During the summer of 2019, US Navy ships near California’s Channel Islands began to report seeing unidentified aircraft in the night sky. When the sightings were recorded, as many as six drones were spotted flying above for prolonged periods.
Last year, documentary filmmaker Dave Beaty shared details about the events focused on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Kidd. On top of the initial information shared, we now have more details on the events thanks to a Freedom of Information request from The Drive.
The FOI requests confirm details already shared on the events, and give us insight into new events and deck logs from the ships involved to see what staff were doing and how they responded. The investigation also used hundreds of gigabytes of ship location data to figure out where each ship was at the time of the sightings and any other navy or civilian ships nearby.
The Drive was able to get the USS Kidd’s starting location and found four other ships nearby: the…
