Commander David Fravor was the guest on a recent episode of “The Fighter Pilot Podcast” to discuss his encounter with and subsequent chasing of, a Tic Tac-shaped UFO back in 2004. This is the most detailed interview with Fravor I have heard so far. I transcribed about 80% of the interview and left out parts that weren’t directly related to the Tic Tac. After the transcription, I added some of my own thoughts about what Fravor had to say.
Vincent Aiello
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Vincent Aiello: “Today, The Fighter Pilot Podcast is in Southern New Hampshire. And we are at the residence of retired United States Navy Commander, David Fravor. Sex, welcome to The Fighter Pilot Podcast, sir.”
David Fravor: “Thanks, Jell-O. It’s good to be here.”
VA: “Well, it’s been a long time. It’s good to see you well.”
DF: “It has. It has been a long time. You’re looking good.”
VA: “Thanks. I’m feeling good, Billy Ray. You know…first off, I never called you ‘Sex’ anyway, because I was junior to you. I used to call you Skipper and Sex just has this kind of weird feeling. Now we’ll get to the call sign thing at the end. (both laugh) I’m gonna call you Skipper if that’s okay.”
DF: “That’s fine.”
VA: “Excellent. Well, thank you for having me in your lovely home. And we are here today to talk about an experience you had back in 2004. And ever since.
(At this point, Fravor discusses his background, education, career and 15 minutes of fame he received after appearing on the PBS series, “Carrier.” If you’d like to hear all of that, click here.
VA: “So, you made headlines, earlier this year, for an event that took place back in November 2004. And that’s what we’ll spend the bulk of our time speaking about today. But I’m just curious – before we talk about the episode – why now? Why suddenly is all of this coming to light?”
DF: “You know, it’s interesting you ask. I hadn’t really done anything about it and it’s been pretty quiet. It was never secret. I wanna point it out because there’s a lot of people that think that this was classified. We weren’t allowed to talk about it. There were people on the boat that thought that we signed non-disclosures to not discuss this. That never happened. It just…it went away. And after – you know, you were out there – after about three days and the “Men In Black” cartoon and the other plane comic of “The Far Side.” When those went away, I had a squadron running, we all had to fly…we were in the middle of workups. So it just kind of faded away.
“I had got a call from the other pilot and they said, ‘Hey, have you been talked to about the Tic Tac lately?’ And I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘Well…you know, I’ve been asked to go to the Pentagon like five times.’ You know…and they said, ‘Well you had the most ACM (Air Combat Maneuvering or Dogfighting. ~Joe),’ cause I was actually the one that engaged it. And I said, ‘Well, just give ’em my name and I’ll talk to them.’ So that was Lue Elizondo, who was running the AATIP program at the Pentagon. So he had called me up and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna come up and talk to you.’ And I said, ‘Great. No problem.’ And…I didn’t think much of it. I’m like, yeah, I’ll tell you what you got. So about, probably a month later I had gotten information on the, “To The Stars” that was coming out with Tom DeLonge and I’m watching this clip that guy had sent me and Lue’s on it. So I call Lue. I go, ‘What’s going on?’ He goes, ‘I left the Pentagon.’ He goes, ‘We’ll be there like this weekend to talk to you.’ I said okay.
“So they came up here and talked to me about the whole incident and he told me what was going on. And he actually explained why he had left the Pentagon. He was a little bit frustrated with…basically the bureaucracy that he was having to deal with. And what he thought was very important. So, he called me up about a month later and said, ‘Hey, we want to do this article with the New York Times. Will you do it?’ And I said, ‘No.’ I actually said, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ And he said, ‘No, no, seriously, dude we really need you to do this.’ I said, ‘Why do you need me to do this?’ He said,
“And he says, ‘And you’re the one piece that will add credibility, you know, because of our background of what we do, it gets harder to discredit us when we see something like that.’ And I said, “Ohhhhhh…alright.’
“I was actually in DC for work so I met him and Helene Cooper and Leslie Kean at a restaurant and they just started asking a question. And…when you first telling the story, there’s kind of like this jaw-dropping from the people you’re telling it to. Which, I was laughing because the only people that really knew the story – cause my family didn’t really know it – it was all my buds. We’d be out, having a beer or two and they’d say, ‘Hey Dave, what’s the coolest thing you ever saw flying?’ And then I’d say, ‘Well, I chased this UFO. And they’d be like, ‘You did what?!’ And I’d say, ‘No, seriously, we…’ and I’d give the whole story. And they’re all like…and you know, people that know me know I’m not totally crazy. And they would just go, ‘You’re joking.’ And I go, ‘No, I’m dead serious.’
