We have helicopters that can hover,” Lieutenant Graves said. “We have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface.” But “combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume.”

The near miss, he and other pilots interviewed said, angered the squadron, and convinced them that the objects were not part of a classified drone program. Government officials would know fighter pilots were training in the area, they reasoned, and would not send drones to get in the way.

As for the Navy's strange public announcement that they were changing the reporting procedures for these types of encounters, their position is the same as it was weeks ago, with the New York Times quoting Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher as such:

The squadron deployed to the Middle East in March of 2015, and according to the pilots interviewed, the encounters off of the southeastern coast of the U.S. ended not long after.

“There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”

We examined this peculiar move by the Navy and the odd timing of it in great detail in my last article on the subject, and this series of events likely had something to do with it. Regardless, with all this in mind, what can we take away from these new on the record revelations?

First off, they are a huge deal. We are talking about two more Navy fighter pilots on the record and another three talking to The New York Times on background. And this was not some account that occurred a decade or more in the past, this was just a couple years ago. Yet what strikes me the most is that once again, this series of encounters occurred in tightly sanitized airspace over the ocean where the military does its most advanced and complex training and testing, just like the Nimitz's Tic Tac incident many years earlier on the west coast. In that case, the gear and personnel involved were also preparing for a major deployment.

Yet what the New York Times doesn't seem to firmly drill down on enough is that we are now getting first-hand accounts that describe a major upgrade in radar technology as being a catalyst for actually detecting and tracking these mysterious objects. Much of my last piece was dedicated to the little known fact that back in 2004, the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was executing very complex and highly integrated training prior to deployment with Cooperative Engagement Capability technology installed on its ships and aircraft. This was the first time this game-changing suite of sensor fusion and data-link technologies was ever integrated into an operational Carrier Strike Group. As a result, multiple accounts definitively state that its unique, 'fused' sensor data was confiscated after the Tic Tac incident culminated in a number of close encounters.

Taking the recent information about the radar upgrade on the Super Hornets into account, it adds a new facet of plausibility to the Nimitz/Tic Tac events. The higher fidelity radar telemetry data Cooperative Engagement Capability provided, like the introduction of AESA fire control radars on Navy fighters not long after, may have allowed for the detection and documentation of these objects like never before. Whether that was by design or by chance remains unknown.

These two facts—the encounters occurring in secure military airspace off the continental U.S. coastline and the presence of advanced, highly capable radar systems in both series of incidents—is compelling, to say the least. As we stated in our last piece on the subject, these areas and the gear present in them during the encounters would make for very attractive testing conditions for undisclosed aerial capabilities. When it comes to the object's strange appearance, making something as alien looking as possible is probably a good thing for deniability and unconventional camouflage purposes. Even the testing of sensors under real-world conditions against such a craft using various guises could be beneficial.

As for near collisions, they have happened among military aircraft operating in highly controlled airspace where both parties are being helped by air traffic controllers. As such, the near miss doesn't seem like an outright disqualifier for these objects belonging to the military, or a military, as the pilots seem to think. And it's not like the presence of totally unknown aircraft that could be a threat to the safety of other aircraft hasn't occurred even in highly trafficked airspace that is patrolled by alert fighter aircraft. We have broken three major stories about just that in just the last 18 months, one of which is unprecedented in its level of documentation.

I do have to stress that this is not the explanation we are giving for these incidents, but it is one that has to be taken into account, especially considering the similar circumstances at hand.

General knowledge of the aforementioned events that occurred off the east coast in 2014 and 2015 is not necessarily new. Many of us who have kept very close tabs on these developments have known about the sphere and cube craft description for some time, and that a number of encounters happened in this area long after the Nimitz event in 2004. Our good friend Danny Silva reported on the broad strokes of this story days before the New York Times piece was published via dissecting an interview with Commander David Fravor, the lead Super Hornet pilot that had the close-up encounter with the Tic Tac in 2004. Silva also blogged about Fravor's description of what the east coast pilots saw back in January. What is new is the level of detail offered and the fact that five pilots talked to The New York Times about this and two were on the record.