Active-Duty Navy Senior Chief Alleges AARO Coercion After Testifying to Congress on Four Tic Tac UAPs

Senior Chief Alex Wiggins did not seek the spotlight. By his own account, he was doing his job aboard the USS Jackson off the coast of Southern California in February 2023 when a radar contact prompted him to step outside and look for himself. What he says he observed that day — an unidentified object ascending from the ocean and joining three similarly shaped craft before all four departed in coordinated formation — placed him at the center of one of the most significant UAP witness accounts to emerge from active U.S. military service in recent years. The objects, he described, were Tic Tac-shaped: the same descriptor that became synonymous with the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter and subsequently entered the formal lexicon of UAP investigation.

Wiggins eventually made the decision to speak publicly, appearing on the Weaponized podcast hosted by investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and veteran journalist George Knapp. In September 2025, he took the further and considerably more consequential step of testifying before Congress under oath, with the U.S. Navy not only permitting that testimony but actively supporting his participation — arranging travel and standing behind one of its own as he described what he and fellow sailors witnessed. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary instance of institutional transparency from a branch of the armed forces that has historically said very little about unidentified aerial phenomena.

But what Wiggins says happened in the aftermath of his congressional testimony raises questions that cut to the heart of the ongoing debate over UAP transparency and the treatment of military witnesses who come forward. According to Wiggins, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — AARO, the Pentagon office formally tasked with investigating UAP reports — subsequently pressed him to recount his account again, this time inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. Wiggins declined. What followed, he alleges, amounted to coercion: AARO contacted his chain of command and raised the prospect of escalating the matter directly to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in order to compel his participation.

The implications of that allegation deserve careful scrutiny. Wiggins had already testified publicly before the United States Congress. His account was on the record, under oath, in the most formal civilian oversight forum available to the American public. The question of why a government office ostensibly committed to resolving UAP encounters would need a military witness to repeat that same testimony inside a classified environment — one from which no public record would emerge — is not a question that answers itself. Critics of AARO have long argued that the office functions less as a transparent investigative body and more as a mechanism for containing and classifying information that witnesses and whistleblowers have sought to bring into the open. Wiggins’s account, if accurate, would represent one of the more concrete illustrations of that concern.

It is worth recalling the institutional context in which AARO operates. The office was established under the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act with a mandate to detect, identify, and attribute UAP and to assess whether they represent threats to national security. Congress simultaneously created legal protections for UAP whistleblowers, in part because legislators on both sides of the aisle had grown frustrated with what they described as stonewalling by the intelligence community. Former intelligence officer David Grusch testified in 2023 that the U.S. government had been running covert programs to retrieve and reverse-engineer non-human technology — testimony that AARO subsequently addressed in a report many observers found inadequate and dismissive of primary sources.

Against that backdrop, Wiggins’s experience fits a pattern that researchers and advocates have documented with increasing specificity: witnesses who come forward through approved channels subsequently encounter pressure that appears designed to move their accounts out of the public record and into classified spaces where congressional oversight becomes functionally impossible. Whether that pressure constitutes a coherent institutional policy or reflects the actions of individuals within the bureaucracy is a distinction that matters enormously — and one that Congress has so far been unable to definitively resolve.

Wiggins has stated that his Navy leadership responded supportively when AARO engaged his chain of command, a detail that further complicates the picture. The Navy, as an institution, appears to have taken a different posture toward UAP transparency than some other elements of the national security apparatus — a posture visible not only in Wiggins’s case but in the service’s 2019 acknowledgment that the Nimitz and Roosevelt carrier group videos depicted genuinely unidentified objects. Whether that posture reflects genuine commitment to transparency or a more calibrated form of managed disclosure is a question the public record does not yet answer.

What the record does show is that active-duty military personnel are now testifying before Congress, on the record, about encounters that involve objects with performance characteristics that cannot be explained by known aeronautical science — objects that, in Wiggins’s account, transitioned from the ocean to coordinated aerial formation and departed at speeds that outpaced any sensor tracking them. Navy sensors captured part of the encounter. That data exists somewhere in the government’s custody. The American public, whose tax dollars fund both the Navy and AARO, has not seen it.

Corbell and Knapp presented their conversation with Wiggins — recorded live at the Contact in the Desert conference — as previously unreleased material, giving it the character of a contemporaneous account rather than a reconstructed one. Both journalists have a track record of obtaining and publishing authenticated government UAP materials, including the videos that prompted the Navy’s 2019 acknowledgments. Their involvement lends the account a level of sourcing discipline that distinguishes it from the broader ecosystem of UAP commentary.

Senior Chief Wiggins has stated publicly that he stands behind what he witnessed aboard the USS Jackson. He testified to it before Congress. He has described, in considerable detail, the pressure he says followed. The sensors were running. The sailors were there. And somewhere in the federal bureaucracy, the data from that February 2023 encounter sits in a file that the public has not been permitted to examine.