“‘The cool thing is there was four of us. Because it was Fs (F/A-18F ~Joe). And Cheeks Kurth, who was the CO (Commanding Officer ~Joe) of the Marine Squadron, he was actually the red air for the event. And they talked to him before we even…they talked to us because he was the first one off the deck. Charlies didn’t have the gas to go play around a little extra like we did.
“So because of that, the New York Times article hit…what was it, December 17th of last year. And then your world explodes.”
VA: “Oh I can imagine.”
DF: “I completely underestimated…I got told, ‘Hey look, this is the New York Times.’ And I said, you know, because of “Carrier,” I’m like, ‘Hey, no…I kind of had that 15 minutes of fame. I really don’t want that 15 minutes of fame. (VA laughing) I wanna just crawl into my little sector of the world and go away.’ And they said, ‘No no, this is going to be a big deal.’ And I’m like, “Eh, no big deal.’ Well, the article hit the Internet – this is a funny story – on Saturday at two o’clock. So, I don’t know if you know Jeter? He was the Japan guy with me. He worked at Check Six with me. He…literally it hit and I get a phone call right away: ‘Dude, I’m sitting down to eat my lunch and I see your ugly mug on my screen. You’re an idiot.’ (both laugh)”
VA: “What would you expect from a fellow aviator?”
DF: “That’s exactly what I would I expect! He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Well, I was asked by the guy at the Pentagon to do this.’ And he said, ‘Holy cow!’ So the next day, I’m not thinking anything, my son-in-law was here visiting and we were taking him to the airport Sunday morning when the paper hit. And we’re literally getting ready to leave the house and my phone rings. And it’s a number that I don’t know. It’s from Jersey. And of course, my wife says, ‘Oh, answer it. I wanna see who it is.’ And I’m like, okay. So I answer the call. And I’m like, yeah yeah. Well it ends up being Good Morning America, which was followed by multiple CNN, which was Fox News, which was The Washington Post, which was The Boston Herald. I mean, I had a guy, literally, The Boston Herald guy track me down on Sunday and found me in a coffee shop on the north end with my wife and daughter.”
VA: “Yeah, never mind the Men In Black. It’s the journalists that frighten me. They can find you anywhere.”
DF: “Oh my God! It is amazing because, you know, it’s not like I’m publicizing this. I’ve actually tried to hide from a lot of people. They find you. Now it makes it easy because there’s not a lot of David Fravors running around the United States. I won’t say how many but it’s very few. I asked the girl. I said, ‘How did you find me?’ And she goes, ‘Oh, it wasn’t hard. We have this database we can go to.’ I did work out a little bit. The Today Show, NBC News had called and then they ended up canceling the interview because it was right when the tax reform came out from President Trump. But I had never been to New York City, my wife has been there a bunch. I went down there with her and I said, ‘Let’s get a tour.’ So I called up NBC, the girls that had worked with me, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna be there. Can I get…I told you guys when I first talked to you that, you know, I wanna go see “The Today Show” and stuff.’ And they did! We got a little VIP tour of “The Today Show” and got to go see “The Tonight Show” – the Jimmy Fallon set. We got to see Saturday Night (Live?). That’s the one benefit. Actually, that’s like the benefit I got out of this whole thing. I called and said, ‘Hey, can we get a private tour?’ And it worked out, so.”
VA: “Well, if people are wondering what it is we’re talking about that brought you your second, fifteen minutes of fame. You’re up to about thirty minutes. Maybe I’ll give you another fifteen. This might be forty-five! (both laugh)”
DF: “Thanks, buddy.”
VA: “Yeah, you’re welcome. So, it was November of 2004. You and I and all of our air wing bubbas were on the USS Nimitz, off the coast of Mexico, south of San Diego. And we were doing what we call workups, which are just exercises at sea to prepare ourselves for deployment. Which ended up being the 2005 deployment that was chronicled in the PBS, “Carrier” special. And we are out flying on a beautiful day. We have the USS Princeton cruiser, operating with us as an air intercept, control provider. Or, air defense commander, I suppose, you would call it. And so, you launch on a mission and just, if you would, give us a quick summary of what happened that day that then blew up on you earlier this year and caused so much attention from the press.”
DF: “Okay, so, 2004, we’re in one of the early gos. I think we were actually the first go. We’re gonna do an air defense exercise. Not only we’re gonna get training cause we’re gonna be the good guys. The Marines are gonna take off. They’re gonna be the bad guys. And we’re gonna actually work with the controllers on the Princeton to do the air defense of the carrier battle group.”
