A Navy F-14D crew’s daylight sighting of a white or opaque egg-shaped object under the sea surface on 10 October 2002, in the W-291 operating area off the west coast of Southern California and the Baja Peninsula. It was not reported at the time. It is known from BAASS Special Report B-010, which James Lacatski prints as chapter 31 of Future Visions: a written statement by the pilot and a telephone interview by Ron Morski of BAASS on 27 August 2009, seven years after the event. It is the tenth of the BAASS Special Reports.
The record
The pilot, Chuck Graves (then a lieutenant junior grade; not the Ryan Graves of the Gimbal Incident), was flying with the deputy air wing commander, CAPT Timothy Sharon, as radar intercept officer, on a mission to practise rigging ships with the LANTIRN pod. His statement describes a large object ‘approximately 20-50’ in depth’, white or opaque depending on the angle of view, egg-shaped and about 40 by 60 metres, its exact size hard to judge because of what looked ‘almost like a distortion from extremely hot water’ around its edges; the crew circled it for about five minutes and it ‘stayed motionless until we left the area’. In the interview he put the aircraft at about 5,000 ft, making about three passes at about 500 yards’ lateral separation, and said there was ‘no apparent disturbance to the surface of the water’ above or around it. CAPT Sharon also saw it. No sensor was pointed at it, no radio call was made, nothing was reported to the carrier’s intelligence centre or the chain of command, and there is no radar or LANTIRN video.
What the record does not settle
Two of the record’s details disagree, one with its own numbers and one with the Navy’s history. The interview prints a line of sight of 7,230 ft at a 78° look-down, which does not follow from 5,000 ft and 500 yards (those give about 5,220 ft and 73°) but does follow from 500 yards at about 7,000 ft; the same interviewer’s figures for the pilot’s second sighting, China Lake Egg 2004, come back from his stated altitudes to a tenth of a degree. And the interview places the crew in VF-2, Carrier Air Wing 2, with the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group, and the statement speaks of workups before a 2003 to 2004 Iraq war cruise; in October 2002 Carrier Air Wing 2 and VF-2 were working up for USS Constellation’s deployment of November 2002 to June 2003, VF-2’s last with the F-14, while the Lincoln was already deployed with Carrier Air Wing 14. Carrier Air Wing 2 went to sea in the Lincoln from October 2004. The record does not say which details slipped.
The bench
The site’s Submerged Egg Buoyancy Bench enters the record’s numbers as printed and prices the two ways a body can hold station under the surface: a mean density equal to the water’s, which for a body of that size is a submarine’s mass (see Neutral Buoyancy), or something carrying the whole buoyant force, which a jet could do only by marking the surface. It also asks what a white body shows through that water from the air (see Secchi Depth). It closes neither reading. The case sits beside the Tic Tac Incident as a second AAWSAP-investigated Navy sighting off Southern California, and under Unidentified Submerged Objects as one of the few such reports with depth, size and duration given by the witness.
Connections
Future Visions · BAASS Special Reports · BAASS · AAWSAP · James Lacatski · China Lake Egg 2004 · Unidentified Submerged Objects · Neutral Buoyancy · Secchi Depth · Tic Tac Incident · U.S. Navy