USS Princeton (CG-59)

So I spoke the language, which was helpful.

And so I'm going out to these folks and talking and What you really had in that whole situation, and I can recap it real quick, for a period of two weeks, the radar operators on board the USS Princeton, which is the Aegis cruiser, it's the air defense boat for the carrier strike group, were seeing targets on the radar that were coming down from basically space all the way to the water.

right over two weeks and the operator had no idea what was going on he thought well maybe there's something wrong with the radar they shut down the radar they did maintenance they brought the radar back up still had the targets so they took advantage of having two f-18s out near one of the targets and they vectored them they drove them to the target area where one of these objects was.

And that was Commander Dave Fravor with Lieutenant Alex Dietrich on the wing.

Four people were in that formation.

The USS Princeton was controlling the exercise.

The training was suspended and the flight was directed toward an unidentified contact.

Let's pause briefly at the difference between those two ships.

However, they also flagged possible weather clutter as a source of confusion, given that sea spray can sometimes generate spurious echoes on radar screens during certain wind conditions.

In fact, an earlier 2004 report from another carrier, the USS Princeton, described encountering similar white objects in the same general area, hinting at a possible cluster rather than a lone event.

That pattern suggests we may have been dealing with more than just a single object, or at least that multiple unidentified objects were active during that two-week period.

One hypothesis advanced by skeptics is that the Tic Tac could have been a weather balloon, specifically an ultra-high altitude research platform, but the observed maneuvering made that unlikely.

The explosion ripped a 25-by-25-foot hole in its hull.

Exactly three hours later, the USS Princeton CG-59, a billion-dollar, state-of-the-art Aegis guided missile cruiser, struck an Iraqi Manta mine.

The explosion cracked the ship's superstructure, jammed its rudder and caused severe structural buckling – a dead-in-the-water mission kill.

Both of these crown jewels of the American fleet were neutralised in a single morning.