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

On February 15, 2023, at approximately 19:15 PST, Senior Chief Operations Specialist Alexandro Wiggins — a senior enlisted radar-systems specialist with more than two decades of Navy service — was on watch in the Combat Information Center (CIC) of the USS Jackson (LCS-6), a littoral combat ship, while the vessel operated in Warning Area W-291 off the Southern California coast, the same oceanic region as the 2004 Nimitz incident. Wiggins detected irregular radar returns and, turning his attention to the horizon, observed a light that, by his account, emerged from the ocean surface and ascended into the atmosphere. The object had a self-luminous Tic Tac morphology — cylindrical, with no visible wings or control surfaces.

Within minutes, the initial object linked up with three others of identical morphology, forming a four-object formation. The USS Jackson's Star SAFIRE multi-spectral EO/IR system captured imagery of the objects; the frames Wiggins later presented show visible timestamp and position data. According to his testimony, all four objects departed the area in what he described as a 'simultaneous, near-instantaneous departure,' leaving no recordable thermal signature, no conventional propulsion trail, and no audible sonic boom. The total duration of the event was several minutes.

A central feature of the case is that the USS Jackson did not file a formal incident report. According to Wiggins, the objects maintained a safe distance and showed no clear signs of aggression, conditions that under current Navy regulations do not automatically trigger the threat-reporting protocol — a gap that illustrates how the institutional system can leave anomalous contacts unrecorded when they are not perceived as hostile. The case entered the public record on September 9, 2025, when Wiggins appeared at a House Oversight Committee hearing devoted to UAP transparency and whistleblower protection, submitting a written statement and the imagery. In doing so he became, per the hearing's coverage, the first active-duty U.S. Navy member to testify publicly before Congress about a UAP incident — an institutional first in eight decades of formal investigation of the phenomenon. His testimony was part of a series of military-whistleblower appearances before Congress in 2023-2025.

The USS Jackson combines three rarely co-present elements: reported transmedium behavior (ocean emergence associated with radar returns), multiple onboard sensor confirmation (radar + timestamped EO/IR), and active-duty congressional testimony — an institutional first without precedent in eight decades of formal UAP investigation. The geographic and morphological proximity to the 2004 Nimitz incident (same oceanic region, same Tic Tac morphology, same naval theater) establishes a pattern correlation across nearly two decades. The absence of an initial formal report illustrates the structural friction between observed behavior and existing reporting protocols: a system tuned to filter immediate threats, not to detect persistent anomalies.

Editorial caution is mandatory precisely because this is a recent case still under validation. Its probative value rests, so far, on a single named primary witness — albeit highly qualified and testifying before Congress — and on imagery whose chain of custody and independent analysis have not yet been published or evaluated by third parties outside the hearing process. Unlike Nimitz, there is (publicly) no multiple-operator corroboration, no released radar telemetry, and no official Department of Defense confirmation of the material's authenticity, as there was with the 2020 videos. The morphological similarity to Nimitz reinforces the pattern's coherence but also requires weighing a framing effect: a witness familiar with the Tic Tac case may describe what was observed in those terms. None of this disproves the testimony; it places it in its correct status — a serious, institutionally significant, and not yet independently corroborated report, whose weight in the corpus should be revisited as external analyses of the Star SAFIRE imagery are published (or not).