Safe Aerospace Podcast

A red Corvette alone on a dark English road. Strange lights closing fast in the rearview mirror, then stopping dead. A silent, color-shifting craft hovering just above a golf course.
Dan Isbell spent his career at the leading edge of American airpower. He went straight into the left seat of the F-111, the first variable-sweep-wing fighter, flew nuclear alert for NATO at the height of the Cold War, graduated first in his Air Force Test Pilot School class, and eventually flew more than 70 different types of aircraft. He later helped shape the F-22 program and pioneered the fiber-laser work behind today's directed-energy weapons. On the night of December 26, 1980, driving home from alert duty at RAF Upper Heyford, he saw something he could not explain, and told no one for more than 40 years.
In part one of a two-part conversation, I sit down with Dan to trace that career from a poor kid who had never set foot on an airport to a test pilot who talked his way into Georgia Tech and never looked back. We discuss the F-111 and the jets that followed, the near-fatal moments he survived, the lung injury he still carries from an F-16 ground fire, and then the encounter itself: a roughly 50-to-60-foot triangular craft ringed with shifting, plasma-like color, completely silent, that descended toward him as he walked closer before he thought better of it and drove away.
Dan does not claim to know what he saw. He says he worked through every prosaic explanation he could, from a helicopter to a Soviet or NATO aircraft to a reverse-engineered platform of our own, and none of them fit. His sighting also falls within hours of the late-December nights now known as the Rendlesham Forest incident. He kept all of it to himself for decades, convinced that reporting it could end his flying career. Whether the object was an unacknowledged craft, an atmospheric phenomenon, or something genuinely outside our physics, his account raises the question this show keeps returning to: how many credible aviators have stayed silent, and what do we lose as a nation when the people best equipped to observe our skies are the ones with the most to lose by speaking?
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What are pilots reporting, and how do we turn those accounts into evidence we can study?
I sit down with Jonathan Miller, known as JMill, to discuss his work on sensemaking and MIT's Confronting Unknowns program. We explore how researchers can study ambiguous data, separate signal from noise, and stay open to new information without jumping to conclusions.
Then we turn the tables. JMill asks me about the encounters that led me to speak publicly, my 2023 congressional testimony, and the work underway at Americans for Safe Aerospace. We discuss pilot reporting, witness privacy, the development of a structured research database, and a longer-term vision for connecting witness accounts with sensor data.
We close with accounts reported to ASA, including luminous spheres, objects described near aircraft, and black triangles. I discuss what witnesses have described, how satellite effects can complicate observations, and why credible testimony still needs careful investigation. These are reported experiences and open questions, not established explanations of what the objects are.

Learn more, report an encounter, become a member, and support our work at https://www.safeaerospace.org/
Learn more about JMill's sense making work at: https://www.sensemaking.wtf
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Chapters
00:00 Opening: pilot reports and unanswered questions
01:05 Introducing Jonathan Miller (JMill)
04:27 MIT's Confronting Unknowns and sensemaking
08:21 Finding signal in ambiguous data
11:57 Discussing government UAP releases
18:39 Turning the tables: JMill interviews Ryan
20:06 Navy encounters and the road to Congress
24:46 Pilot reporting protections and state policy
29:47 What ASA's reports can tell us
32:15 Building a structured research database
34:37 Oshkosh plans and membership support
39:40 Sharing witness accounts through the podcast
42:36 Protecting witness privacy
43:57 How ASA's mission has evolved
46:41 A vision for connected sensor networks
51:30 Confirmation bias and independent analysis
58:56 Patterns in the reports: spheres and lights
01:00:44 Satellite effects and ambiguous observations
01:04:08 A close-range account from Marines
01:05:57 Black triangles and reported near-misses
01:09:24 Why reporting matters and how to help