VA: “Okay, so it’s a 2 v 2, out over the ocean…”
DF: “”Yep. So we launch. We join up. We’re in, obviously VFA-41. We’re flying Fs. So I have a wizzo (WSO or Weapon Systems Officer ~Joe) in my back seat. And the other pilot and the other wizzo are in the other jet. So they join up…we’re driving out. We hear a little comm on the radio as we’re checking through all…you know going through strike, getting all checked in. And all of a sudden, the Princeton comes up and says, ‘Fast Eagle. Hey, say your load out. (laughs) And I actually laughed. I said, ‘Well I got a CATM-9, and with a sledgehammer, you can get it off the airplane.’ Cause you know how they’re locked on. It’s just a big…it’s a hollow tube. It’s no real motor but it does have a real seeker head and its for training only. And they said, ‘Well, we’re gonna cancel the air defense exercise training right now, we have real world tasking.’ And we were to proceed to about forty miles south of the carrier. So you were right on, so if you draw…if you look at a map and go from San Diego down to Ensenada, we’re kind of working around that area. Closer to Ensenada than San Diego.
“So, we start pressing out and they give us a vector of 270, at about sixty miles. So we start driving out towards the west. I’m the lead, so my wingman, the other airplane, gets on my lefthand side. So they’re sitting to the south. So, I’ll start referencing a clock cause it makes it easier to go. So as we start driving out, you know, they’re calling forty miles, thirty miles, twenty miles, ten miles…We’re not seeing anything on the radar. We’re both clean, which means we see nothing. Then, all of a sudden, the cruiser calls Merge Plot, which tells us that now, the blip that they were looking at, and us, are in the same resolution cell. So it just looks like one blob. They can’t tell us apart.”
VA: “You’re in the same vertical column of air.”
DF: “That’s exactly right. So as we’re looking out, you know, the heads start coming out cause we’re looking to see where this thing is at. And as we look down off the right side of the airplane, we see…so we’d be at the six o’clock position of a clock and this object would be in the middle. We look down…and what it looks like is something like a sea mount under the water. Because it’s a…no whitecaps, beautiful clear day and there’s just this white water. And if you’ve seen a sea mount – which I know you have – where the waves come in, they just break over this, in the middle of the ocean. And it tells you there’s probably something under the surface. We kind of see this and as we’re looking, the back-seater in the other airplane, Jim Slaight ‘Clean,’ goes, ‘Hey skipper, do you…’ And right about when he gets to the do you, I’m looking and I see this little white object. It’s kind of randomly moving around the disturbance under the water.
“Now it’s important…the disturbance, think of it as…what we first thought is…you know, it looked kind of like a 737 size-wise, pointing to the east. Alright? So it looked like it had kind of wings, you know like shapes…like a cross. It was the way the disturbance was set up. And the little, white Tic Tac – is what we referred to it as because that’s what it looked like – was kind of going north, south and then east, west. But it wasn’t changing its direction. It was elongated to the north/south. So the longitudinal axis of this thing was pointing north.
“So the first thing you think is, oh, it’s a helicopter, right? So as we’re looking at it and he goes, ‘Hey, do you see, what the…’ And I go, ‘Yeah, what the hell is that?’ And we’re looking.”
VA: “What’s your altitude at this point?”
DF: “Uh, we’re at about 20,000 feet. So we’re looking down. There’s no rotor wash. There’s no wings. It literally looks like a Tic Tac and it’s just flopping around, right? So we’re like, that’s kind of weird. So as we remove around towards about the nine o’clock position, I decide, ‘Hey, I’m going to go check that out.’ (both laugh).
VA: “Of course.”
DF: “So the other pilot says, ‘Hey, I’m gonna stay up high.’ I said, ‘That’s perfect. Just stay up here. Just mirror us and I’ll go down.’ So we’re having all this comms. And I’m also talking on the intercom to my back-seater. And we’re both, you know, kind of like, ‘Dude, what is that?’ And we have no idea. So, at about the nine o’clock position we start that slow descent and as we get around to the twelve o’clock…and we’re watching this. So this whole evolution’s gonna take about five minutes because we’re only doing around 300 knots. (345 mph ~Joe) We’re just kind of saving gas. So we get to about the twelve o’clock position and the thing, which had been pointing north/south, basically just turns. So now the longitudinal axis is kind of pointing to the west. And it starts mirroring us. So we’re in a slow descent, clockwise flow and it’s coming up the same way. So this thing’s been in a hover, right over the water, with no rotor wash or nothing and then all of a sudden, it goes…BOOP, and starts climbing.
