We are still waiting, perhaps futilely, for the government to release more information about US Navy encounters with UFOs (or UAPs, as they prefer to say these days) involving the Nimitz carrier battle group in 2005 and the Roosevelt carrier battle group in 2015. Despite the efforts of many journalists to get the Pentagon to provide more details, the military continues to put up what amounts to a cone of silence for the most part.

But while we wait, a number of scientists have been pouring over the little data available and marveling at the technology on display. That leaves many of us wondering just what these tic-tacs and other craft are truly capable of and whether or not such technology represents a threat to us. This is the subject that my friend Micah Hanks tackled this weekend in an article at Mysterious Universe. What Micah focuses on, in particular, is a section of an older interview with Cmdr. David Fravor, the Nimitz pilot who attempted to engage the tic tac originally. When you look at his descriptions in the context of this question about the technology on display, you have to wonder whether we’re really more like a group of Neanderthals watching a moon landing.

“We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Fravor told the New York Times in 2017. Although the unidentified object at no time displayed any offensive capabilities or other indications of hostile intent, the fact that it (or rather, its operators) had obvious knowledge of the Combat Air Patrol coordinates seems to indicate one of two possibilities:

1) That in addition to highly advanced maneuverability, the “tic-tac” also had the ability to decode the highly encrypted communications systems employed by the Strike Group at that time, or

2) The operators of the UAP technology may have somehow had foreknowledge or other means of access to this information.

As Micah goes on to point out, while there’s no reason to panic just yet, we can’t (or at least shouldn’t) write off the existence of technological capabilities so far in advance of our own.

The implications of either scenario are significant, and may even be fundamental to understanding the nature of the technology in question.

The various accounts of this object and its capabilities, observed at close-range by Fravor and his company during the intercept, as well as on radar by Voorhis, Day, and others, indicates something that is well beyond the capabilities of any known technologies possessed today by the United States; the same can be said of any other world superpower. This should not necessarily be alarming, as there was no indication of overt offensive capabilities displayed by the object. However, any object or aircraft with such highly advanced performance should not be ruled out as a concern.

Keep in mind that the part of the encounter Fravor was discussing in that excerpt took place after the “close encounter” between the tic-tac and his Super Hornet. At the conclusion of their little dance, the craft shot back up in the air a great distance in virtually no time at all and then went tearing away, over the horizon, arriving at the other aviation unit’s CAP point (Combat Air Patrol coordinates) more than 40 miles away in under a minute. Possibly well under a minute, given the fact that it took the other pilots some amount of time to pick up the contact and report it.

Here’s where a couple of those questions about advanced technology and possible threats to national security come into play. First, there’s the speed. This thing went from a dead stop to showing up at the other CAP point in at most a minute. That means that it accelerated to a minimum of Mach 5 in the blink of an eye. That’s not supposed to be possible. But the other question is… how did it “know” where the other CAP point was?

As you saw above, Fravor suggests two possible answers. The first possibility he mentions (that the creators of the craft can bust our best encryption systems), while disturbing, would require more proof I think. There’s been virtually zero indication that who or whatever controls those vehicles has any hostile intentions or even any interest in us. Could they crack our encryption? Probably, assuming they’ve figured out how to navigate the galaxy. But would they bother? Unknown, but it strikes me as unlikely.

The second option is the more tantalizing one, if somewhat frightening. Perhaps they don’t need to know what we’re talking about because they already know what’s going to happen before it does. But how would that work?

There’s been a theory going around for a long time that the human brain essentially acts like a quantum computer. We assemble information into linear timelines to avoid going mad, but time may not behave that way in reality. Perhaps everything happens at once and we only perceive our timeline as we do to make sense of all the data. If that’s the case, then perhaps other intelligent entities don’t view the universe that way. They may see the past, the present and the future all in the same frame.

Now we swing back to the other part of the original question. Thus far, the US hasn’t seen any indications of hostile intent out of these things. But what if they do become hostile? What the heck are we supposed to do against a foe that can potentially see the end of the fight before it even starts? Disturbing to say the least. Sleep tight, campers.