USS John F. Kennedy encounter (1971)

USS John F. Kennedy encounter (1971)

Date	June/July 1971
Topics	Military encounters (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Ocean & underwater (topic)
People	John F. Kennedy, James Kopf, Timothy Good
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 74
Year	1971 in UFO history
Timeline	1971 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	8

The USS John F. Kennedy encounter is an incident described by James Kopf, a former U.S. Navy communications man who later worked for the National Security Agency. He said that one evening, while he was serving aboard the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy, a huge glowing sphere hung over the ship. While it was there, the carrier's teletypes, communications, radar and compasses failed, and the crew stayed at battle stations for about two hours.^[1] Kopf gave his account to Steven Greer's Disclosure Project in October 2000, and it was published in the project's 2001 briefing document.^[1] Accounts disagree on the date. The briefing document's summary says the summer of 1979. Michael Shellenberger's 2024 UFO timeline gives June or July 1971, in the Caribbean, and an anonymous online version says May 1971.^[1][4][8] No official record of the event has been published, and the account rests on Kopf's memory and on what shipmates told him.

The ship

According to the Wikipedia account, USS John F. Kennedy was the only ship of her class. She was a supercarrier based on the Kitty Hawk class, and the last conventionally powered carrier built for the U.S. Navy. She was ordered as a nuclear-powered ship but converted to conventional propulsion during construction.^[5]

• Early service. She was commissioned in 1968, originally designated CVA (attack carrier). She left for her first Mediterranean deployment in April 1969, relieving USS Forrestal at Rota, Spain, on 22 April 1969. For much of the 1970s her deployments were to the Mediterranean, because of the worsening situation in the Middle East.^[5]
• 1979. In 1979 she began her first year-long overhaul at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia, finishing in 1980. During the overhaul arsonists set five fires on 9 April 1979, which killed a shipyard worker and injured 34 people, and two more fires on 5 June 1979.^[5]
• Nuclear weapons. The briefing document says the carrier was carrying nuclear weapons while Kopf served aboard.^[1]

James Kopf

The briefing document describes Kopf as a former U.S. Navy and National Security Agency employee, under the heading "US Navy Crypto Communications".^[1]

• Navy. He joined the Navy in 1969 and worked in communications for part of the time aboard the John F. Kennedy.^[1] Shellenberger's timeline gives his rank as Yeoman Third Class and his name as James M. Kopf.^[8]
• NSA. He worked for the National Security Agency from 1980 until 1997.^[1]
• Testimony. He was interviewed by Steven Greer in October 2000. The transcript spells his name "Koph" in the speaker labels.^[1]

His account

The following is drawn from the excerpts of Kopf's testimony printed in the briefing document.^[1]

• The teletypes. All eight teletype machines in the communications centre suddenly began printing "complete garbage". He had seen one or two errors in messages before, but never anything like this. He called facilities control on the intercom to report that his broadcast was out. They told him they were busy because all communications had just gone out across the ship, something that had never happened before.
• Voices from the signal bridge. The communications room was linked by intercom and pneumatic tube to the signal bridge at the top of the carrier's island. An excited voice came over the line shouting that "God was here" and that it was the end of the world. A few seconds later a calmer voice said there was something over the ship.
• The sphere. Kopf and a shipmate left the communications centre for the catwalk on the port side, at the edge of the flight deck. They saw a large glowing sphere above the ship. With nothing to give perspective, its size was hard to judge, but it looked huge. The sun had gone down and it was twilight. The briefing document's summary describes it as an "orange-yellow" object that pulsated, and says a number of others saw it too.
• Radar and compasses. Later, a friend in the radar department who had been on watch told him all the radar screens had glowed, and then nothing: they could detect nothing. Kopf heard that the compasses on the bridge had stopped working and that the radar navigation system had gone offline. He and his friends stayed up most of the night talking about it.
• How long. The object was over the ship for "maybe five minutes or less", he said, but the effects lasted at least an hour. That, he believed, was why the crew stayed at battle stations for two hours. They were waiting to see if it came back, and still restarting systems, which took at least an hour.
• The Ready CAP. No aircraft were airborne. Two F-4 Phantoms were kept as a Ready CAP (combat air patrol), and he heard that crews tried to start them but they would not start.
• Photographs. He heard that men from the ship's IOIC unit, which he thought stood for Integrated Operations Intelligence Communications or something similar, were out taking pictures of the object during the event.

Aftermath

• The captain's warning. A few days later, Kopf said, the commanding officer and executive officer came on the ship's closed-circuit television. It was the only way to address the crew of 5,000. The commanding officer reminded the crew that certain events aboard a major naval combatant were classified and "should not be discussed with anyone without a need to know". That was all he said. Kopf said he would never forget it.^[1] Shellenberger's timeline says this happened two days later, and names the commanding officer as Captain Ferdinand B. Koch.^[8]
• Men in suits. The briefing document's summary says that when the ship returned to Norfolk, Virginia, men in suits came aboard to interview crew members.^[1]
• Kopf's view. Kopf told Greer he was convinced the government knew far more than the public. He thought officials believed people could not handle the knowledge that extraterrestrials were visiting. He also thought the information would undermine the economy, because devices that could produce cheap, pollution-free energy were being held back by "corporate greed". That, he said, was the part of the cover-up that bothered him most.^[1]

The briefing document printed the captain's closed-circuit warning a second time, as one of the excerpts in its summary of witness statements.^[1]

Other versions

Shellenberger's timeline. The timeline submitted to the House Oversight Committee in November 2024 dates the event to June or July 1971.^[8] It gives the following details.