“So we’re kind of looking at it and we go around, you know…all the way around. So as we approach about that six to eight o’clock position – actually, we’re at six and you know, we can watch it, it’s coming up below us. At about the eight o’clock position – we’re at eight o’clock and it’s over towards about two o’clock – there’s probably about, maybe about 3000 feet of altitude between us. So, we’re probably at about, you know, somewhere around the fifteen-ish thousand and then he’s probably around…the thing is probably around that eleven/twelve thousand, somewhere around there. So I go, ‘Well, the best way to fix it a two- circle, fight – so he’s on the opposite side of the circle – is cut across the middle of the circle. So I go, nose low, and cut across the circle and pull lead on it. So I, finally at the eight o’clock…think of it as, I point my nose down…I’m gonna cut across the bottom. I’m gonna make a big scoop out out of the bottom of it. I’m going kind of over towards three o’clock cause I wanna kind of be over there when he gets there. And as we start pulling nose up, the thing rapidly accelerates like from, just this nice, easy, kind of mirroring our speed to…poof, it’s gone as it crosses our nose. It just disappears.
“So we’re like…I go…I ask the other airplane, ‘Hey you guys see that?’ And they’re like, ‘It’s gone.’ Now keep in mind, they’re still above us. So it’s not like, you know…we have different perspectives of the object. And the object, we both see it just take off and disappear. So we’re like, (laughs) alright, now I’m pretty weirded out. So I said, ‘Hey, let’s turn around and see what was in the water. Cause we’re right there. So we basically just turned the airplanes around real quick and there’s nothing. There’s no disturbance, there’s no whitewater…as far as you can see, there’s nothing. So we kind of turn and I’m like, ‘Well, you know, look at the clock…but we gotta get some training done.’ And, I told my back-seater…I said, ‘Dude, I’m pretty weirded out. That’s…that’s odd.’ So…and the controller’s hearing all of this, so. I remember telling the controller, I said, ‘Hey, please tell me that you guys are gonna strip the radar tapes.’ And throughout this, he’s been telling us, ‘Hey sir, we’ve been tracking these things for like two weeks, since we got out here.”
VA: “Really?”
DF: “We got here in the beginning of the month. Remember, we got out in the beginning of November. It was a two-month at sea. Remember I was fighting to get home for Thanksgiving?”
VA: “Yeah.”
DF: “So, he says, Yeah, we’ve been tracking these things. They’ve been coming from, basically 80,000 feet or above 80,000 feet, coming straight down and hanging out at like 20,000 feet. And they had been tracking like, up to, you know…multiple. You know, I think it was like up to ten. And then they would hang out for a little bit and then they would go back up. And this was the first time that they had had manned airplanes, airborne when these things showed up. Which was, you know, it happens to be us. You know, I don’t know if that’s lucky or unlucky (both laugh). But, my life would have been just fine if this never happened.
“So, I said, ‘Well, hey we’re gonna go back, to the CAP,’ which is our hold point for the exercise. And meanwhile, the Marines are still hanging out, you know. They’re a hundred miles south of the ship just kind of doing circles in the sky. And the controller comes up and says, ‘Sir, you’re not gone believe this but that thing is back at your CAP point,’ And we’re like, ‘Oh great.’ So we end up getting to the CAP…we don’t see it, we do the exercise and we go back and land. When we had landed, we were in the PR shop and one of our crews was getting ready to launch. And we’re telling them this and they’re like, ‘Ahhh.’ So, Chad Underwood, NUTS, goes, ‘Hey, I’m gonna get video of this thing.’ And that’s actually the video that you see. The video was taken by him. We, chased it visually.
“The one regret of the whole side from my point of view was that, because we never used the helmet cam on the joint helmet – because it was just nauseating to try and watch on a screen – I never had it on. Cause had I had it on, you had probably got tons of video of this thing flying around. And then the other side is is because nothing was done and a lot of the stuff is lost. Like we have the tapes. We have the radar tape and the FLIR tape. The FLIR tape is what you guys have seen but it’s been degraded so many times because it’s been copied. But on the high-res monitors it was pretty good. And then the radar tape actually showed, you know, the thing. As we hit it with the radar, it started to jam. Went to the jam extrapolate and the aspect vector started spinning around because it didn’t want to be locked up. And Chad saw that, you know, that’s what he had seen when he did it. And then, obviously the video. But all the radar tapes from the Princeton…there’s a bunch of stuff that’s missing that they can’t find.”
