The biggest UFO story of the last year has been without a doubt the disclosure of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program and several pieces of allegedly declassified footage which appear to show U.S. military craft being stalked by unidentified and advanced aircraft. Among that footage was a video depicting an unbelievably fast and agile “Tic Tac” shaped UFO playing a two-week game of cat and mouse with the U.S.S. Nimitz supercarrier off the coast of California in 2004. The unidentified objects were able to easily outmaneuver the Navy’s F-18s and displayed flight and cloaking capabilities far beyond anything the U.S. armed forces possess.

The true nature of that object has not yet been determined – at least publicly. Was it an extraterrestrial observer? An incredibly advanced drone flown by a rival superpower? Or perhaps some sort of natural phenomenon which played tricks with the Navy’s instruments and cameras?

Who knows. A heavily redacted report of that incident was made public by that pop punk rocker guy’s weird UFO research thing and can be read here. To add to the mystery surrounding that incident, the air intercept controller serving aboard the USS Princeton during the Tic-Tac UFO encounter recently made comments in an interview which seem to suggest that the sighting had strange effects on his psyche similar to other documented UFO sightings, giving him psychic abilities and apocalyptic visions.

In an interview with Mike Damante, former air intercept controller Kevin Day recounts that the high strangeness he experienced during those encounters left him “struggling to make sense of what had happened.” For years after the incident, Day has experienced apocalyptic dreams of the world ending, dreams so vivid that they have given him anxiety attacks:

The dreams I began to have in 2008 can be loosely described as eschatological; world-wide disasters, comets causing tsunamis, epic floods, earthquakes, plane crashes, (and) end of the world scenarios. I remembered the ‘nightmares’ the next day and those dream-memories would trigger acute anxiety, which I experience daily even now many years later.

Day adds that since he left the Navy, he believes he has been stalked by unknown individuals or groups:

I do know that somebody has been watching me for years now… like the spooks told me ‘Kevin, the government spent millions training you and now they are spending millions watching you’ … they want to know what I’m going to do.

The interview takes a strange turn from there, with Day adding that he believes that high-frequency radiation from the Tic Tac sighting gave him a “strange psychic ability” which gives him the ability to control reality with his thoughts:

As it also turns out, the spooks already knew everything about me and what I had been going through before they met me. They even acknowledged the strange physic ability that I seem to have – which is, I seem to be able to manifest things and situations, hence their stated fears. What I think about has a weird way of becoming reality. It has happened now too many times to be just coincidence. In fact, I now manifest things on purpose. I also seem to have been advantaged with what I now know is called ‘downloaded information’.

Similar reported cases of post-effects following UFO sightings and close encounters are fairly common, and some contactees claim they were intentionally given special abilities or knowledge by visitors from other dimensions, galaxies, or what have you.

While I tend to remain skeptical about claims made without concrete proof, one thing is clear: encountering such an unexplained and otherworldly phenomenon like the Tic-Tac would have a profound impact on anyone. Could there be something to Day’s claims?