A crashed spaceship. A career left in doubt. And six days later, a backyard full of light he couldn't explain.
Brian Binnie was the second person to fly a private spacecraft to the edge of space — a Navy veteran with 33 combat missions, advanced degrees from Brown and Princeton, and the test pilot who flew the final flight of SpaceShipOne. Six days after a hard landing damaged its landing gear and left him wondering whether he would ever fly it again, Binnie described watching roughly a dozen glowing, translucent spheres move through his backyard in Rosamond, California, at four in the morning. He kept the account within a small circle for years. He passed away in 2022.
I sit down with filmmaker Kevin Curran, who documented Binnie's story in Beyond Blue Sky: The Untold Story of the First Private Astronauts, and aerospace engineer Matt Stinemetze, who led the SpaceShipOne program and shared an office with Binnie for years. We trace Binnie's path from Gulf War Hornet cockpits to the high-stakes, low-budget test-flight culture at Scaled Composites, the crash that nearly ended his career, and the encounter he described six days later — a dozen fixed-shape spheres, some patrolling his fence line like sentries, two of which he said drifted through his bedroom window and passed into him before the whole scene dissolved back into darkness.
Binnie looked for every prosaic explanation and never claimed to know what he saw; those closest to him describe it not as a fright but as something that gave him peace and, in his telling, the resolve to climb back into the cockpit. Whether it was a genuine anomaly, an artifact of a sleep-deprived mind under enormous stress, or something we don't yet have the science to describe, the conversation returns to a question this show keeps running into: what do we lose when we dismiss a credible, sober observer simply because their account doesn't fit the paradigm — and who pays for that silence?
Watch Kevin Curran's documentary, Beyond Blue Sky: The Untold Story of the First Private Astronauts, on Apple TV: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/beyond-blue-sky/umc.cmc.3scqjpza3p8lkaz5tr55ksmu9
Learn more, become a member, and support our work at: https://www.safeaerospace.org
Please like, subscribe, and share this episode to help us continue producing independent aviation-safety research and conversations.

Three passes. A persistent radar contact. A brief glimpse of something silvery off the wing.
Former Navy F-18 pilot Austin Hulbert and his weapons systems officer called it a balloon and moved on. Years later, Austin started building stratospheric balloons for the military. That explanation no longer made sense to him.
I sit down with Austin, one of my instructors during Navy flight training, to revisit his encounter off the coast of Virginia Beach and what changed his mind. We discuss what he remembers seeing, what the radar was tracking, and why neither crew member thought much of it at the time.
Austin also takes us inside his career in naval aviation and special operations, the return of balloons to modern warfare, and the challenge of detecting objects our air defenses weren’t built to find. Throughout the conversation, we return to a question familiar to many military aviators: What gets missed when pilots dismiss something they can’t explain?
Learn more, become a member, and support our work at: safeaerospace.org
Please like, subscribe, and share this episode to help us continue producing independent aviation-safety research and conversations.

What did a defense network engineer see while monitoring U.S. military drone feeds over the waters of East Asia?
I sit down with former Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) contractor Kevin Campbell, who supported satellite communications and monitored MQ-9 feeds from Hill Air Force Base. Kevin says he encountered several clips of unidentified objects in the East China Sea and Yellow Sea region—including one event he watched live. He describes a roughly spherical object moving just above the water, an elongated rust-colored form briefly visible in electro-optical imagery, and another luminous object that changed direction before it was lost from view.
Our conversation examines how unusual footage was discovered and saved, the increased MQ-9 coverage Kevin says he observed after the first incident, and the lack of a clear reporting process inside his workplace. Kevin also discusses contacting Americans for Safe Aerospace, speaking with the FBI, his concerns about AARO’s early reporting pathway, and congressional interest in footage he believes may include one of the events he reported.
Kevin does not claim to know what the objects were. He argues that the underlying footage should be preserved, analyzed, and, when possible, released so the public and policymakers can better assess what military sensors are recording.
His account raises a broader aviation-safety and national-security question: How should agencies collect, retain, and share UAP data when important observations are scattered across systems and organizations?
Learn more, become a member, and support our work at: safeaerospace.org
Please like, subscribe, and share this episode to help us continue producing independent aviation-safety research and conversations.