster than their Super Hornets (which can fly over 1,000 mph) yet had no obvious means of propulsion.

At one point:

The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.

The near miss, he and other pilots interviewed said, angered the squadron, and convinced them that the objects were not part of a classified drone program. Government officials would know fighter pilots were training in the area, they reasoned, and would not send drones to get in the way.

“It turned from a potentially classified drone program to a safety issue,” Lieutenant Graves said. “It was going to be a matter of time before someone had a midair” collision.

I’ve been trying to find out what the objects were. I’m having no luck. I did find this clip of Lieutenant Graves describing them. Unfortunately it’s a clip from a television program so there’s a melodramatic announcer and suspenseful music. I’m going to talk about it anyway though because this was something that actually happened. In the clip, Graves is talking to another pilot, Commander David Fravor, and Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

The clip includes a recreation of the “sphere encasing a cube” passing between two jets.

So, what are they? There was a whole fleet of them.

Before we can say something is not of this world, we need to eliminate everything it could be that is of this world. It looks to me like a drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), something of this world. But how is it being propelled? And controlled? I would say it’s not a US drone because why would the US risk US lives and $70 million aircraft?

I just read that the Ranking Member on Homeland Security’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Subcommittee, Mark Walker, said, when asked about these objects, “We are concerned.” He wrote a letter to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer asking for more information. When asked yesterday what these objects are, Walker replied, “We don’t know for sure. The question that we’re wanting to get to is, is this something that’s a defense mechanism from another country?”

If it’s a drone, the technology that keeps it airborne at 30,000 feet is something else. Speaking of that technology, did you see Elon Musk’s test flight of his Starhopper yesterday? This is how we get to Mars? That’s a lot of fuel. I’d bet Musk would pay to get his hands on this sphere-encasing-a-cube technology.

It got up several feet. Even Musk said it looked like a flying water tower:

Starhopper flight successful. Water towers *can* fly haha!!

— e^👁🥧 (@elonmusk) July 26, 2019