Two days after Christmas in 1950 and six months after the beginning of the Korean War, U.S. President Harry Truman proclaimed a national emergency. The first Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) was created to cover the U.S. and Canada, specifically against enemy aircraft. It is uncertain exactly when W-291 was first defined, as there are no historical documents addressing this, but the warning area was specified at least by the early 1980s. W-291 falls within the U.S. Navy’s Southern Range Complex (SOCAL) and serves the largest concentration of naval forces in the world, meeting their mission requirements in every area from research and development to training and evaluation, including live fire.
Antisubmarine warfare tactics are practiced for U.S. and allied submariners as well as boarding procedures involving the interdiction of suspicious vessels on the high seas.
The SOCAL operational areas parallel the coast for about 288 nm (533 km).
They include Warning Area W-291 and portions of W-289 and W-290.
The Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility San Diego (FACSFAC SD) controls and manages W-291 in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Code of Federal Regulations defines a warning area as
. . . airspace of defined dimensions, extending from 3 nautical miles outward from the coast of the United States that contains activity that may be hazardous to nonparticipating aircraft. The purpose of such warning areas is to warn nonparticipating pilots of the potential danger. A warning area may be located over domestic or international waters or both. (14 CFR section 1.1, General Definitions).
Warning Area 291 (W-291)
Warning Area 291 (W-291) encompasses 113,000 square nautical miles located off the Southern California coastline, extending from the ocean surface to 80,000 ft above mean sea level (MSL). W-291 supports aviation training, research, development, test, and evaluation conducted by all aircraft in the Navy and Marine Corps inventories. Ordnance use is once again permitted, and in those cases, as in others, civilian use of W-291 may be restricted for safety reasons.
The ocean floor within Area 291 is an abyssal plain. An abyssal plain, to an oceanographer, is a vast, flat, and therefore featureless area. It is devoid of seamounts and canyons, though there may very well be the skeletons of whales and the keels and bulkheads of sunken wrecks. Abyssal plains are typically found at depths of 6,500 feet or more, and this particular plain (called the Basin and Range Province abyssal plain) has a maximum depth of approximately 3,000 meters (10,000 feet). It is this great depth, so close to land and land with a major naval base at that, that makes W-291 so important for training not only planes but also surface ships and submarines as well.
November 2004
In spite of the many military training exercises, W-291 (map below) does not appear to have more than the expected number of incidents involving collisions, explosions, sinkings, or suspected Russian or Chinese submarines and enemy surface vessels. However, it does have several important incidents involving unidentified anomalous phenomena over the past two decades or so. The first incident I’ll mention is the one reported by Commander David Fravor, USN (Ret.). The material below is taken from his sworn statement to Congress concerning an incident he witnessed on November 14, 2004 while in support of the carrier Nimitz and the USS Princeton, a guided missile cruiser. But first, something that his testimony to Congress did not include:
An important role of the USS Princeton is to act as air defense protection for the strike group. The Princeton was equipped with the SPY-1 radar system which provided situational awareness of the surrounding airspace. The main incident occurred on 14 November 2004, but several days earlier, radar operators on the USS Princeton were detecting UAPs appearing on radar at about 80,000+ feet altitude to the north of CSG11 in the vicinity of Santa Catalina and San Clemente Islands. Senior Chief Kevin Day informed us that the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) radar systems had detected the UAPs in low Earth orbit before they dropped down to 80,000 feet. The objects would arrive in groups of 10 to 20 and subsequently drop down to 28,000 feet with a several hundred foot variation, and track south at a speed of about 100 knots. Periodically, the UAPs would drop from 28,000 feet to sea level (estimated to be 50 feet), or under the surface, in 0.78 s. Without detailed radar data, it is not possible to know the acceleration of the UAPs as a function of time as they descended to the sea surface. However, one can estimate a lower bound on the acceleration, by assuming that the UAPs accelerated at a constant rate halfway and then decelerated at the same rate for the remaining distance.
Now to Commander Fravor’s testimony:
I was a commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41, the world-famous Black Aces. We were tasked to Carrier Airwing 11 stationed on board the USS Nimitz and had begun a 2-month workup cycle off the coast of California. On this day we were scheduled for a 2 V 2 air to air training with the USS Princeton as our control. When we launched off, Nimitz, my wingman was joining up. We were told that the training was going to be suspended and we are going to proceed with real-world tasking.
Commander Fravor’s group was asked by an officer on the USS Princeton who re-tasked them if they had live weapons. Thet replied they did not. It was about 2:00 p.m.
As we proceeded to the west, the air controller was counting down the range to an object that we were going to, and we were unaware of what we were going to see when we arrived. There the controller told us that these objects [ed: at least a hundred] had been observed for over 2 weeks coming down from over 80,000 feet, rapidly descending to 20,000 feet, hanging out
for hours and then going straight back up.
