WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp
The U.S. Air Force Pilot Who Had A Dogfight With A UFO
20 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is Lt. Colonel Ryan Bodenheimer's background in aviation?
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They can't, the people around you don't want to think that you're seeing things while you're flying, right? I essentially got into a mini dogfight with the UAP and I'll never forget it.
Normalize people talking about it. You know, these things happen. You're an expert, trained witness, and this is what you saw.
Like this. It's moving like this. So there's nothing aerodynamic about this thing. It reminded me of, like, Mario Brothers. Like, hey, go through here to go to the next level. Like, that's what it seemed like to me.
Do you allow yourself to speculate what all these things are, where they're from? This is Weaponized. This is Weaponized. I'm George Knapp here in Las Vegas, joined by my friend and colleague, Jeremy Korbel. How you doing, Jeremy? We had a good one today.
Oh, yeah. I'm excited, man. We're going to be speaking with somebody who has seen things for themselves and has a really pretty incredible background.
You know, one of the cool things, the many cool things about living in Las Vegas is it's the home to the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. This precision flying team that travels around the world demonstrates the precision and the power of American air forces and the Thunderbirds because of the proximity where I live.
When they're in the air, a couple of times a year, they'll practice and then they put on a show over Nellis. When they're in the air, they fly right by my house. So I go up on the roof and watch them. And it's spectacular. These are some of the elite of the elites in aviation and aviation.
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Chapter 2: What experiences led Bodenheimer to share his UFO encounters?
So I think what you're saying is true, though. It's really interesting. The Thunderbirds, I will hear more about it, but it's precision flying. So you have to have like a lot of time in aircraft to be able to fly with that kind of thing. But you have to have a whole history before. So we're going to be talking with my friend, Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Bodenheimer.
Yeah, well, George, Jeremy, thanks for having me. It's really, really good to be here today. George, sounds like the Thunderbirds need to charge you a royalty for that view of their takeoffs every day, man. That's awesome. Yeah, so I started in the Air Force, went to pilot training in Texas, got the F-15E Strike Eagle.
uh dream jet you know twin engine uh twin cockpit jets basically you know the the top gun jet for the air force uh two people in that thing very combat capable so all the beeps and squeaks all the like different technologies that you could ever ask for they literally update that thing every month uh with the newest technologies that the air force has so dream jet
Did that for eight years or so, a little bit less than eight years. And I ended up deploying to Afghanistan during that time, did 70 combat missions, 300 combat hours over there. That would have been 2011 through 2012. And then I came back and I didn't think life could get any cooler. And I threw my name in the hat for the Thunderbirds.
And yeah, just wild, a very rare chance to get selected for that mission. Got selected for it, moved to Vegas, and flew with the Thunderbirds for about three years. You do about six months of training, two years of shows, and then six months of instructing and training your replacement. So that was the big military part of my career. Then I ended up flying commercial for about five years.
And now I'm basically a full-time washed-up fighter pilot on YouTube. That's my job now.
Your name, Max Afterburner, that's a great name. And you've got something like 500,000 subscribers. So a lot of these are your fellow aviators, former military guys, I would think.
Yeah, I think there's quite a few of them on there, yeah. And that's kind of what led me to do the UAP videos a few months back, I guess now, was a lot of the people in the comments section were just like, hey, tell us about UAPs. And that was around the time, I mean, you guys were getting a ton of press. You were doing great work.
So I noticed you guys, you know, and you've since been doing great work with the congressional hearings and just giving aviators a platform to come forward and talk about this stuff. I think it's really great. So you guys have done a great job there. So I saw you guys out there doing it and I thought, hey, my subscribers want to see this. Why not?
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Chapter 3: What details did Bodenheimer describe about his first UAP sighting?
As an elite fighter pilot to have the call sign Neo. Now, I know there's probably a story behind that, which I'd love to hear. But currently you're a colonel or lieutenant colonel in the Air Force reserves. Is that correct?
I am. Yeah. Reserves. Yep.
All right.
Yep.
Let's talk about stigma, because you said that you got this great episode about your UFO sightings or encounters. And you admit, hey, there is real stigma about this for current duty on duty military guys. And and until recently, you didn't feel comfortable talking about it. Now you do. Is this something that you talk about with fellow aviators privately about the UFO topic?
Is it does it come up?
You know, it came up for me after one of the experiences that I have that I'll share with you guys here in a second. But it wasn't this like huge event. It was literally me being like, hey, I just I saw that out there on this sortie. Did you see anything? And the other pilots like, no, you know, and they kind of give you that.
