Inside the Radar Room: 26-Year Air Traffic Controller Jason Judy on UAP Sightings, Filtered Radar Data & the Chinese Balloon

A shining black triangle, bigger than a warship, hanging motionless over a moving cruiser. Red, blue, and green lights at its corners. Then, in an instant, it was eight miles away. Ricky Harris spent decades in and around naval aviation, first as a Navy avionics technician aboard EC-130 TACAMO aircraft, the airborne link between national command authority and the submarine fleet, and later as a civilian instructor at the Navy’s strike fighter weapons school. In July 1981, standing on Vultures Row aboard the USS Eisenhower in the Puerto Rico operating area, he and several other sailors watched something they could not explain hover over one of the carrier’s plane guard ships. I sit down with Ricky to walk through a lifetime of encounters he kept almost entirely to himself. We cover the object over the Eisenhower in detail: a triangular craft, black and featureless underneath and mirror-bright on top, ringed with colored lights at its corners and a large amber light at its center, holding position over a ship under way before jumping miles across the formation in the blink of an eye and performing a display of movement he says no conventional aircraft could survive. He describes the general-quarters call that followed, a newspaper item he read days later about a ship in the battle group accidentally firing a missile, and why that detail is the part that still unsettles him. Ricky also recounts a second sighting near Norfolk years later, a vast silent boomerang flying a standard approach profile with an F-117 close in trail, and reflects on why objects keep appearing over carriers and other military assets. He does not claim to know what any of it was. He says only that whatever he saw was not built by any company or country he knew of. Whether these were advanced programs of our own, the craft of an adversary, or something genuinely beyond our science, his account raises the question this show keeps returning to: if credible witnesses across an entire battle group saw the same thing and said nothing, what records still exist, and what would we learn if the people who were there felt free to speak? Learn more, become a member, and support ASA's work at: https://www.safeaerospace.org Please like, subscribe, and share this episode to help us continue producing aviation-safety research and conversations. Sponsors: MOD: Visit https://MOD.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code SAFEAERO. Scribe: Turn any process into a step-by-step guide automatically. Get started at https://scribe.how/SAFEAERO, with your first month free on select plans.

Stars winking out in the shape of a giant triangle. A beam of light that found him alone at his hot tub, with no source in sight. A sphere of plasma that stopped behind his house. And a veteran journalist’s warning: they’re tracking you. In this part two of a two-part series, and the conclusion of Dan Isbell’s story. Dan Isbell flew the F-111 on Cold War nuclear alert, graduated first in his Air Force Test Pilot School class, flew more than 70 types of aircraft, and later taught test pilots at Edwards before a career in directed-energy weapons. In part one, he described the silent triangular craft he saw near a NATO base in England in 1980 and kept to himself for 43 years. In part two, he walks through the three encounters that followed, spread across 35 years and three states, none of them from an aircraft. I sit down with Dan to hear all of it: a roughly 300-foot black triangle that blotted out the stars over a classified range at Edwards in 1990, moving so slowly it unnerved him; a defocused beam of blue-green light that surrounded him at his Florida hot tub in 2014, its source expanding in discrete steps into a white sphere before accelerating out of sight in under half a second; and a silent plasma sphere that moved down a retention pond and stopped behind his Tampa-area home in 2016. He also describes sitting across a table from journalist George Knapp and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, and the four words Knapp said to him that he could not shake. Dan does not claim to know what any of it was. He says he ruled out the prosaic explanations he could, and as an engineer he has spent decades theorizing about propulsion, optical stealth, and the physics that might make such objects possible, wherever those theories lead. Whether these were unacknowledged programs, a natural phenomenon, or something genuinely outside our science, his account returns to the question this show keeps asking: how many credentialed observers have stayed silent for fear of their careers, and what would we understand about our own skies if they felt safe to speak? Missed part one? Watch it here: https://youtu.be/MJHO8iB6tDw Learn more, become a member, and support our work at: https://www.safeaerospace.org Please like, subscribe, and share this episode to help us continue producing independent aviation-safety research and conversations.

