USS Ronald Reagan orange orb

USS Ronald Reagan orange orb

Date	9 May 2022
Topics	Military encounters (topic)
People	Ronald Reagan
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 206
Year	2022 in UFO history
Timeline	2022 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	4

The USS Ronald Reagan orange orb is a sighting reported by several U.S. Navy veterans. They say that one night in early 2004, while the new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) was working up off the U.S. East Coast, a large, glowing orange object hung over the flight deck and paced the ship.^[1] The accounts were published on 9 May 2022 by the news site The Debrief. It said it had spoken to nearly a dozen people connected with the incident, and identified five primary witnesses who saw the object themselves.^[1][4] Several witnesses said their officers ignored the object, and that crew were told not to log it. None could remember the exact date, and no official record has been published.^[1]

The ship

The Debrief's background on the carrier gives the following.^[1]

• Commissioning. Ronald Reagan was commissioned on 12 July 2003 as the ninth Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarrier. She is 1,092 feet long, with two Westinghouse A4W reactors, up to 260,000 horsepower, a top speed of 30 knots and a crew of 5,680, known as "76'ers".
• East Coast trials. In 2003 she was based on the East Coast for sea trials. Her operating areas ran from Florida to Virginia and included the Virginia Capes range complex, the Cherry Point operating areas and the Jacksonville operating areas.
• Post Shakedown Availability. From January to May 2004 she was working through secondary flight-deck certifications as part of her Post Shakedown Availability. This is the process in which a new ship corrects faults found on its shakedown cruise.
• Aircraft aboard. The VX-23 "Salty Dogs" test and evaluation squadron flew tests from the ship in July 2003, and VFA-15 carried out flight-deck evaluations in May 2004. No permanent air wing appears to have been attached at that point. In May 2004 Carrier Air Wing 11, normally on USS Nimitz, embarked a quarter of its aircraft for the transit around South America. They included VFA-41 "Black Aces", the squadron of David Fravor of the 2004 "Tic Tac" encounter. The Debrief said it was unclear whether Fravor himself was part of that detachment.
• Departure. On 27 May 2004 she left Norfolk, Virginia, on the long voyage around South America to her permanent home port of San Diego.

The witnesses

The Debrief said it verified the witnesses' military service using DD-214 separation documents, the official 2004 cruise book of the Ronald Reagan, and corroborating witness statements.^[1] It gave the following accounts.

• Witness 1: Karol Olesiak. A petty officer third class and quartermaster, responsible for navigation and for the ship's official logbook. He was Quartermaster of the Watch on the bridge from 8 p.m. to midnight. When he arrived, the outgoing watch made it clear something was going on but said little: "I don't know what that is. I don't care." Through the bridge windows, at eye level, he saw a large, round, orange glowing object with a fiery surface hovering about 100 feet above the flight deck. It reminded him of the biblical "burning bush". He believed it stayed in the same place, matching the ship's speed, which he put at 22 knots for flight operations, for his whole four-hour watch. He did not see it arrive or leave. He was surprised that aircraft were still being launched: "it's watching the planes get launched," he said. He first wrote about the sighting on his own website in October 2021. The researcher Keith Basterfield brought that article to the attention of Dave Beaty for The Debrief's report.^[1]
• Witness 2: Derek Smith. He joined the Navy in February 2002 as a seaman in the deck department and was trained as a lookout, which includes recognising aircraft, ships and marine mammals. He was on the starboard forward lookout post, a catwalk around the carrier's island about 50 to 75 feet above the deck, with a trainee. Soon after they went on watch, they saw a large, orange, glowing object several hundred feet in front of them, just above the deck's centreline forward of the island. "It was oval-shaped… it didn't look solid, but it had a shape to it," he said. Through the deck-mounted "big eyes" binoculars it looked "glowing, gaseous", self-luminous, with a moving, swirling surface. He reported it to the operations centre over the lookouts' sound-powered headset, and watched it for several minutes. He said the people on the flight deck below were all looking up at it.^[1]
• Witness 3: an anonymous trainee. A woman training as a lookout under Smith, interviewed in April 2022. She said she had not been in touch with the other witnesses for 19 years and had never read Olesiak's article. She joined the ship in November or December 2003 at the Newport News shipyard. She recalled a "round, glowing object hovering over the flight deck", pacing the ship. When she called it in, the operations centre asked if she "was smoking crack", and asked about her position relative to the sun. "That's not the sun," she told them. Unlike Olesiak and Smith, she remembered it beginning before sunset, around dusk, with cloud about. She recalled flight-deck crew pointing up, then dropping their equipment and running off the deck. She described fuzzy edges and a swirling interior like "a science video of the sun close up". Just before it "shot off into the clouds" at extreme speed, she said, it made a sudden series of half-circle manoeuvres. She recalled that the operations centre had an air-search radar contact. She said flight operations were already over and the air department was securing equipment, and that there were instructions that no log entries should be made.^[1]
• Witness 4: Patrick Gokey. He enlisted in August 2003 and joined the ship as a seaman at Newport News in November 2003. He placed the sighting during the one- to two-week sea-trial periods between December 2003 and May 2004, and recalled being told "We are in the Bermuda Triangle". He was a lookout from 8 p.m. to midnight. Up to ten lookout posts were manned, and lookouts rotated every hour. From the starboard forward post he saw "this orange, bright orange ball… wavy, but somehow still solid like a plasma almost", perhaps 200 feet above the deck, for about 30 seconds. He recalled flight operations under way and dozens of people on deck. It paced the ship, then made "three half circles" and was gone "in the blink of an eye". Later, alone on the fantail lookout at the stern, he saw it, or something like it, again: closer, hovering 100 to 200 feet up behind the ship, again making three half circles before leaving. He believed it was under intelligent control. He said he reported it, as others had.^[1]
• Witness 5: an anonymous Boatswain's Mate of the Watch. He supervised all the lookouts and kept a log at his station on the bridge, reporting to the Officer of the Watch. His chief sent him out to see why the lookouts were "horsing around on the intercom system talking about UFOs", and he went ready to "chew out" the lookouts. At the starboard forward post he saw a large round object about 200 feet above the deck. It was "glowing orange", fuzzy, like a "blob", and the colour of the ship's orange night work lights. It cast no light on the deck. He called it "a translucent blob… like a lava lamp… almost like viscous, but in the air". He watched it for several minutes without seeing it move, and said no air operations were going on. He put the officers' lack of reaction down to exhaustion, and decided it was "above my pay grade". When he began writing the sighting into his log, he was told to "rip it out". The Debrief said it had asked his Navy public affairs office for permission for him, as an active-duty sailor, to speak on the record, and had not heard back.^[1]

