Too real to ignore

I was 20 years old when the US Navy videos of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) were brought to public attention by The New York Times in December of 2017. I can't remember exactly where I read about it, as many other news outlets followed suit, but I didn't think much of the three videos at the time. I'm not a military pilot, so I didn't really know what I was looking at. I took a mild interest in the story, but soon forgot about it.

A couple of years later, I heard about the interview with Commander David Fravor on The Joe Rogan Experience. I was familiar with the podcast and had since become more interested in the possibility of intelligent life on other planets, so I decided to give it a listen. Hearing Fravor explain what he'd encountered made me appreciate the considerable weight of this particular UAP sighting.

A still image from one of the three UAP videos declassified by the US Navy Credit: US Navy

Commander David Fravor served 24 years in the military, during 18 of which he flew aircraft for the US Navy. He garnered every qualification you could get, “even the stuff they're not doing anymore”. With a background as impressive as this, it's no wonder why he was trusted to fly A-6s, Hornets, and Super Hornets. As Joe Rogan put it: “They don't give those to morons.” Fravor’s credibility alone would be enough to get people listening, but his testimony was backed up by that of others as well as hard video evidence - which sets this UAP sighting apart from most others.

On 14th November 2004, Commander David Fravor - together with his Weapons System Operator, more commonly referred to as the “back seater” or “wizzo” - of the Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 41 “Black Aces”, took off from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier to do an air-defence training exercise, approximately 60 miles off the coast between San Diego, California and Ensenada, Mexico. Fravor and his back seater were in one F/A-18 Super Hornet, with Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight as the back seater in a second Super Hornet. Marines from the “Red Devils” were set to play the bad guys. USS Princeton was to coordinate the exercise. This routine training drill was about to take an unexpected twist.

The USS Nimitz aircraft carrier Credit: US Navy

The Princeton had been tracking UAP, which displayed odd characteristics, since 10th November. Equipped with the sophisticated AN/SPY-1 radar to help protect the fleet - capable of detecting a golf ball sized object from in excess of 100 miles away - they tracked groups of five to ten unidentified craft at a time. These unknown objects would appear on radar from above 80,000 ft, rapidly descend to 20,000 ft or thereabouts, hover for three or four hours, then zoom back up.

Soon after take off, Commander Fravor was told the training exercise was cancelled because radar had picked up a UAP track and this was the first time there’d been aircraft aloft, able to take a closer look. The two Super Hornets, with four crew members, were sent to investigate.

They arrived at the “merge plot”, meaning the radar was no longer able to distinguish the Super Hornets from the UAP. At first, they didn't see anything. But when they looked down, Fravor noticed white waves breaking on the surface of an otherwise calm sea. Just below the surface was a cross shaped object, about the size of a Boeing 737. Above it, they could see a white oval shaped object about 40 ft in length - now dubbed “the Tic Tac”, as it vaguely resembled the shape of a branded mint - erratically moving around the cross. They initially questioned if it was a helicopter, but the lack of rotor wash eliminated this as a possibility.

Fravor decided to go take a closer look and so circled down, with the second Super Hornet staying at a higher vantage point. During his descent, the Tic Tac rapidly turned and started rising up, as if to meet him. They continued to circle towards each other until Fravor was about 2000 ft above it, when he decided to cut across the circle and head straight for the Tic Tac. As he got close, the unknown craft accelerated and vanished - no longer visible to any of the four flight crew in the two Super Hornets. When they turned to look at the cross shaped object in the water, it had also disappeared.

The USS Princeton then radioed: “Sir, you're not going to believe this, but that thing is back at your CAP [combat air patrol] point.” The UAP had reappeared on the radar approximately 60 miles away from where it had just been, travelling there in a matter of seconds.

The USS Princeton, fitted with AN/SPY-1 radar, detected groups of UAPs on dozens of occasions Credit: US Navy

As the first two Super Hornets landed back on the USS Nimitz, a third Super Hornet was getting ready to take off. Fravor explained the situation and told them to be on the lookout. Chad Underwood, the back seater, was determined that they were going to find the UAP.

Up in the air, Underwood picked something up on his radar. He captured video using the Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared Camera (ATFLIR), although unable to see the UAP with his own eyes as they were about 20 miles away from it. The FLIR video shows the Tic-Tac object hovering in midair, but with no notable exhaust from conventional propulsion sources - even when it rapidly accelerates to the left.

Underwood has since spoken out. “The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving. And what I mean by erratic is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets. It was just behaving in ways that aren’t physically normal. That’s what caught my eye. Because, aircraft, whether they’re manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible.”

As I said at the beginning of this article, it was hearing Commander David Fravor being interviewed by Joe Rogan which really got me going. Fravor goes into a lot of detail, explaining everything. It’s a lengthy interview, lasting almost two hours, but well worth a watch.

On the East Coast, strange objects were sighted almost daily by Super Hornet air crews flying training missions from the USS Theodore Roosevelt during the summer of 2014 until March 2015. Described as being similar to a translucent “sphere encasing a cube”, these unknowns could reach hypersonic speeds despite having no visible signs of propulsion. And they could stay up in the air for 12 hours, much longer than any conventional high-performance aircraft can do without refuelling. In one instance, a UAP apparently flew between two Super Hornets flying close together, prompting an aviation safety report.

The GIMBAL video is about 40 seconds long and shows an unidentified craft moving through the air before slowing down and rotating. You can hear one of the pilots say “There's a whole fleet of them”.

Fravor speculates that if this was the work of a secret government program then the technology would have likely emerged by now, many years after the incident. “If you have a propulsion system that gave the capabilities that we observed visually, that's a huge leap for mankind. If you've got something that works like that, it would change air travel forever.”

He further states that the United States government is starting to take UAP sightings a lot more seriously, saying he has been to Washington DC twice to recount his story to “high level government officials”. He says the female navy pilot who flew the second Super Hornet of his flight has been called in to recount the event to top officials half a dozen times.

On 4th August 2020, the US Department of Defense established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). Their aim is to gain insight into the nature and origins of UAP, particularly those that could pose a threat to US national security. The facts, as currently known and understood, are considered too real to ignore.

We don’t know what these unidentified objects are or where they’re from. Some have speculated that Fravor merely misidentified a bird as the Tic Tac, but do birds fly at a height of 20,000 ft or 80,000 ft?! Before retirement, Fravor was a real-life Top Gun and the weather conditions that day were perfect. His encounter lasted for five minutes, also involving three other Navy pilots with “eyes on”. Are we expected to believe that birds on the East Coast are shaped like “a sphere encasing a cube”? Could these UAP be new “black project” technology from the US, China, or Russia? Possibly, but it would involve a leap forward in science and technology that we don’t know about. Fravor and Underwood both doubt they were “ours”. Could they originate from beyond Earth? Again, this is possible, but we don’t know. We need more data. It would be unwise to speculate further at this point in time.

Written by Jessica Nelson, 7th May 2021

UPDATE (November 2022): The Tic Tac encounter is featured in our “The best UFO cases and what they suggest” film: