In the summer of 2019, an ordinary training exercise off the coast of southern California turned into something unusual something that would later grab worldwide attention and raise questions not just among UFO enthusiasts, but within the U.S. defense establishment itself.
In July 2019, several U.S. Navy warships including the USS Russell, USS Kidd, USS John Finn, and USS Rafael Peralta were operating as part of Strike Group 9 in a designated warning area off San Diego. They were conducting routine fleet exercises when radar and visual sightings began to record mysterious aerial objects.
According to deck logs and reports later obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests, crews on multiple vessels logged encounters with multiple unidentified aerial contacts sometimes up to nine in under an hour behaving in ways that didn’t match commercial drones or known aircraft.
These “objects” would appear suddenly, hover, change altitude and direction, and remain near the ships for extended periods characteristics hard to reconcile with conventional drones.
The Russell video didn’t exist in isolation. Around the same time, other ships in the group also recorded unexpected aerial contacts described in logs as unidentified “drones” or UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems). One naval vessel reported up to six such objects, and, intriguingly, even a civilian cruise ship in the area noted multiple unidentified contacts above the waves.
The Navy, Coast Guard, and even the FBI looked into the broader swarm,”although they never publicly confirmed the identity of the objects or their operators.
