USS Princeton (CG-59) is a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser of the United States Navy (USN), armed with naval guns and anti-air, anti-surface, and anti-submarine missiles and carrying two Seahawk LAMPS III helicopters.12 It was the first Ticonderoga-class cruiser to carry the upgraded AN/SPY-1B radar system.3 In November 2004 the ship formed part of Carrier Strike Group 11 (CSG-11), alongside USS Nimitz (CVN-68), USS Chafee (DDG-90) and USS Higgins (DDG-76), and was completing Tailored Ships Training Availability (TSTA) in preparation for deployment to the Arabian Sea, from 2004-11-10 to 2004-11-16.45
During this period Princeton’s radar detected an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) operating in the vicinity of the strike group on several occasions.6 The AAV was observed to descend rapidly from approximately 18,000 metres to approximately 15 metres in a matter of seconds.7 On 2004-11-14, after again detecting the object, Princeton tasked a returning flight of two F/A-18Fs to investigate it, taking over control of the aircraft from the E-2C Hawkeye and vectoring them for an intercept that led to visual contact approximately 1.6 kilometres away.89 The only participants recorded in the detection and intercept were Princeton, Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron 117 (VAW-117), Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232 (VMFA-232) and Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41).10 A Senior Chief aboard the ship, with seventeen years’ experience as a Fire Control operator, assessed that the object exhibited “Ballistic Missile Characteristics” in its appearance, velocity and radar indications.11 The AN/SPY-1 radar was set to a mode for air intercept of conventional aircraft, never obtained an accurate track of the contacts, and repeatedly dropped them as clutter.12 The Tactical Air Officer aboard could not identify the contact and was perplexed by its speed and altitude.13 The object was detected by Princeton three separate times during the week, operating off the western coast of the United States and Mexico.14 The Air Control Officer of the E-2C Hawkeye had not seen the object on his own radar until Princeton directed the contact, and without the ship’s input the faint, low return would likely have been missed.1516 All the activity was reported up the chain of command to D. C. Curtis by the commanding officers of Princeton and VFA-41.17
Princeton, callsign “Poison,” directed David Fravor’s flight into the encounter that became the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter. The E-2C Hawkeye controller handed his flight to Princeton, which vectored them via bearing, range and altitude calls towards the contact, and asked what ordnance they carried; Fravor’s flight reported two captive training AIM-9M missiles and nothing else.1819 Fravor’s flight, designated Blue Air, was being controlled by Princeton, and as they launched from Nimitz and checked in, they were told the training exercise was suspended for real-world tasking and directed toward a contact west of their combat air patrol (CAP) point.2021 Describing the ship afterwards, Fravor said Princeton is a guided-missile cruiser, not an aircraft carrier, with a helicopter landing pad rather than a fixed-wing flight deck, and is equipped with an AN/SPY-1 phased array radar system with four panels that look in quadrants.2223 He said that on 2004-11-10 Princeton began detecting a few objects flying at approximately 8,500 metres altitude at approximately 190 kilometres per hour off the coast of California, and that the ship detected the objects intermittently for about a week before his encounter.2425 Fravor said Princeton gave his flight bearing, range and altitude calls indicating the contact at ranges of approximately 80, 64 and 48 kilometres, and that the object had been too far - approximately 97 kilometres - for the ship’s radar to detect something near the ocean surface.2627 After the intercept, Fravor denied a rumour that unidentified personnel had arrived by helicopter aboard Nimitz and Princeton to confiscate recorded data.28
Separate published accounts describe events in Princeton’s Combat Information Centre. During the encounter, crew there were reportedly tense, listening to Fravor’s and his wingman’s increasingly stressed radio communications while five radar operators tracked the event across the ship’s sensor systems.29 At the moment Fravor called that he was engaged, fourteen other unidentified targets on Princeton’s radar screen were tracked plummeting from above approximately 24,000 metres towards the ocean, and once Fravor and his wingman returned to Nimitz, the swarm shot back above that altitude in a fraction of a second.3031 Fravor and his wingman were directed by Princeton to a prearranged rendezvous approximately 100 kilometres away, known as the “cap point”.32 Kevin Day, Princeton’s Operations Specialist Senior Chief and responsible for coordinating the systems protecting the carrier group, had grown increasingly concerned by anomalous radar tracks in the days before 2004-11-14, and again saw a cluster of fourteen unidentified objects on his screen late that morning.3334 Day verified the tracks using the ship’s Cooperative Engagement Capability system, which merged radar data from every source into a single picture.35 Around 14:00 that day, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kurth, piloting an FA-18 Super Hornet, was directed by Princeton to the nearest unidentified object on the radar screen.36 One account states that it was Princeton, not Nimitz itself, that was providing air defence protection for the strike group using its then-new SPY-1 Aegis radar system, a passive electronically scanning array giving 360-degree coverage of the group.3738 The same account states that for nearly two weeks before the encounter, Princeton’s radar operators regularly logged over one hundred UAP around the vessels, performing manoeuvres the operators considered beyond any aircraft they had encountered, and that at the time Nimitz and Princeton were travelling close together while the rest of the strike group was occupied elsewhere.394041
Two further claims concern the aftermath. A former Petty Officer, Jason Turner, who was aboard Princeton in 2004, said he saw a fuller version of the FLIR1 video of the object on a console monitor in the ship’s Signal Exploitation Space.42 The morning after the encounter, Day went to Princeton’s communications room to obtain a copy of the previous day’s radio traffic for an after-action report, and found that the recordings had been erased from the ship’s optical disk even though their date and time stamps remained.43 Petty Officer Gary Voorhis was separately ordered to turn over data tapes from the ship’s Combat Engagement Centre, and said he had checked the radar system for false returns during the encounter, finding it recalibrated with no problems detected.4445 One account states that crewmen aboard Nimitz and Princeton shared the Tic Tac video over the government’s classified email system after the encounter.46