• The carrier was in the Caribbean, finishing an Operational Readiness Exercise, when incoming messages began arriving garbled.
• Radar, compasses and electrical systems then failed.
• Kopf and others went outside and saw a large, pulsating orange sphere sitting silently above the ship, for about 20 minutes.

The timeline's 20 minutes differs from the "five minutes or less" in the briefing-document transcript. Its source is an archive.org copy of a book titled Need to Know, which is a restricted lending scan and was not read here.^[7][8]

The unnamed online version. A retelling on the gaming-community site Stronghold Nation, which names no witnesses, gives a different account.^[4]

• Setting. It places the event at about 6 p.m. on a normal night in May 1971, while the carrier was on routine operations in the Caribbean, partly in the Bermuda Triangle. It gives the crew as "close to 1,000 sailors", against Kopf's 5,000.
• The events. Communications picked up strange signals and radar registered unknown objects, and battle stations was sounded. Upper-deck witnesses said a large green glowing ball appeared about 100 feet above the flight deck. All upper-deck electronics stopped working, two alert fighters would not launch, and no weapons would work. After several minutes the ball shot straight up, and the electronics came back.
• Afterwards. Battle stations ended after about an hour. Command was said to have sent frantic messages to Washington and the Navy. Within hours a helicopter landed men in dark suits on the deck, and the next morning the crew was reminded to stay silent.
• Years later. Two former sailors, one from the upper deck and one from below, met many years later. When the subject came up, the upper-deck man went pale, refused to discuss it and warned his friend not to either.
• Records. Officially, the piece says, nothing happened that night, apart from a log entry about electronic malfunctions.

NICAP chronology. NICAP's 1971 chronology lists, "sometime in 1971", a U.S. aircraft carrier "shut down by a UFO" in the Bermuda Triangle at 8:30 p.m. It credits ufocasebook.com and marks the entry unevaluated. The entry does not name the ship.^[6]

The Disclosure Project

Kopf's testimony was one of many the Disclosure Project gathered for its public campaign. In May 2001 the project held a press event at the National Press Club in Washington. ABC News reported on 10 May 2001 that, on the Wednesday, about 20 former government workers, many from the military and security services, said they had witnessed evidence of aliens and UFOs and called for congressional hearings.^[2] Greer said some 400 witnesses were willing to testify before Congress. James Oberg, ABC News's space consultant, said Greer had long pushed a "bizarre theory" of a worldwide cover-up using UFO technology. But Oberg added that not every witness shared Greer's views, that they should not be mocked, and that unexplained sightings were worth documenting.^[2] The ABC News report does not mention Kopf.

Assessment

No deck log, message traffic or official report about such an event has been published in the sources read here. The account rests on Kopf's recollection, much of it second-hand: he heard about the radar, compasses, fighters and photographs from shipmates. The unnamed online retelling is the only source to mention a log entry, and it describes only "electronic malfunctions".^[1][4]

The date is the main inconsistency. The briefing document's summary gives the summer of 1979. According to the Wikipedia account, the carrier spent 1979 in a year-long overhaul at Norfolk, which makes an at-sea encounter that summer hard to fit.^[1][5] The transcript excerpts themselves give no year. Shellenberger's June/July 1971 date and the Stronghold Nation piece's May 1971 both place the event in the Caribbean.^[4][8]

Notes on the earlier version

• The 1979 date. The earlier version said the 1979 date "conflicts with Kopf's dates of service". The sources read here give only his enlistment (1969) and his NSA service (1980–1997), not when he left the Navy. The stronger evidence against 1979 is the carrier's overhaul that year.^[1][5]
• The podcast source. The earlier version cited a podcast episode, "Witness to the unknown: a UFO encounter on the USS JFK", for the 1971 dating. The page returned only a sign-in screen, so the podcast's content is not covered in the sources read here.^[3] The 1971 dating is supported by Shellenberger's timeline and the Stronghold Nation piece.^[4][8]
• Battle stations. The earlier version said the crew stayed at battle stations "while systems were restored". Kopf's own explanation was that they were waiting to see if the object came back, as well as restarting systems.^[1]

People and topics

• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• John F. Kennedy — 35th U.S. president, named in disputed MJ-12 memos.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• James Kopf — Navy yeoman who described a 1971 encounter aboard the USS John F. Kennedy.
• Disclosure Project — Steven Greer's campaign for UFO disclosure, best known for its May 2001 press conference.
• Timothy Good — British author of books on UFO secrecy including Above Top Secret and Need to Know.
• NICAP — The leading U.S. civilian UFO group of the 1950s and 1960s.

On the Timeline

• Montauk chair (January 1971) — Nichols also claims Montauk mind experiments produced a chair that turned thoughts into reality.
• Hynek's The UFO Experience (May 1972) — Blue Book adviser J. Allen Hynek writes that Blue Book was a cover-up and the problem was glossed over.

See every 1971 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67)”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.