A red Corvette alone on a dark English road. Strange lights closing fast in the rearview mirror, then stopping dead. A silent, color-shifting craft hovering just above a golf course. Dan Isbell spent his career at the leading edge of American airpower. He went straight into the left seat of the F-111, the first variable-sweep-wing fighter, flew nuclear alert for NATO at the height of the Cold War, graduated first in his Air Force Test Pilot School class, and eventually flew more than 70 different types of aircraft. He later helped shape the F-22 program and pioneered the fiber-laser work behind today's directed-energy weapons. On the night of December 26, 1980, driving home from alert duty at RAF Upper Heyford, he saw something he could not explain, and told no one for more than 40 years. In part one of a two-part conversation, I sit down with Dan to trace that career from a poor kid who had never set foot on an airport to a test pilot who talked his way into Georgia Tech and never looked back. We discuss the F-111 and the jets that followed, the near-fatal moments he survived, the lung injury he still carries from an F-16 ground fire, and then the encounter itself: a roughly 50-to-60-foot triangular craft ringed with shifting, plasma-like color, completely silent, that descended toward him as he walked closer before he thought better of it and drove away. Dan does not claim to know what he saw. He says he worked through every prosaic explanation he could, from a helicopter to a Soviet or NATO aircraft to a reverse-engineered platform of our own, and none of them fit. His sighting also falls within hours of the late-December nights now known as the Rendlesham Forest incident. He kept all of it to himself for decades, convinced that reporting it could end his flying career. Whether the object was an unacknowledged craft, an atmospheric phenomenon, or something genuinely outside our physics, his account raises the question this show keeps returning to: how many credible aviators have stayed silent, and what do we lose as a nation when the people best equipped to observe our skies are the ones with the most to lose by speaking? Learn more, become a member, and support our work at: https://www.safeaerospace.org Please like, subscribe, and share this episode to help us continue producing independent aviation-safety research and conversations.

What are pilots reporting, and how do we turn those accounts into evidence we can study? I sit down with Jonathan Miller, known as JMill, to discuss his work on sensemaking and MIT's Confronting Unknowns program. We explore how researchers can study ambiguous data, separate signal from noise, and stay open to new information without jumping to conclusions. Then we turn the tables. JMill asks me about the encounters that led me to speak publicly, my 2023 congressional testimony, and the work underway at Americans for Safe Aerospace. We discuss pilot reporting, witness privacy, the development of a structured research database, and a longer-term vision for connecting witness accounts with sensor data. We close with accounts reported to ASA, including luminous spheres, objects described near aircraft, and black triangles. I discuss what witnesses have described, how satellite effects can complicate observations, and why credible testimony still needs careful investigation. These are reported experiences and open questions, not established explanations of what the objects are.

A crashed spaceship. A career left in doubt. And six days later, a backyard full of light he couldn't explain. Brian Binnie was the second person to fly a private spacecraft to the edge of space — a Navy veteran with 33 combat missions, advanced degrees from Brown and Princeton, and the test pilot who flew the final flight of SpaceShipOne. Six days after a hard landing damaged its landing gear and left him wondering whether he would ever fly it again, Binnie described watching roughly a dozen glowing, translucent spheres move through his backyard in Rosamond, California, at four in the morning. He kept the account within a small circle for years. He passed away in 2022. I sit down with filmmaker Kevin Curran, who documented Binnie's story in Beyond Blue Sky: The Untold Story of the First Private Astronauts, and aerospace engineer Matt Stinemetze, who led the SpaceShipOne program and shared an office with Binnie for years. We trace Binnie's path from Gulf War Hornet cockpits to the high-stakes, low-budget test-flight culture at Scaled Composites, the crash that nearly ended his career, and the encounter he described six days later — a dozen fixed-shape spheres, some patrolling his fence line like sentries, two of which he said drifted through his bedroom window and passed into him before the whole scene dissolved back into darkness. Binnie looked for every prosaic explanation and never claimed to know what he saw; those closest to him describe it not as a fright but as something that gave him peace and, in his telling, the resolve to climb back into the cockpit. Whether it was a genuine anomaly, an artifact of a sleep-deprived mind under enormous stress, or something we don't yet have the science to describe, the conversation returns to a question this show keeps running into: what do we lose when we dismiss a credible, sober observer simply because their account doesn't fit the paradigm — and who pays for that silence? Watch Kevin Curran's documentary, Beyond Blue Sky: The Untold Story of the First Private Astronauts, on Apple TV: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/beyond-blue-sky/umc.cmc.3scqjpza3p8lkaz5tr55ksmu9 Learn more, become a member, and support our work at: https://www.safeaerospace.org Please like, subscribe, and share this episode to help us continue producing independent aviation-safety research and conversations.