The same pilot’s second sighting, BAASS Special Report B-011, chapter 32 of Future Visions, where the chapter title calls it an airborne egg-shaped object and the book’s list of reports calls it a maneuvering oval. On 27 October 2004 Chuck Graves, by then flying an F/A-18F Super Hornet during his squadron’s transition from the F-14D, was transiting the R-2508 complex near NAS China Lake on a forward air controller (airborne) training flight when he saw a dark grey or black egg-shaped object, with a more pointed nose than an egg, flying roughly due east at what he put at ‘at least 500 knots’. It made ‘a very aggressive turn into the vertical’, its downrange travel stopping ‘almost as if it transitioned from purely lateral to purely vertical flight in an instant’, and then ‘appeared to accelerate as it climbed’. His WSO also saw it. Neither made a radio call, no sensor was used, and it was not reported.
Two altitudes
The written statement puts the object ‘probably at an altitude of about 4,000-5,000 feet’. In the BAASS interview of 27 August 2009 he placed himself at 15,000 to 18,000 ft and the object at about 45,000 ft, half a nautical mile to the north, which gives the interview’s line of sight of 27,170 ft and look-up angle of 83.5°; the record does not reconcile the two. He estimated its length as a large tactical fighter’s and said it may have been a conventional aircraft, except that he knew of none that could turn vertical and keep climbing at that altitude; the report raises the F-22, then in flight evaluation, and doubts even it could. The site’s Submerged Egg Buoyancy Bench uses this account’s geometry as a check on the arithmetic of Submerged Egg 2002.
Connections
Submerged Egg 2002 · BAASS Special Reports · Future Visions · BAASS · U.S. Navy