Alex Wiggins
speaker
263 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Alex Wiggins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, absolutely. It's I've been on the west coast of San Diego since 2002 is when I joined the Navy. So and I've been out of country in between that time. But however, I've been on the west coast the majority of my career and off good old San Diego coast. You as in the being in the Navy, we go out there, we do our mission, we, you know, work ups and things of that nature.
And, uh, every now and again, you know, you, we will see satellites, we will see shooting stars, things of that nature. And then you'll see things that are very unexplained, like the video, uh, that Jeremy released. So, um, you'll see that more often than not.
And, and I, I have conversations with plenty of sailors, uh, that I work with and have worked with, uh, that we'll see things and it's unexplained and we see them so often that it's, we just kind of joke about it. You know, we'll, we'll, uh, you know, Say we can't explain it. You know, I'm a radar operator on board the USS Jackson at the time of the video in 2023. So the position is called TAC.
So we were monitoring the radar and that's what we do. So if there's things that we can't explain. when it comes to the kinematics of a contact on our screen, uh, then, you know, we'll use visual, we'll use other sensors like Sapphire. We'll, you know, we'll, we'll look out of the bridge wings and see what we can see to identify what's around us. Uh, and yeah,
Every now and again, we will see things that we can't explain. And when I say that, it's not as if we're seeing things that are a threat to the military, a threat to our ship. They're just things that we identify. You know, there's helicopters, there's aircraft that are commercial aircraft all around San Diego, the coast and things of that nature.
So it's my job on that watch to identify what's what. And when you can't identify what's what, it makes you kind of skeptical.
it in the air specifically for my task as the, the, the tech comm, uh, is to ensure, you know, the air pitcher is, you know, the way it needs to be in order for us to conduct our operations. But, uh, if there's something that's unexplainable, I'll, I'll depend on my team, uh, in ICC one, which is combat information center for, for an LCS ship.
And I depend on them to kind of help me out and figure out what we're actually witnessing and what we're seeing. Um,
So that night, it was an evening into the night watch. We were standing and typical day underway, conducting normal operations off the coast of San Diego. And There was a time that I witnessed on my radar a few contacts popping up. It was northeast on the contact on the radar. The radar is in true. So northeast ish. Looking at the radar and noticed a few things come in and out.
I've been in the Navy for 23 years as an operations specialist, so I know the difference between helicopters, which I'm a helo controller myself with an NEC of helo control, and helicopters. knowing the difference between that commercial navigation radars, which are your typical comm nav that are, you know, going to Hawaii possibly, uh, and then atmospherics.
So things like, uh, clouds, uh, rainstorms, things like that. You, you learn over, you know, the years to differentiate what's what on your radar. Uh, so that night, uh, I noticed that I couldn't differentiate what was what at all amongst the things that I just mentioned. So I decided to go out to the bridge wing just to take a look, to see. I didn't think it was that far away.
I think, you know, it's nighttime, so light travels. So I figured, you know what, let me just poke outside, see what I can see. And to my surprise, which is something I've never witnessed, was a light I noticed on the horizon, but it was... it looked as if it were surfacing out of the water and going up.
Now, seeing lights on the horizon, very typical when you're out in the water, but seeing a light on the horizon going into the air is a different story. So witnessing that, I'm not sure of what I'm seeing. What goes through my head, maybe there's a military team that's out there conducting flight operations, and maybe they're helos hovering, something like this. But their lights blink.
I'm a helo controller, so I know that their running lights are going to be blinking red, green, and pulsating. So it's not like it's going to be a solid light, and that's what I witnessed was a solid light rising from the horizon up. So went back inside, looked at my radar to just kind of match what I'm seeing with my own eyes. And I didn't really see what I thought I was going to see.
I only saw one light visually, but then I saw four different contacts on radar. So seeing those four contacts on radar, I asked our CSM. I forget what that stands for right now, but combat systems. I forget the full title, but ask the CSM to take a look on Sapphire. They're in charge of managing Sapphire and moving it around to just look at surface and air contacts around our ship. So.
They slew over to the location that I gave them, the direction in which I gave them. And that's where you see the video cut into play, where you see it slew in into that target to kind of look at it. And, you know, they're the operators, so they know how to zoom in and kind of see what the profile is.
of the contact that we're looking at to kind of understand, okay, if it were a comm nav radar, which is a typical, you know, airliner 747, then we're going to say, okay, good to go there, you know, headed off to Hawaii or wherever, every, anywhere to the West. Uh, but that night we didn't witness that, uh, as shown by the video.
Yes, so it's pointed towards a north-northeast direction at the time, based on what that video shows in Sapphire. We were fairly far away from the coast of San Diego, San Clemente area. So it definitely was not, you know, lights on the horizon from the city, nor did I have anything as far as helicopters or air traffic that I was detecting at all in that location.
Absolutely. Absolutely. So when I say that I saw this craft come out of the water, it's nighttime. So I want to be clear when I say what I saw, I saw a light and it was a decently bright light. So when you've been on the water as long as I have, You know the difference between an aircraft carrier's lights, a difference between an oiler's lights, a fishing cargo ship.
It's what we learn when we freshly come into the Navy, especially as an operations specialist. We have to learn silhouettes. We have to learn lighting structures, things of that nature. It's just part of what our job is. Being senior enlisted...
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