In November 2004, Senior Chief Petty Officer Kevin Day sat at the SPY-1 radar console aboard the USS Princeton during training exercises with the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group off Southern California. He tracked fleets of anomalous aerial contacts that would become the most documented military UAP encounter in the public record: the “Tic Tac” incident. Commander David Fravor’s visual encounter with the object, and the FLIR1 infrared video that followed, were eventually released to the public and reshaped the entire conversation.
In 2019, Day, fellow Princeton crew member Gary Voorhis, and Jason Turner founded UAPx to do what the military had not: go back to where the encounters happened and apply calibrated scientific instruments. The organisation was incorporated as a Florida 501©(3) in August 2022 and holds a federal CAGE code (9ELW1), indicating registration for government contracting.
The first expedition took place in July 2021 over five days in the Catalina Channel, chosen for its proximity to the 2004 Nimitz operating area. The team deployed a sensor suite including FLIR cameras, observable-light and infrared cameras, an MIT Cosmic Watch cosmic ray detector, radio frequency spectrum analysers, gamma radiation sensors, infrasound sensors, seismographs, and a custom-built quantum random number generator designed by Christopher Altman, a NASA-trained commercial astronaut. The expedition collected over two terabytes of multi-sensor data, including approximately one hour of triggered video, over 600 hours of untriggered far-infrared recordings, and 55 hours of background radiation measurements.
Post-expedition analysis revealed a distinct atmospheric anomaly: a radiation interaction of approximately 43 MeV per centimetre (probability less than one in 100,000 per week) correlated with camera imagery, alongside significant turbulence and apparent metallic radar-reflecting objects on Doppler weather radar. The findings were published in a peer-reviewed paper listed on SUNY Research Connect with three Scopus citations. The FLIR data was shared with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies for independent review.
Dr Kevin Knuth, Associate Professor of Physics at SUNY Albany and former NASA scientist, serves as UAPx Vice President and principal scientific advisor. Knuth, who also sits on the advisory boards of the Society for UAP Studies and the Sol Foundation, secured local Doppler weather radar data for the analysis. Associate Professor Matthew Szydagis (SUNY Albany, physics) contributed cosmic ray detector data analysis. The expedition was documented in the film “A Tear in the Sky” (2022, Amazon Prime Video). UAPx was subsequently invited to Skinwalker Ranch for an investigation televised on the History Channel.
Related: Americans for Safe Aerospace | SUAPS / Limina | The Sol Foundation
