Posted on 08/04/2023 6:45:08 AM PDT by Red Badger
U.S. fighter jets are having worrisome aerial encounters in Arizona’s restricted air combat training areas, which fits with a broader trend.
Encounters with small unidentified "objects," sometimes in swarm-like groups of as many as eight. Sightings of other objects, including some characterized as drones, flying at altitudes up to 36,000 feet and as fast as Mach 0.75. Another apparent small drone actually hitting the canopy of an F-16 Viper causing damage. These incidents and many more, all occurred in or around various military air combat training ranges in Arizona since January 2020.
The events are described in reports from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) filed over roughly a three-year period. Overall, the data points to what are often categorized as drones, but many of which are actually unidentified objects, as well as what do appear to be drones, or uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), intruding into these restricted warning areas with alarming regularity.
Marc Cecotti, a contributor to The War Zone, has been able to obtain additional partially redacted reports about a number of these incidents from the U.S. Air Force's Safety Center via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that provide additional insights. Cecotti, together with Adam Kehoe, another one of our contributors, had first begun to notice a clustering of reports of unusual aerial encounters in southwestern Arizona back in 2021. An interactive online tool they created for The War Zone that leverages the FAA's public database of drone-related incident reports helped highlight that trend.
Arizona Is Host To Major Air Combat Training Areas When it comes to the Air Force, Arizona is home to Luke Air Force Base and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Luke has long been a major training hub for U.S. Air Force and foreign F-35 and F-16 pilots, though its work with the F-16 has been steadily diminishing in recent years. Davis-Monthan currently hosts units flying a variety of aircraft, including A-10 Warthog ground attack jets and EC-130H Compass Call electronic warfare planes, as well as the unit that oversees the U.S. military's famous boneyard that is part of the sprawling installation.
Units of the Arizona Air National Guard also operate from various bases in the southern end of the state. This includes Morris Air National Guard Base, which is collocated with Tucson International Airport in the city of the same name and that also hosts the Air National Guard-Air Force Reserve Command Test Center.
Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Yuma, a major test and training base for that service that hosts multiple F-35 squadrons, as well as units flying various other aircraft, is some 140 miles southwest of Luke.
Arizona has a number of major training ranges with restricted airspace, including significant areas adjacent to Luke AFB and MCAS Yuma. In fact, a large swathe of Arizona's border with Mexico sits under these ranges, including the Barry M. Goldwater range. There are a number of other designated Military Operating Areas (MOA), which can readily, if temporarily be closed off for training, elsewhere in the state. Restricted airspace and MOAs are all included in what the FAA more broadly refers to as Special Use Airspace (SUA).
The reports of unidentified objects, especially the ones involving groups of them flying together, are particularly interesting given the surge in interest in recent years in what are now often referred to as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), but have previously been more commonly known as unidentified flying objects (UFO).
Members of Congress are increasingly pushing for more declassification and general transparency from the U.S. military and Intelligence Community on these matters. These calls from legislators have only grown in the wake of allegations of a massive coverup from intelligence official and Air Force veteran turned whistleblower David Grusch, which you can read more about here.
Beyond all that, Arizona is, of course, no stranger to reports of unusual drone activity and UAP sightings. In 2016, a Tucson Police helicopter had an encounter with a mysteriously capable drone in the skies over that city. Some five years later, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter was involved in an incident with a similarly puzzling UAS.
The War Zone was the first to report on the worrying appearance of drone swarms over the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Arizona across multiple nights in September 2019. There's also the matter of the crews of an American Airlines flight and a Phoenix Air charter business jet reporting encounters with what appeared to be the same UAP in the skies over the southern part of the state near the border with New Mexico the year before. The state is home to the notorious Phoenix Lights mass sighting in 1997, which remains a topic of discussion to this day, too.
Incidents in Arizona have, in turn, long highlighted the growing threats that UASs present, including outside of traditional battlefields. This is something The War Zone has been highlighting as a very real concern now and still evolving issue for years now, including in the context of UAP discussions and how problematic it is that the two issues are so closely intertwined.
It should be noted up front that not all of the reports about incidents in the skies over U.S. military training areas in Arizona during the 2020-2023 timeframe are necessarily notable, at least based on the information currently in hand. Some part of the uptick in overall incidents can be explained by the growing prevalence of consumer-grade drones, something that has appeared in other similar data sets in the past.
At the same time, a number of the incidents that the FAA and the Air Force documented in the past three years include details that are very attention-grabbing.
The Reports There have been a number of encounters between military aircraft and what are described as groups of craft flying together in the past three years or so in this specific part of the United States. For instance, on March 29, 2021, two pilots flying F-35s in the vicinity of Buckeye, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, made a report about "3 to 4 UAS off [the] right side while e[ast] bound at 17,000 feet," according to the FAA. On April 22, 2022, another F-35 pilot reported "8 silver UAS [at an altitude of] between 16,000 and 20,000 feet" in the vicinity of Glendale, Arizona, another Phoenix suburb, another entry in the FAA's logs says.
It should be noted up front that not all of the reports about incidents in the skies over U.S. military training areas in Arizona during the 2020-2023 timeframe are necessarily notable, at least based on the information currently in hand. Some part of the uptick in overall incidents can be explained by the growing prevalence of consumer-grade drones, something that has appeared in other similar data sets in the past.
At the same time, a number of the incidents that the FAA and the Air Force documented in the past three years include details that are very attention-grabbing.
The Reports There have been a number of encounters between military aircraft and what are described as groups of craft flying together in the past three years or so in this specific part of the United States. For instance, on March 29, 2021, two pilots flying F-35s in the vicinity of Buckeye, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, made a report about "3 to 4 UAS off [the] right side while e[ast] bound at 17,000 feet," according to the FAA. On April 22, 2022, another F-35 pilot reported "8 silver UAS [at an altitude of] between 16,000 and 20,000 feet" in the vicinity of Glendale, Arizona, another Phoenix suburb, another entry in the FAA's logs says.
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MUCH MORE AT LINK........................
Maybe they should start using the area around Skinwalker Ranch. The Traffic pattern might be less used.
Swamp gas powered Chinese weather balloons just a distraction squirrel Biden corruption.
There, saved FReepers a half-dozen comments.
Everybody should remember that they train Drone Operators at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
A Chinese treasure ship (simplified Chinese: 宝船; traditional Chinese: 寶船; pinyin: bǎochuán, literally "gem ship"[14]) is a type of large wooden ship in the fleet of admiral Zheng He, who led seven voyages during the early 15th-century Ming dynasty.
They gathered treasure from as far as the Cape of Good Hope.
Were it not for the Chinese bureaucracy becoming frighted by the possibility of new ideas from afar breaking their rice bowls, we would be speaking Chinese!
Imagine a world where the Chinese found Europe and declared it all to be a single country, and like the British tried in India, attempted to impose the Chinese language and culture on the whole continent.
It would make a pretty good alternate history story...
This is what Dr. Steven Greer has said about this rash of most recent UAL sightings. These are crafts that the US(and other countries) have been reverse engineering Alien craft ever since the 1940s.
That the corporations and entities that have these crafts are not necessarily part of the US Defense Department. Although many were originally financed by the US Black Budgets. Companies like McDonald Douglas and Lockeed Martin among others have been building anti gravity vehicles for almost 70 years.
FYI, there is a 16 part interview of him I have have been watching recently on YouTube. He has also been on several different podcasts in the last six months. He also wrote several of the questions asked by Congressmen/women that they asked at last weeks hearing.
> Except for the ones that are classified,
How convenient.
Imagine a world where the Chinese found Europe and declared it all to be a single country, and like the British tried in India, attempted to impose the Chinese language and culture on the whole continent.
—
In such a world, there would only be Han Chinese, all the other races having been slaughtered to a man, woman, and child.
And in this reality, that is still their intent - with the manufacture of genetic DNA-based racial bio-weapons.
With a wide open border, there’s nothing to prevent the Chinese from sending in drones to monitor US air training, listen in on radio frequencies, etc.
Ultimately, yes.
As immune to a novel disease as a mono-culture of Gros Michel bananas.
And then there were none...
Never mind that the PLA is spending $9.2 Billion to get it done.
What are you doing to stop it that I can emulate?
Sounds like Raytheon and/or Northrop testing out swarm technology on the US military. I’ve heard they have stuff the military doesn’t even know about.
If the military folks would just close their eyes and turn off their sensor equipment 24/7 we wouldn’t have all these “distractions” and “squirrels”.
;-)
Bookmark
Here’s the issue - Are they ‘ours’ or are they extra-terrestrial craft? Dr. Greer’s theory is that there are bastards among us (Rogue deep black ops) who are trying to convince us that we need to get ready for war. They are doing this by illegally flying over restricted areas and doing all manner of illegal activities. Greer says the dark breakaway renegades have anti-gravitational zero-sum energy craft all to themselves so they can make us believe their craft are of extra-terrestrial origins. There are parts of Greer’s views on aliens that I do not subscribe to, but this one I view as likely correct, primarily because it would be done to generate support for the military-industrial complex never-ending war philosophy. If the outlaws can convince us that we have a whole new enemy to fight, think of the money that can be made.
Soon arr your base are berong to us.
I miss those days. Esp tourist guy.
True.........
since by then Chinese will have had plenty of practice dancing in the sky with our aviators...
Now that’s an interesting idea.
F-16 pilots are unable to identify a drone when they see one?
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