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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's become part of very basic elementary things that you have to know when doing your job, kind of learning the basics first and then applying what you experience throughout your time and then kind of coming up with your solution as what you're seeing. So watching this light emerge from the water at a distance and then go into the air with a solid light, no blinking or anything,
I've never noticed that and witnessed that ever in my life. That's kind of what triggered me to go back to my instruments, check it out, talk with the watch team and ask them, are you seeing what I'm seeing? Let's use other sensors. Let's use what we got to see what we're witnessing. One thing I do want to add is that When I witnessed that, I wasn't feeling threatened.
I didn't think, you know, the ship is going to get attacked. And why didn't I think that? Because...
multiple reasons i'm not at a different level of roe i'm not postured in such a way off the coast of san diego where we're receiving intel that there's a significant level threat that we need to be at a higher threat level none of this is happening right we're off the coast we're doing workups we're you know doing training things of that nature uh so nothing made me think that we need to you know trigger a higher level of of threat warning um
I indicated what I saw to the tactical action officer, the TAO, who's in charge of Combat Information Center, ICC1. And it was just, let's do more investigating. Let's see what we're looking at. And that's why we got Sapphire to look in that direction and notice what we noticed.
Great question. So I'll answer that question by telling you what actually happened when we were talking with each other. after the aircraft left. And when I say they left, they really left as one unit of four objects, all at the same time. So there's a lot of skeptics out there. I get it. We're not meant to all be the same person and think the same way. And it's no different on board a Navy ship.
So on board the ship that night, after all four of those craft left at the same exact time, we had a few people that were on the bridge different from combat information center. It's kind of like a curtain that separates us. And, you know, we're just kind of laughing. Like you, like you witness what you witnessed, you guys understand what you saw.
And, you know, the, I believe it was the, the junior officer of the deck was just saying, Hey, you know, that was just an aircraft. It was just an aircraft, typical, you know, seven 47. And I said, sir, Did you see wings? Did you see, you know, anything protruding from the craft that indicated a silhouette of a typical aircraft?
And he was like, yeah, well, it's because we're so far away from the aircraft that it seems to look like a Tic Tac. So I said, OK, sir, got it. I would say maybe 20 seconds pass.
20 seconds pass and I go back to my radar and I'm just looking around and I tell the CSM, I said, slew over to a certain degree and I forget the degree and he slews over to an air contact that I know is an air contact and I tell him, zoom in. Now, I just mentioned that there's a curtain that separates ICC1 from the bridge, but the bridge has the same monitors that we have.
So they can see what we're doing from the bridge and you can change like channels so they can see certain pictures that are being displayed in ICC1. So they're already displaying the Sapphire camera on one of the multiple monitors on the bridge. So when I tell him to slew over, I say, O.D., do you see what this air contact looks like?
This air contact was maybe five, six nautical miles further than what we witnessed, the tic-tacs, and you can clearly see... The wings. You can see the propulsion. You can see the propulsion. Like when on a hot summer day, being from Las Vegas, George Knapp, I'm sure you know what that is. You can see that hot propulsion from the aircraft.
And I told the JOD, I said, like, what do you have to say now? You know, because it was funny to me that I was able to disprove. his skepticism, like within 20 seconds, that what we witnessed was probably an airplane. We were just zoomed in so far that it just looked like a small tic-tac, but disproved like within 20, 30 seconds. And he didn't really say anything after that.
He just kind of chuckled and laughed.
No. And I want to be clear on that. The Navy, the ship, you know, I'm not speaking for the Navy. I'm not speaking for the ship. I'm not the commanding officer of the ship. And I don't want to put words in the Navy's mouth by saying that there was a level of a chain of command where we were to report all this information and we just didn't. It was just something that was witnessed.
And again, I point out that it wasn't a threat to the ship. I want that to be very clear that the ship didn't skip any steps in reporting aircraft anomalies or aircraft that are getting close to the ship. And this was not close enough to the ship to have triggered an alert warning where we would have to investigate, is this craft about to crash? cause harm to our ship. Nowhere close to it.
So in that case, if it were, absolutely, I would let the tactical action officer know. Tactical action officer would, depending on lots of different variations, would notify the captain and then we'd take action to defend the ship as any other ship in the Navy would do. That wasn't this case.
Absolutely. Yeah. I was new there just checking in. Uh, and that's how I wind up actually going to the Jackson. A lot of folks that are either not in the military or not in the Navy, uh, Littoral combat ships, you can be moved around pretty often. For those that know, we know you get moved around a lot if you have certain NECs or different skills that they need on another ship.
So I originally started off on the Omaha and wound up going to the Jackson afterwards. Uh, but I, I saw the Omaha video, uh, afterwards. I actually didn't even know it was being recorded originally. Uh, but I was there for that incident. Just wasn't on watch. I wasn't, you know, a brand new check-in, uh, to the command and just kind of observing things.
Uh, never been on an LCS before, so it was new for me. Uh, but yeah.
Showing 221–240 of 263 · page 12 of 14
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