But I did see something very strange on radar in the Navy.

On my ship we had the output of our surface search radar displayed on two repeaters on our bridge. They were used for navigation, keeping on station while formation steaming, and for tracking surface contacts, both friendly and potentially hostile. The radar was tuned so only objects under 200' over the water would register, and it had a range of about 100 nautical miles. Our aerial radars were highly classified, and only the guys in Combat Information Center were cleared to use them.

One night about 20 miles offshore of N Vietnam, I spotted a contact flashing across the screen in just seconds. Fortunately, the Officer of the Deck was nearby, and I got his attention and he verified the sighting. We saw it was a hard, sharp echo (like metal, not a cloud or coastline or surf kicked up by a reef, and that it was traveling several thousand miles per hour--faster than any jet. It passed within a mile or two of the ship, headed straight out to sea, there was no sonic boom, and the lookouts did not report it. I don't think the guys in CIC picked it up on their air search gear because they did not make a report to the bridge.

It could have been anything, some kind of weather phenom, a meteor, mechanical malfunction, or radar counter-measures (either ours or theirs). What makes this story kind of spooky is that I was relating it to one of my shipmates in the reserve unit after I got back who had also been a QM watchstander on Yankee Station. I never finished the tale, he completed it for me! He had seen something very similar to it in those same waters: something invisible flying out of N Vietnam going faster than any airplane could go, hugging the waves, and not making a sound.