For those that do not realize, above 80,000 feet is space.
We arrived at the location at approximately 20,000 feet and the controller called merge plot, which means that our radar blip was now in the same resolution cell as the contact. As we looked around, we noticed that we saw some whitewater off our right side. It is important to note that the weather on this day was as close to perfect as you could ask for off the coast of San Diego. Clear skies, light winds, calm seas, no whitecaps from waves. So, the whitewater stood out in a large blue ocean.
History.com adds to this rendezvous:
When they first arrived on the scene, the pilots didn’t see any flying objects. But they did observe what the lead pilot, Commander David Fravor, later referred to as a “disturbance” in the ocean. The water was churning, with white waves breaking over what looked like a large object just under the surface. Then they noticed one of the objects flying about 50 feet above the water. Fravor, the commander of the elite Black Aces squadron who was a Top Gun program graduate with more than 16 years of flying experience, described it as about 40 feet long, shaped like a Tic Tac candy and with no obvious means of propulsion: "It's white. It has no wings. It has no rotors. I go, 'Holy shit, what is that?'
Commander Fravor continued his congressional testimony:
All four of us, because we were an F–18F so we had pilots and WSO in the backseat, looked down and saw a white Tic Tac object with a longitudinal axis pointing north south and moving very abruptly over the water like a ping pong ball. There were no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings. As we started clockwise toward the object my WSO and I decided to go down and take a closer look with the other aircraft staying in high cover to observe both us and the Tic Tac. We proceeded around the circle about 90 degrees from the start of our descent and the object suddenly shifted its longitudinal axis, aligned it with my aircraft, and began to climb. We continued down another 270 degrees, nose low, where the Tic Tac would have been.
Our altitude at this point was about 15,000 feet and a Tic Tac was about 12,000. As we pulled nose onto the object within about a half mile of it, it rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared. Our wingman, roughly 8,000 feet above us, lost contact also.
We immediately turned back to see where the whitewater was at, and it was gone also. So, as we started to turn back toward the east, the controller came up and said, ‘‘sir, you are not going to believe this, but that thing is at your CAP point roughly 60 miles away in less than a minute.’’ You can calculate the speed.
We returned to Nimitz. We were taking off our gear. We were talking to one of my crews, who was getting ready to launch. We mentioned it to him, and they went out and luckily got the video that you see, that 90-second video.
Commander Fravor emphasized to the committee that the encounter involved “far superior technology” to what is present available. He said:
If you had one, you captured one, you reverse engineered it, you got it to work, you are talking something that can go into space, go someplace, drop down in a matter of seconds, do whatever it wants, and leave and there is nothing we can do about it. Nothing. . . We have nothing that can stop in midair and go the other direction nor do we have anything that can, like in our situation, come down from space, hang out for 3 hours and go back up.
So, we got within a half mile of the Tic Tac, which people say that is pretty far, but in airplanes that is actually relatively close. It was perfectly white, smooth, no windows, although when we did take the original FLIR video that is out there when you put it on a big screen it actually had two little objects that came out of the bottom of it. But other than that, no windows, no seams, no nothing.
Fravor believes that the objects shut down the electronic sensors on his interceptor group.
The Princeton tracked it. The Nimitz tracked it. The E2 tracked it. We never saw it on our radars. Our fire control radars never picked it up.
The other airplane that took the video did get it on a radar. As soon as it tried to lock it, it jammed the radar, spit the lock and he rapidly switched over to the targeting pod, which you can do in the F–18.
Commander Fravor believes that there was a second object below the surface of the water that was not visually observable, but whose presence the pilots could surmise was there based on the churning of the ocean’s surface, which created significant whitewater turbulence. Fravor believed this second object was in communication with the aerial object. However, if there was a submerged object, it never emerged.
July 2019
July 2019 was hot off the coast of San Diego, CA, and in more ways than one. The incidents involving the USS Omaha and eight other naval vessels, which were swarmed by a hundred or more UAPs, very likely took place in W-291, though it was not officially designated as occurring in that specific warning area. These objects were described as six-foot, self-illuminating spheres. Also involved was the USS Kidd, a Burke-class destroyer equipped with the AEGIS combat system, as well as the U.S. Navy destroyers USS Rafael Peralta, USS Russell, USS John Finn, and USS Paul Hamilton.
Around 10:00 p.m. on July 14th, two UAPs were sighted by the USS Kidd. The ship almost immediately
. . . entered into a condition of restricted communications designed to enhance operational security and enhance survivability. This is noted throughout many of the logs as “River City 1.” During the events, the ships often engaged “emissions control,” or EMCON, protocols designed to minimize their electronic emissions profile.
