United States.USS Jackson — Transmedium Incident (Wiggins, 2023)

On February 15, 2023, at about 19:15 Pacific time, Senior Chief Operations Specialist Alexandro Wiggins (an operations specialist with about 23 years of Navy service) was on watch aboard USS Jackson (LCS-6), a littoral combat ship transiting Warning Area W-291 off the Southern California coast. According to his written statement, he was moving between the combat center (called ICC-1 on this class of ship, and located on the bridge) and the bridge wing to correlate the sensor picture with visual observation. Before Congress he specified that the contact first appeared on his radar and that he went out to the port bridge wing to verify it: at about seven or eight nautical miles he saw a light that, in his reading, came out of the water and rose slowly to about 3,000 or 4,000 feet before accelerating. On the display of the Star SAFIRE electro-optical/infrared system the object looked self-luminous and 'Tic Tac'-shaped, with no control surfaces and no exhaust plume. The coordinates published with the imagery (32.889 N, 117.934 W) place the ship about 60 km (~33 nmi) off the San Diego coast; Wiggins describes it as the same general area as the 2004 Nimitz incident.

Still according to his testimony, the first object joined three similar ones and the four held a formation geometry; Wiggins clarified that he did not see the other three with his own eyes, but when he went back to the radar and the SAFIRE. All four departed at once with an acceleration he described as near-instantaneous (a 'subjective' impression, his written statement says, and an estimate of '1, 2 Mach' he offered as a non-expert) with no perceived sonic boom and no conventional propulsion signatures on infrared; a few seconds later the tracks were gone from his radar. On radar detection, the executive summary of his written statement says the objects 'were detected on multiple sensors, including radar'; the sensors section adds that they 'were described as detected on multiple reconnaissance platforms including radar' and that he saw the picture stop displaying them. Combat-center personnel recorded the SAFIRE display with a handheld camera, capturing at least two of the objects; the released imagery is stabilized from that recording and shows time, coordinates and sensor readouts, and on the audio an operator mentions an altitude of '22 thousand feet'. Wiggins estimated the encounter, from radar detection to the end of the video, lasted five to seven minutes.

There was a report at the time, but no follow-up. Wiggins testified that he reported to the tactical action officer on watch, who was in the room, and then asked the SAFIRE operator to slew to that position; the tactical action officer, himself, the RCO and two other watchstanders were all watching the display together. Asked by members of Congress, he said that to his knowledge there was no investigation, no after-action report and no debrief by any agency of him or his shipmates, and that no one told them not to document or discuss it. Nor did he bring out the video: he saw it once it was already circulating, recognized his voice at the end of the recording and contacted Admiral Tim Gallaudet. The case became public on April 8, 2025, when journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp posted the imagery and audio excerpts on their WEAPONIZED site, and on April 15 Wiggins recounted it on their podcast. On September 9, 2025 he appeared, in his personal capacity, before the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, with a written statement that the Defense Department's Office of Prepublication and Security Review cleared for publication on September 4. Representative Eric Burlison hailed him as the first currently serving witness to appear at these hearings; Wiggins said the Navy supported him in testifying and that he faced no pressure.

At the same hearing he qualified the feature that gives the case its name. Asked whether the object had come out of the ocean, he said yes, but added that he could not be sure of that part: it was night, the object was far away and 'it is very hard to tell the difference between something on the horizon and something surfacing from the water'; his personal conviction is that it came from the water, but he acknowledged he has no visual evidence showing it. That is a concession compared with what he had told WEAPONIZED: 'I know the difference between a light on the horizon coming up and a light coming out of the water.' He also said he believed in UFOs before the encounter and had watched George Knapp his whole life, and answered 'It cannot, no' when asked whether any known technology could explain what he saw. He stated that the full-resolution, unedited video had been provided to Congress. On the Metabunk forum (a secondary source), several analysts used the time, position and angles shown on the display to search for aircraft in the camera's direction and proposed tentative candidates (among them a helicopter about 30 miles away and a much more distant airliner) without reaching a firm identification because of uncertainty over the camera bearing and the cropping of the released imagery. The same thread noted that 22,000 feet was the altitude of Southwest flight 1822, one of the nearby aircraft, at that moment, so the operator's callout may refer to that flight rather than to the object.

USS Jackson brings together three elements: an active-duty witness with radar training testifying before Congress with the Navy's approval, a handheld recording of the SAFIRE display, without official confirmation, and the claim of transmedium behavior. Its proximity to the 2004 Nimitz incident (same general operating area, same described shape) gives it pattern coherence across nearly two decades. And the institutional handling is telling in itself: the contact was reported to the officer on watch and seen by five people in the room, yet, per the witness, it produced no investigation, after-action report or debrief, illustrating how a system tuned to immediate threats can leave unrecorded what it does not perceive as hostile.

Caution is mandatory, and the primary record itself supplies the reasons. The most striking feature (the emergence from the water) is, in the witness's own words, a conviction he cannot demonstrate: it was night, the object was about seven miles away and he himself acknowledged that it is very hard to tell something rising over the horizon from something surfacing from the sea. The radar detection rests on his testimony (the written statement says the objects 'were detected on multiple sensors, including radar' and before Congress he said he saw them first on his radar) but no radar data have been released. The public video is a handheld camera recording of a display showing lights at an unknown distance; the altitude of about 22,000 feet mentioned by an operator and the nighttime hour leave the air-traffic hypothesis open, which independent analysts have explored with specific candidates without being able to close it. There is no official Department of Defense confirmation of the material, and none of the other four people in the room has spoken publicly. None of this disproves the testimony: the witness knows his radar and his display, and the Navy cleared him to testify. What remains is the testimony of an active-duty witness, not yet independently corroborated, which could be checked if the original recording or radar data are released.