USS Russell "pyramids" and USS Omaha "splashdown sphere"

July 2019. The waters off Southern California. Navy ships training in the warning areas off San Diego began logging something they could not name. Drones, the logs called them. As many as six at a time. Flights of more than 90 minutes. Objects that kept pace with destroyers doing 16 knots. Two of those nights would later become famous, because of what the cameras caught.

Night. The destroyer USS Russell, Strike Group 9. The War Zone's FOIA documents place one object about 62 nautical miles southwest of San Nicolas Island, hovering at about 700 ft. The encounter lasted about an hour. The objects were "not distinguishable by the naked eye."

Through night-vision gear, they were. The clip runs about 18 to 20 seconds. Three faint orbs hang in the dark sky. Then the camera pans to a fourth. Triangular. Flickering. The ship's own deck log described drones "dropping in elevation and moving forward and backward and left and right."

July 15, 2019. Aboard USS Omaha, crew in the Combat Information Center were watching an infrared screen. According to filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, the event series ran about two hours, with a minimum of 14 targets, at least 6 ft in diameter. One was a sphere. It moved slowly toward the surface of the sea. A voice on the clip: "Whoa, it's getting close." Then: "Whoa, it splashed!"

At 11pm (PST), in Corbell's words, "one of the unknown targets" entered the water. "No wreckage found. None of the craft were recovered." A submarine search reportedly found nothing.

April 2021. Corbell and reporter George Knapp of Mystery Wire released the footage. Corbell said it had been shown at an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing on 1 May 2020. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough said: "I can confirm that the referenced photos and videos were taken by Navy personnel." The UAP Task Force, she added, had included the incidents in its ongoing examinations. In May the Pentagon confirmed the Omaha clip too. Late that month Corbell released a radar display video showing a swarm of 14 tracks.

Mick West of Metabunk argued the pyramids were bokeh: out-of-focus lights, turned triangular by the lens aperture. On 17 May 2022, at a House hearing, Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, said: "We're now reasonably confident that these triangles correlate to unmanned aerial systems in the area." The shape, he said, came from light passing through night-vision goggles and then being recorded by an SLR camera.

The sphere proved harder. West first suggested a balloon, then glare from a distant hot object going behind the horizon. He also said "the simplest explanation is that it's just a plane." Others answered that the object moves against the wind, that there is no range data, and that the leaked clips are screen captures with a six-minute gap. The UAP Task Force reportedly could not determine the nature or origin of the phenomena. No official resolution has been published.

FOIA records later tied parts of the wider swarm to surveillance from a commercial ship, and one night to a local fisherman's quadcopters. The War Zone noted that this conflicted with Adm. Michael Gilday's earlier statement that the Navy was "unaware of who was operating" the drones. The pyramids have an answer. The sphere that went into the sea off San Diego still does not.