Less than 10 minutes after the sighting, the USS Kidd advised the USS Rafael Peralta of the situation. The USS Rafael Peralta logs show . . . that reports of additional sightings were coming in from the USS John Finn
UAP cat and mouse involvement with the naval vessels (especially the USS Rafael Peralta) lasted for about ninety-minutes.
On the night of July 15th, 2019 the UAP’s returned. There were civilian ships in the area as well, and the Carnival Imagination, a cruise ship notified the USS Rafael Peralta that there were five or six UAPs in their area and they had no idea what they might be.
February 2023
We heard testimony to Congress earlier this week (September 9, 2025) of yet another, more recent (February 15, 2023) encounter in W-291. On that occasion . . .
A self-luminous, “Tic-Tac”-shaped object was observed emerging from the ocean (transmedium), then linking up with three similar objects. All four departed simultaneously in a highly synchronized, near-instantaneous manner. No sonic boom or conventional propulsion signatures were observed. Sensors/Evidence: Objects were detected on multiple sensors, including radar, and video was recorded inside CIC using a Star SAFIRE multi-spectral EO/IR system; location and time stamps are visible in the source video frames published by journalists.
The term “transmedium” is a relatively recent term used to indicate an object that can travel as fluently under the water as well as through the air, something that we are still developing. These prosaic weapons systems, however, are confined to torpedoes or ballistic missiles and cannot nearly approach the speeds that UAPs can in either medium.
Other Warning Areas
There are all sorts of warning areas or otherwise restrictive airspace across the U.S. They include not only military facilities but also nuclear facilities and areas with special security concerns, such as Washington, D.C., or perhaps where and when the next Super Bowl is being held. One such favorite place for UAPs to hang out is W-72 off the coast of Virginia.
Writing in an article in Politico, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves—who was himself involved in the incident that follows—testified in July 2023 to Congressman Tim Burchett’s subcommittee:
On a clear, sunny day in April 2014, two F/A-18s took off for an air combat training mission off the coast of Virginia. The jets, part of my Navy fighter squadron, climbed to an altitude of 12,000 and steered towards Warning Area W-72, an exclusive block of airspace ten miles east of Virginia Beach. All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude — almost like a doorway into a massive room where military jets can operate without running into other aircraft. Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold, one of the pilots saw a
dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere — motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets, only 100 feet apart, zipped past the object on either side. The pilots had come so dangerously close to something they couldn’t identify that they terminated the training mission immediately and returned to base. ‘I almost hit one of those damn things’ the flight leader, still shaken by the incident, told us shortly after in the pilots’ ready room. We all knew exactly what he meant. Those ‘damn things’ had been plaguing us for the previous eight months.
Furthermore, the California Vandenberg Range Complex and the Barry M. Goldwater Range (BMGR) in Arizona have been frequented by UAPs whenever special missile tests or alerts were conducted. These areas and incidents are worthy of posts and articles of their own. If this seems to be a pattern, why not have scientists out in force for the next exercise?
The Director of National Intelligence weighs in
Despite what can only be described as coy behavior by the Department of Defense, as they and NASA seem intent on debunking the presence of UAPs, the Director of National Intelligence takes a more sober approach to the problem. In their Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena of June 25, 2021, they report:
Although there was wide variability in the reports and the dataset is currently too limited to allow for detailed trend or pattern analysis, there was some clustering of UAP observations regarding shape, size, and, particularly, propulsion. UAP sightings also tended to cluster around U.S. training and testing grounds, but we assess that this may result from a collection bias due to focused attention, greater numbers of latest-generation sensors operating in those areas, unit expectations, and guidance to report anomalies.
A handful of UAP appear to demonstrate advanced technology as seen in 18 incidents described in 21 reports, where observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics. Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speeds without discernible means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings. The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management. Additional rigorous analysis is necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data. We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated.
Eighteen objects in seventeen years that defy gravity or the laws of physics as we understand them. Or, eighteen objects that can climb from sea level to fifteen miles above sea level in two or three seconds flat while tracked by radar. Or, eighteen objects that can change course by 180 degrees without turning.
Eighteen objects does not seem like a lot, but suppose the U.S. Navy had eighteen surface ships or submarines disappear in the same time frame? Or eighteen people who died of some hitherto unknown and not understood disease?
This is an issue that demands the attention of the public as well as accountability to our elected representatives in Washington.
You might also like
Portals is a post that discusses the possibility of portals or doorways to other dimensions or realities that exist or can be accessed here on Earth under certain circumstances. Read about how these portals might appear and where they might be found.
Image credit: Adamnozil (Dreamstime).
Where do Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) come from? Hypothesizing Hyperspace weighs the possibility that they originate on Class III civilizations in distant corners of our galaxy and travel via wormholes or “folding space”.
Image credit: (Adobe).
