Off San Diego, July 2019: the Ships' Logs

What the logs record

USS Rafael Peralta’s CIC log opens each day with “USS RAFAEL PERALTA IS CURRENTLY UNDERWAY IN THE SOCAL OPAREA”. On 15 July (p. 12):

• 20:40 “AWAY SNOOPY TEAM STAR BRIDGE WING”;
• 20:57 “DRONE 1 SPOTTED BEARING 019°T ALTITUDE APPROX”, with the figure lost at the edge of the page, and then “BRIDGE VISUALLY SITED [sic] AN EXCESS OF 4 DRONES”;
• 20:58 “DRONE 2 BEARING 044°T” and “DRONE 3 BEARING 090°T”;
• 21:03 “2 DRONES BEARING 253°T MOVING NORTHEAST”, 21:07 “1 DRONE BEARING 249°T”, 21:10 “DRONE 4 BEARING 353°T”.

On 16 July (p. 14): 01:33 “BRIDGE HOLDS 6 DRONES OFF OF STBD BOW” and 01:36 “GUNS VISUALLY HOLDS A UAV BEARING 236°T ON TIS” (our reading). On the evening of 14 July the log has “AWAY THE SNOOPIE TEAM STBD BRIDGE WING” at 22:10; the entry at 23:00 is blacked out on p. 5, and p. 6, a second scan of the same sheet cut off on the left, leaves the end of that line legible: “…FLIGHT DECK DRONE.” (our reading).

USS Paul Hamilton’s brief of 17 July, “Interaction with UAS”, charts the ship’s track and the positions of the drones with a scale bar of 5 nautical miles, marks “Video/Photos capture point(s)”, and shows a small photograph captioned “(U) [UAS] by PHM” with three dark points on a grey sky (our viewing). Its timeline is blacked out.

The Navy’s incident database has an entry on the same ship, dated 29 July 2019 and placed in the “San Diego OPAREA”: “PHM observed four UASs with a CPA approximately 200 yds off the bow, port, and starboard beams. The UASs had an on station time of approximately 2 hours and 20 minutes.” One “hovered approximately 200 yds above PHM”, two shone “what appeared to be a searchlight or photographic device” on the bow and bridge. “Point of origin of all UASs is unknown. UASs were observed visually, with optical sighting system, and night vision goggles. Three UASs were identified visually as quadcopters.” The entry gives local times from 02:40 to 05:30. The Navy’s public-affairs card of July 2020 spells the abbreviation out: “When an unmanned aerial system (UAS) is NOT immediately identifiable, we refer to it as UAP.”

What the documents do not say

Who flew the drones and from where: “Point of origin of all UASs is unknown.” No recording or photograph of them can be opened beyond the small one in the brief. The Navy’s public-affairs card of July 2020 explains why: “Imagery (including stills/videos obtained by SNOOPIE Teams) of any UAP observation is considered classified”. Rafael Peralta’s log sends its “SNOOPIE” or “SNOOPY” team to the bridge wing at 22:10 on 14 July and at 20:40 on 15 July, before the entries about drones. None of these documents names USS Omaha, under whose name this base held a case until October 2026 (see the withdrawn entry).

Recordings of the same year and ocean

Release 05 of the Department of War, on 7 August 2026, has five recordings titled “Unresolved UAP Report, Pacific Ocean, 2019”: DOW-UAP-PR123, DOW-UAP-PR124, DOW-UAP-PR125, DOW-UAP-PR126 and DOW-UAP-PR127. By their descriptions the Navy’s UAP Task Force passed them to AARO in 2022, the first three are films of an infrared sensor display taken with a hand-held device, the last two films taken by a service member in low light, all five “captured contemporaneously”, and “This media was digitally altered before being reported to AARO”. The descriptions name no ship, no place and no date beyond 2019. Nothing ties these recordings to the ships in this case.

Why this scores where it does

Witnesses: 4. Watchstanders of USS Rafael Peralta on the bridge and at the guns, in the ship’s own CIC log, and lookouts of USS Paul Hamilton: by the incident database, the drones “were observed visually, with optical sighting system, and night vision goggles”. Not 5: no one is named, and the database entry is a summary.

Radar: 0. None of the documents in the case records a radar track of the drones.

Optics: 1. One small photograph in Paul Hamilton’s brief, captioned “(U) [UAS] by PHM”. Not higher: the “Video/Photos capture point(s)” the brief marks cannot be opened, and the Navy’s public-affairs card of July 2020 says that such imagery “is considered classified”.

Physical trace: 0. None.

Multi-channel: 2. The records of two ships on different nights, all of them visual apart from the one photograph.

Documentation: 3. A handwritten log with times to the minute, a dated brief and a database entry. Not higher: the brief’s timeline is blacked out, and we have not read the handwritten logs of other ships in the Navy’s reading room.

Anomaly: 1. The documents themselves call the objects drones, and three of the four around Paul Hamilton were “identified visually as quadcopters”; what they leave open is who flew them: “Point of origin of all UASs is unknown.” (incident database, PDF p. 38)

Data today: 2. The logs, the brief and the database entry are public; the photographs and videos marked on the brief are not, nor are the blacked-out entries of USS Russell’s log.

The overall is 1.5: class D, testimony only.

What would settle it

The handwritten logs of other ships in the Navy’s reading room, which we have not read, filed as “2019-07 SPRUANCE”, “2019- 07 JOHN FINN”, “2019-07 Ralph Johnson”, “2019 - 07 AMERICA”, “USS COMSTOCK_29-31_July_2019” and “SPRUANCE CIC Logs”. The entries of USS Russell’s deck log from 21:15 to 22:00 on 15 July, blacked out under “(b)(3) 10 U.S.C. § 130”; that evening the log puts the ship at 32°53.2′ N, 119°23.0′ W at 20:00. The photographs and videos marked on Paul Hamilton’s chart and the timeline beside it. The positions and times of each sighting, and any record of who launched the drones.