No, you know, and that's that's the stigma in itself, because, I mean, fighter squadrons, it's high pressure, high stakes jobs where you got to be dialed in. They can't the people around you don't want to think that you're seeing things while you're flying. Right. And that's understandable because, you know, in the Thunderbirds, you're flying three feet away from someone.
So if they didn't see it, that's kind of I think where the stigma comes from. That's why I think it's great with Commander Fravor. You know, he had a WIZO with him, had other members of the formation. So I think that's where you can really have some discussions and conversations.
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Chapter 4: How did Bodenheimer's dogfight with a UFO unfold?
And I just want to tell my stories and have the viewers make their own decisions. So it's,
Yeah, look, man, I think it's rare that you get good footage to begin with, you know, that comes out, you know, military footage of UAP is really closely guarded, even if people do get footage. So what I think is valuable, though, is you talking about the culture. But first of all, this is Air Force, right? So we have a lot of Navy pilots that have come out and there's a culture within Navy.
There's a culture within Air Force. We know Air Force has been really quiet, you know, for good or bad. They've been quiet about the UAP thing.
So because you're Air Force, and I would like to understand, you know, kind of when you began and kind of where you're ending, if you're saying that there is a change, you know, in this culture by hearing people come forward, hearing people testify, you know, that that has inspired you to tell your story. There's got to be a lot of stories and studies out there where the people haven't talked up.
So what do you see about the Air Force and kind of... the silence of it. And was that kind of embedded within your training or is that just because of the mechanisms and how you run?
Super good question. Yeah, that's a really dialed in question. I think that's important. If you even just look at Top Gun Maverick, there's a reason why Top Gun Maverick was made by the Navy and not the Air Force. The access levels and just the different mindsets between the two services is vastly different.
I was in pilot training and one of the instructors, we were talking about naval aviators and you got to call them aviators or they'll get really upset. So it's, you know, we don't want to bruise any egos.
Yeah.
She said she was like, well, with with naval aviators, they have a little book that's this big. That's the things that they're not allowed to do. And it's just like a really small book tells them, hey, this is the stuff that can get you killed in the air. Don't do this stuff. Right. And then the Air Force has a stack of books this tall that says these are the only things you're allowed to do.
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Chapter 5: What was Bodenheimer's experience with UAP while flying commercially?
And, you know, my channel is Current Events, right? So I'm doing a video almost every day. And a lot of it's like high stakes deployments with Iran or, you know, what's going on with Greenland, things like that. So I feel like maybe there was some comments that I missed.
But probably after this, after talking with you guys, there'll probably be a lot more discussions that I can have with some fellow aviators. Yeah, I just I felt like, you know, this might get into some of the philosophy and I'll just give you like one sentence on that. I kind of had a realization moment with all this UAP stuff because, yeah, I'm from, you know, Air Force guy.
I'm proud of the Air Force. I love the Air Force, you know. And so I kind of felt for a while that if I talk about it, I was, you know, maybe biting the hand that feeds me. Right. But I've since thought about it. And I think this is. This is honestly one of the best things for aerospace, space aviation, military combat aviation, because it's creating like an extraterrestrial arms race.
And I think that's good because it drives engineers within the military, engineers maybe right now at Area 51. If this isn't U.S. technology, they're looking at this and they're like, how do we do that? Or... You know, if there's some of these craft that have been, you know, gifted, you know, intertwining that into what looks like traditional military hardware, that's awesome.
Because now it's going to keep my fellow colleagues alive more. And who knows, maybe some of that technology I was already using unbeknownst to me. But I think there's so many advancements here from this, just seeing it, that can make aviation safer, can make your fighter jet safer, can make you more combat capable and to, you know, survivable.
You know, you're up there flying in these austere environments. Being more survivable and more lethal is super important. But if you want, I can just dive into some of the encounters.
Sure.
I'll get off my soapbox and tell the people what they came here for.
Before you do, our friend Dave Fravor, the reaction he had after seeing the Tic Tac and chasing it and see what it could do, he was amazed. He wasn't freaked out. He was amazed. And what he told us, Jeremy, you'll recall, I want to fly that thing. That's what he said.
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Chapter 6: What are the cultural differences in discussing UAPs between Air Force and Navy pilots?
There are MOA, So there's ships and things operating below you, you know, commerce is happening below you, but you're up there and you typically own, typically it's like you own like a thousand feet above the water, sometimes surface up to like 60,000 feet. So you own like all that airspace, which is great for training, right?
You can do all kinds of different situations, defensive counter air, offensive counter air, strategic strike, like all this stuff. But typically, I mean, it was it was happening almost every sortie where at the end of it, you're you're you've completed your training mission. You've done your big air war.
