Bizarre

BIZARRE

Ships Logs Released Over a Year After Mysterious Drones Swarmed

By: JORDAN B. DARLING

CHANNEL ISLANDS— In July 2019 several U.S. Destroyers were swarmed by a group of unidentified unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, several times near Channel Islands.

Dave Beaty, a documentary filmmaker, uncovered the initial details of the event in 2020.

“Did the navy ship #USSKidd #DDG100 encounter a UAP in July 2019 in SoCal OPAREA Trying to find out more,” said Beaty in a June 8, 2020, tweet. “The ship logs indicate a “Snoopy Team’’ was deployed - an intel section that tries to visually ID objects. DM if you know more. Near San Clemente island #TicTac @UfoJoe11.” After Beaty’s tweet, a group of reporters at The Drive began submitting Freedom of Information Act requests that resulted in a huge release of documents that included deck logs and hundreds of gigabytes of locational data that showed where the ships were when the flyovers took place, according to an April 1 article from UAV Coach.

The paperwork showed that the USS Kidd, USS Rafael Peralta, USS John Finn, and the USS Paul Hamilton were in a training exercise in a military area 100 miles off of Los Angeles, according to a March 23 article from The Drive.

Around 10 p.m. on July 14 the lookouts on the USS Kidd spotted a couple of UAVs

The Ship Nautical Or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation and Exploration team, SNOOPIE, an onboard photographic intelligence team, was in charge of documenting the event and the unknown contacts.

After reporting the UAVs to the other ships, the USS John Finn and the USS Rafael Peralta activated their own teams. The log shows that the USS Rafael Peralta reported white lights hovering above the flight deck, and documented a search for the unidentified UAVs.

The encounter lasted over 90 minutes and the log showed that the UAV matched the destroyer’s speed in low visibility conditions, according to the article from The Drive.

On July 15 a similar event occurred, at 8:39 p.m. the USS Rafael Peralta spotted the UAVs and by 9 p.m. the USS Kidd had also spotted the UAVs and by 9:20 p.m. reported that there were multiple UAVs surrounding the ship.

The Drive posits that the UAVs appeared to be following the ships, and that an entry in the log that said “Man Mark 87 Stations” could potentially be about the Mark 87 Electro-Optical Director, a component of the massive infrared and optical turret used to direct the ship’s 5-inch gun and is used for long-distance surveillance. Roughly around this time the USS Russell recorded five to six UAVs that were moving in all directions. The final sighting was from the USS Russell at midnight. After three hours they were still unable to identify the UAVs.

An official investigation was started on July 17 that involved Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Navy, and the Coast Guard. The investigation appears to have gone cold as of July 25 but the UAVs picked back up again on July 25 and 30.

The USS Kidd spotted them again at 1:20 a.m. on July 25 and again on July 30 at 2:15 a.m.

The investigation is still underway, and there is no information about who operated the UAVs, or where they came from.

The naval ships were running a training exercise o the coast near Channel Islands.

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