The object

The Debrief summarised the descriptions as "largely consistent".^[1] Assuming they were accurate, it listed these features:

• Size and position. Roughly the size of a jet fighter, 10 to 40 feet across, hovering 100 to 200 feet above the flight deck forward of the island. (The article's introduction gives 20 to 40 feet.)
• Colour. Yellow, orange, reddish or fire-coloured.
• Shape. Round or a sideways oval, "a blob", with rough, fuzzy, uneven edges.
• Surface. Gaseous-looking and moving, like "science videos of the sun", and possibly translucent.
• Light and sound. Self-luminous rather than reflecting light, but casting no light on the deck. No sound or smell was reported.
• Movement. Two witnesses saw it both hover and make half-circle movements as it left, and two saw it depart at high speed.

The witnesses estimated that 50 to 300 other people saw the "hours-long event" from the flight deck, the bridges and other departments.^[1] Shellenberger's timeline, submitted to the House Oversight Committee in November 2024, summarises the accounts of Olesiak, Smith and the Boatswain's Mate.^[4]

The logs and the chain of command

• Officers unmoved. Olesiak said the Officer of the Watch and the Conning Officer were not alarmed and carried on as normal. To his knowledge the captain was not on the bridge and was not called. No general quarters or defensive measures were ordered. Olesiak said the 16-hour shifts meant only life-threatening problems got attention, and that his training told him to defer to senior officers: "It's a problem when somebody tells you that it's a problem." He compared the bridge's silence to "The Emperor's New Clothes". Several witnesses said jokes about the Bermuda Triangle were made.^[1]
• Pages removed. Gokey, on his bridge rotation, said he saw an officer order a subordinate to take pages out of the deck logbook. He found this the most surprising part, because he had been taught that the log was a legal record.^[1]
• The Greenbook. Witness 5 said that when he entered the sighting in his "Greenbook", the Boatswain's Watch log, a senior officer ordered him to "rip that shit out". He said this was not the official deck log kept by the quartermasters, but a less formal record kept by the watch.^[1] (Elsewhere in the article, the order is attributed to his chief.)
• Not logged. Olesiak, who kept the official log, said he did not write the sighting down. He thought he asked the Conning Officer whether he should. He did not remember the answer, but came away with the impression that it should not go in the official log.^[1]
• Elizondo's view. Luis Elizondo, former director of AATIP, told The Debrief that AATIP had come across cases where observers seemed "mesmerized" or "hypnotized" by an event, and only afterwards asked themselves what they had seen. He also described a practice he called "log it and scratch it": incidents were logged as required, then scratched out as if they had not happened.^[1]

Dating the sighting

Olesiak first thought the sighting might have happened in September 2003. That was when the carrier and about 40 other ships left Naval Station Norfolk to ride out Hurricane Isabel at sea. But two of the other primary witnesses, Witness 3 and Gokey, did not join the ship until November 2003. The Debrief therefore placed the event between December 2003 and May 2004, before the carrier left Norfolk for San Diego.^[1]

Explanations considered

The Debrief wrote that very few ordinary explanations fit all the observations, and looked at two.^[1]

