2023 USS Jackson UAP Encounter

On the evening of February 15, 2023, the littoral combat ship USS Jackson (LCS-6) was in transit through W-291, a Navy warning area off the Southern California coast. According to Senior Chief Operations Specialist Alexandro C. Wiggins, an active-duty sailor with about 23 years of service, unusual sensor cues at around 7:15 p.m. drew watchstanders in the ship's Combat Information Center to the feed from its Star SAFIRE electro-optical and infrared camera. Wiggins says he moved between that room and the bridge wing, watched a light rise from the waterline and join three similar "Tic-Tac"-like objects, and then saw all four leave at the same moment with no sonic boom. He says the objects were detected on several sensors, including radar, and that their radar tracks dropped as soon as they left.

The account reached the public through journalists rather than the Navy. On April 8, 2025, filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and reporter George Knapp published thermal video and screenshots recorded in the Combat Information Center on the WEAPONIZED podcast's site, with time stamps and coordinates placing the ship in W-291, together with an anonymous crew member's description and excerpts of crew dialogue. The released imagery shows two of the four objects, and one line of dialogue mentions "22 thousand feet" without making clear what it refers to. Wiggins identified himself as the witness in an episode released a week later. In Knapp's report for NewsNation, former Defense Department analyst Marik von Rennenkampff said flight-tracking data showed no aircraft in the camera's line of sight, and David Fravor and Chad Underwood, aviators from the 2004 Nimitz encounter in the same general waters, said they were struck by the similarities.

On September 9, 2025, Wiggins testified at a House Oversight hearing titled "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection," held by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. DefenseScoop described him as the first active-duty Navy member to testify publicly before Congress about a UAP incident. His written statement was cleared for open publication by the Defense Department's Office of Prepublication and Security Review on September 4 and says he spoke in a personal capacity, not for the ship, the Navy or the department. In it he said the four objects departed in a "highly synchronized, near-instantaneous manner," that crew members recorded at least two of them and reported the event to the ship's tactical action officer, and that unidentified objects are reportedly encountered with some regularity in the operating areas off Southern California. He asked Congress for standardized sensors and training, witness protections and confidential reporting channels, telling the panel that sailors "need to know that reporting UAP encounters will not harm their careers."

Neither the Navy nor the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has published an assessment of the encounter, and the full SAFIRE recording and the radar data have not been released. When the video first surfaced, Knapp's NewsNation report said it was not clear why the sighting had not been reported up the chain of command or to AARO. The released material has also become a point of dispute. In May 2026 the skeptic Mick West called Wiggins a credible person giving an interesting account but wrote that "there is no available corroborating video of this event as described." Von Rennenkampff replied that a real video of the incident exists and that West had offered no explanation for it. The disagreement turns on the gap between what Wiggins says he saw, including an object rising from the sea and a four-object formation, and the two objects visible in the published clips.

Wiggins returned to the case in a WEAPONIZED episode released in September 2026 and recorded at the Contact in the Desert conference. There he said the Navy had supported his decision to testify, and he alleged that AARO had pressed him to repeat his account inside a secure compartmented facility. Retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet also discussed the Jackson account in an August 2026 interview with Jesse Michels about reported activity at sea, as one of several secondhand accounts he relayed.

The encounter stands out among modern Navy reports for the specificity of its record: a named, serving witness, a fixed date, ship and warning area, and infrared imagery published before he testified to Congress. What has not been published, including the complete sensor recordings and any official analysis, is what would show whether the ship's systems captured the formation and departure that he describes.