Navy F/A-18 pilot says four-jet training mission was cancelled over “interlopers”

What was said

"Pretty quickly the flight lead's like, "We got to return to base. We're unable to complete this with the interlopers." So, we had to cancel that day's flight, which is a pretty costly evolution uh to get four jets up in that sky to do this. So, we rejoin, we go back, we land, and I remember in the debrief expecting that we're going to talk about this thing that had just happened, and nobody said anything."

A US Navy Super Hornet pilot identified only as “Lieutenant Gill” tells the Shawn Ryan Show that a four-aircraft training sortie in the Whiskey 72 training area off Virginia Beach was aborted after his flight lead reported “interlopers”. Gill says he tracked a “little spherical object” using radar and the jet’s forward-looking infrared (FLIR), and that the flight returned to base without the object being discussed in the post-flight debrief. He says he took the silence as a sign there may be a classified programme involved, though he offers no evidence beyond his own experience.