• Earthquake lights. A 2014 paper, "Prevalence of Earthquake Lights Associated with Rift Environments", was written by Robert Thériault of Quebec's energy and natural resources ministry, the independent geophysicist France St-Laurent, Friedemann Freund of NASA and the retired USGS scientist John Derr. It studied 65 written reports from the 1600s to 2009. It proposed that highly stressed rock produces electrical discharges that ionise the air and create luminous plasma. Witnesses of the 1979 Saint-Fidèle earthquake in Quebec described luminous globes, including a red one circling a cross above the Saguenay River. The Debrief noted the differences: earthquake lights usually flash or rise in columns, all 65 reports were over land, and they do not hover or appear to manoeuvre. It said the paper's authors had not answered its question about reports at sea.
• Laser-induced plasma. The Debrief pointed to a 2018 Navy patent application by Alexandru Hening, "System and Method for Laser-Induced Plasma for Infrared Homing Missile Countermeasure" (US20200041236A1). It describes using ultra-short laser pulses to form plasma filaments, and "rastering" them into 2D or 3D "ghost" images in the air, to decoy heat-seeking missiles. Hening had reportedly worked on such a project at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific since 2012. A Japanese company, Aerial Burton, demonstrated a laser-plasma 3D display in 2018. The Debrief said it was unclear whether the Navy had any working laser-plasma system in 2004. Several witnesses said they saw no unusual equipment on deck, and Smith said what he saw did not look like a projection. Hening had not responded to a request for comment.

Comparisons and context

The Debrief compared the orb to earlier military reports of glowing red or orange balls.^[1]

• Malmstrom, 1967. Robert Salas, then a deputy missile combat crew commander at Oscar Flight, Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, said guards reported a "glowing red ball" over the gate before 8 to 10 missiles went offline. A guard at Echo Flight later described a "ball of fire".
• Loring, 1975. On 28 October 1975 at Loring Air Force Base, Maine, Sgt. Steven Eichner and others reported a "reddish-orange" object over the nuclear weapons storage area, later seen hovering five feet off the ground.
• Elizondo on orbs. Elizondo said such "luminous balls of almost, like, plasma" had been compared by some to drones or probes, possibly launched from a larger UAP craft.
• The databases. A MUFON field investigator, Lynda Thompson, said MUFON's database held 91,190 reports from 1 January 1995 to 24 April 2022, including 4,773 "orbs". According to The Debrief, 9,605 of the 138,017 reports on the NUFORC website, about 6.96 per cent, are "fireball"-shaped.

The Debrief also linked the case to the 2004 Nimitz encounter and the 2014–15 USS Theodore Roosevelt encounters.^[1] The Wikipedia account of the Pentagon UFO videos describes both.^[3] The Debrief noted that such incidents must now be reported under Navy guidelines to the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. It also argued that a similar event today would probably be kept secret.^[1]

Assessment

The Debrief conceded that the case, like many, lacks physical evidence. It argued that the number and training of the witnesses set it apart: most were lookouts trained to recognise aircraft, and five recalled the event independently, some never having discussed it in the 18 years since. It found "no widespread differences" or signs of deceit, though details varied.^[1] Some of those variations are considerable. Estimates of how long the object stayed run from about 30 seconds (Gokey) to Olesiak's four-hour watch, and accounts differ on whether it was dusk or full dark. The witnesses also disagree on whether flight operations were under way.^[1] No Navy record of the event has been released, and the Navy is not reported to have commented.

Notes on the earlier version

• Number of witnesses. The earlier version said The Debrief published accounts from "five Navy veterans". It spoke with nearly a dozen, or "ten Navy vets", of whom five were primary witnesses.^[1]
• Flight operations. The earlier version said "flight operations continued". Olesiak and Gokey recalled aircraft operations under way, while Witness 3 and Witness 5 said none were taking place.^[1]
• The torn-out entry. The earlier version said Witness 5's chief told him to tear out his entry. The Debrief reports the order once as coming from his chief and once from "a senior officer". It also says the entry was in the Boatswain's Watch "Greenbook", not the official deck log.^[1]
• Daily Caller. The earlier version also cited a Daily Caller report of 9 May 2022. That page refused automated access, so its contents are not covered in the sources read here.^[2]

People and topics

• Ronald Reagan — 40th U.S. president whose diary and speeches touched on space and alien threats.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• The Debrief — A news site covering UAP and science.
• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• Nimitz Tic Tac encounter — The November 2004 encounter between Navy pilots and a white Tic Tac-shaped object off California.

On the Timeline

• Coulthart on contractor scientists (2022) (May/June 2022) — Coulthart describes scientists said to work on secret UAP research.
• Politico "Skull and Bones" faction report (16 May 2022) — An official tells Politico a 'secret society' withholds UAP information from Congress.

See every 2022 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “USS Nimitz UFO incident”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.