Description

On 09/14/21, I was walking along the shoreline at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront from 34th Street southward to 1st Street. It was a beautiful beach day with perfect weather, and not crowded at all. As I passed 6th St. at exactly 2:36 PM, I heard an F-18 jet from nearby Oceana Naval Air Station make a VERY close approach to the beach over the tourist hotels. I had my phone with me, so I snapped a short burst of photos, but the jet was moving so fast, I didn't have enough time to take any good ones.

Once the F-18 had passed over the Doubletree hotel, I glanced at my photo roll and saw that only two photos had the jet in them and the rest were misfires, random shots of the beach and some folks who were enjoying their day.

Oceana Naval Air Station is a stone's throw from my childhood home. I grew up around these jets, only 2 miles from where these photos were taken, but something was definitely "off" that day in 2021. I took the photos because it struck me as unusual that an F-18 would be flying so low to the Oceanfront hotels when there was no airshow scheduled that month.

I did not discover the unusual nature of these images until 02/17/23, while scanning through my photo roll on my old iPhone 8. In several of the photos, I noticed an anomaly in the sky that just doesn't make sense. It's not a kite, nor a balloon, nor a drone, as far as I can tell, and I did not recall seeing this thing in the sky at the time the photos were taken.

Upon close inspection, the Object is a seven-sided, geometical shape with a strange, greenish hue, hovering approximately 200 feet in the air, above the Doubletree South Oceanfront hotel. It is not a kite, because there is nobody beneath it and no visible strings. The beach was mostly empty of tourists, and near the boardwalk there was only a small construction crew setting up a tent for the Neptune Festival sandcastle competition.

The Object has a matte gray exterior, but there appears to be either a glint of light or a hole in it. It appears to change position slightly between shots. I would guess that the Object is most likely the size of a minivan. There is another shot from further north which I took several seconds earlier, which could resemble a drone quadricopter from some angles. But, as it appears in the other photos zoomed in, this Object doesn't look like any human-designed drone that I've ever seen.

There was a flurry of UFO activity in Virginia Beach in the late 2010's, with almost daily sightings reported by airmen stationed at Oceana, two miles to the west. Most sightings were over the Atlantic Ocean.

SO, ...what's going on here? Perhaps the F-18 in the photos had been scrambled to intercept this Object, or perhaps the Object was hovering and observing the jet on a normal training mission. It was thrilling, however, stumbling upon these pictures 17 months later, especially since I can clearly remember the F-18. I only wish I had perceived the Object that day, because I would have taken a video and many more photos, I'm sure.