And then on the way out, the weapon systems operator in the back has, you know, this amazing we call it like a Gucci of technology, which just means fancy. It's a targeting pod. I mean, you can just see. You can see amazing things. I can't give the exact numbers on what you can see with it. Let's just... For the sake of this, it's amazing what you can actually see with this thing.
But on the way out of the airspace, for almost every sortie, we would see these little orbs. And to me, they looked like...
um a sphere but not you know maybe half the size of a car is what i would estimate you know based on some of the um ranging that you can see in that targeting pod and then a lot of times they'd be you know going with the wind or going opposite direction of the wind it seems like the wind didn't really matter uh for the flight path of these things and the weapon systems operate in the back you know we just cue these up and try to track it and sometimes it was hard to track because we were far away or the object was a little too small so when i started to see
And I think it was there were some other sightings off the coast, off the East Coast. I started to see some pilots come forward and I thought, well, yeah, we've seen these a lot. So that's just something that I think was a normal thing for us where we were just like, yep, it's more of these orbs.
And then we would think that, hey, maybe these are launching from ships like they were small drones because there's tons of big container ships or oil tanker type ships below us. So we kind of just wrote it off as that. But that was kind of my first experience.
so an orb doesn't really look like a drone that we know of. Right. And, and they're going again against the wind in some cases. So likely not a balloon.
Yeah. Like I would say not a balloon, uh, just based on going against the wind. And then I didn't see any like quad copter type things, you know, on it that you could, you probably would be able to see at least on some of them, you'd be close enough on some of them to see that. And then some of them would just disappear, you know, while they're being tracked, they would just disappear. Um,
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Chapter 7: How does Bodenheimer speculate on the technology behind UAPs?
But then as you kind of fly the fighter jet around the airspace, like this camera, you know, it can't look through metal. And so if the actual jet itself, you know, gets in between the visuals, then it'll just break contact and you can't see it. But yeah, it'll be on your screen the whole time. And you can flip through those screens.
You can see the screen that the weapons system operator in the back is using, or you can be on something else. So it's super, like, really great user interface in those fighter jets to be able to see that.
And so the weapons system operators, when they're back there tracking things and you're flipping through, you can see exactly what they're seeing. So you're looking at, like, thermal imagery if they're taking thermal imagery. Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
And so you've probably seen out of these thousands and thousands of hours of flight time. And also when you're flying on your own compared to having a backseater, you probably seen a lot of this type of footage before, right?
I think it was it was it Graves, the F-18 pilot who came forward with some footage like Tic Tac type footage.
Commander Underwood filmed the Tic Tac UFO footage. And then there have been other pilots that have brought stuff forward through Ryan Graves. Yeah.
Yeah. So I remember seeing that and I think there was one there was a video where I think it was the backseater in the F-18, you know, their Navy F-18s saying like this thing's going against the wind or something like that. So, yes, I remember I've seen that footage and it just kind of cued in my brain like, oh, yeah, I've seen that before.
Well, I'm sorry, I'm leaving your question here is that George and I have some other footage we'd love to show you at some point, maybe not today, but just, you know, we're trying to determine if you're seeing a sphere or like an orb, you know, people like to just throw out this debunk. Well, these are, you know, birds or balloons.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of UAP sightings for military innovation?
And you're kind of you're just confirming that on the East Coast, that's what you were experiencing.
Yeah, I never had any midair collision scares with these orbs. They're typically pretty far away from us when we when we pick them up. So but yeah, I mean, you know, even a. You know, a drone or something like that, something even really small is going to be very damaging to a fighter jet.
So, yeah, you would want to avoid if you could pick these things up and you saw them, you wouldn't like want to fly near it, you know, just for safety reasons.
When you come back from that flight, that training flight, do you tell anybody? Is there a reporting process for for pilots?
Yeah, there's like after action reports we can do. So a lot of times we would write up a few of those encounters and then it basically goes in a safe. And yeah, I don't know. I don't know what happens from there. It gets delivered to the intel department in the fighter squadron. Every fighter squadron has its own little intelligence office.
And so at the time, I mean, we were preparing for, you know, combat. So for us, we're like, okay, cool. Here's that sheet of paper. We got other things to think about. See ya.
Hmm.
The Air Force are going to lock that up because there's no like, you know, reporting structure like in the Navy where they're saying you should be reporting UAP, right?
Yeah, I never really got while I was in and this could have changed. You know, when I was flying fighters full time, that was never really an avenue for that. I think I think maybe towards the end, you know, a few more discussions would happen with our intelligence, you know, officers in the vaults. And but that was pretty much it.
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