Kevin Day
Radar operator on the USS Princeton during the Nimitz incident who convinced commanding officers to send aircraft personnel to investigate
Kevin Day, Operations Specialist Senior Chief, worked on the USS Princeton and was tasked with manning the radar. His main role was to keep the airspace safe and identify anything in the skies. Around November 10, 2004, Day noticed unusual objects appearing on radar near San Clemente Island. These occurrences continued for over a week. Day was able to convince a commanding officer to allow aircraft performing training exercises to investigate these odd radar happenings. The pilots sighting came to be known as the Nimitz encounter.
According to Day, his career suffered from voicing his concerns about what he had encountered. He was not taken seriously and made the butt of jokes by reporting the incident. Eventually, he says, "[I] walked away from the DOD out of frustration, I had tried in vain to get somebody, anybody, to listen to me." His job to the American people was to keep them safe. Day says that he continued to speak up due to his responsibility for "safety of flight because of objects that I knew to be real and inexplicable were in our training areas."