VA: “Hmmm…”
DF: “Matter of fact, in the archives – I was talking to someone that has access to this stuff – the log book, someone has taken that page. Sometimes it’s just, you know, the sailor that wants…thinks it’s cool. Like a buddy of mine saved the Airplane from that day. And when this broke, sends me a text going, ‘Dude, I saved this for all these years…because this was such a strange event,’ and sent me the Airplane comic. So…”
VA: “So that’s crazy. So…I wanna talk about after you landed. What, if anything, happened as far as the debrief. But it might be worth mentioning that the USS Princeton is what we call an AEGIS cruiser. And, correct if I’m wrong but that technology is probably about as good as it gets for detecting and tracking air contacts. Isn’t that true?”
DF: “Yeah, it’s one of the most sophisticated, if not the most sophisticated radar in the world. And with that whole system. I mean, I think it was the SPY-1B at that time. They’re beyond…it’s just incredible technology that we possess.”
VA: “Right. I mean they can track, incoming ballistic missiles and target them with other missiles. Which is a miracle in its own right. And then also you said it was occurring for the two weeks prior to that. Was there, other than NUTS’ encounter after the event of yours, was there any more that you’re aware of in the days and weeks that followed?”
DF: “No. Not that I know of. Now, supposedly the ships had seen stuff and then when we came back off that at sea period…so we got back, you know, right before Christmas. January. We have Comcast, so I had the Comcast home page. And the top video of the year for the 2004 year which came out in January of 2005, for Comcast videos, was the Mexican Air Force tracking like six of these things with a FLIR. In the same area. So, it wasn’t just us. I think we were the only ones…cause there was a lot of people that you know, hey we had radar contact on something odd. You know, we saw FLIR video of stuff in the distance. But I don’t think anyone else has actually visually chased the thing like we did. That’s why it’s unique.”
VA: “So when you landed, as we usually do, you’d probably run down to CVIC, Combat…I don’t even remember what it’s called any more.”
DF: “Carrier Intelligence Center. CVIC.”
VA: “Okay, there ya go. Thank you. And you’re probably talking about it and…I mean I’m just curious. So, the Air Wing Commander or Ship’s Commander, anyone come in and ask you about it?”
DF: “No. This is where it gets…At first we thought…okay this is, this is kind of odd. We’ve got something that we have…we can’t control. We can’t…for the performance of it. You know, anything that hovers like that, doesn’t not accelerate like…you know. And you’ve seen…you know, I’ve seen airplanes doing 1.8 going by me doing the high fast like at Top Gun where guys are, you know, you just see the CONS coming. But to see something that literally accelerates. Cause even if you go to Mach II (approximately 1500 mph ~Joe) Think of a rocket that takes off. You watch it and those things accelerate relatively quick but you can watch them for a significant period of time. This thing literally disappeared in a matter of…you know, less than a second. It was in front of me and it was gone.
“So, we think, ‘Oh yeah, someone’s gonna come and talk to us.’ So, we had the tapes. My back-seater went down cause he was junior. He did the debrief in CVIC. And, you know, you gotta tell them what’d you do: ‘Oh we chased this thing. We have no idea what it was.’ And then, of course, they’re laughing, cause they think it’s funny. And he comes back to the ready room. And there’s some other stuff that went on. So, we’re like, ‘Okay, maybe someone’s gonna come. And the next thing you know, the intel guy comes down and says, ‘Hey, we wanna…we need your tapes. They’re gonna start this investigation.’ And they’re making it like it’s a big deal. The problem was is it wasn’t a big deal because we figured out they thought it was a big, funny joke that they would do this. So I remember going down there. I told Del. I said, ‘I’ll be back…I’m gonna go get those tapes.’
VA: “Del was your XO?” (Executive Officer. ~Joe)
DF: “Yeah. And I went into the uhh, (laughs) I went into CVIC and I said, ‘Hey, I need my tapes’ and they were just looking at me. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You got about two minutes to give me those tapes or I’m gonna tear this place apart and there’s not a damn thing you’re gonna do about it.’ And the Lieutenant that was in there…and I said, ‘You can go get your boss if you want cause I’ll have the same talk with him.’ And within about thirty seconds, I had the tapes in my hand and we took those back to the ready room because they’re actually our property.”
VA: “Right. And the classified equipment.”
DF: “So we copied them, believe it or not. Because we use those tapes again. So we copied them and we wrapped them up and stuffed them in the safe. They were wrapped in a piece of yellow paper that said 4CO and they stayed there. We came back from cruise, they were in the ready room safe. And then somehow, they disappeared. No one knows where they went. And I don’t know if it was, you know, there’s been several COs since then. You know, probably about eight different COs. So. No one knows where they went. You know how it is when you go to and from crews. Someone goes, ‘What are these? Hey, they look like blank 8mm tapes. We’ll just use them.'”
VA: “Oh, okay. Someone might have taped over them.
DF: “It’s consumable. So no one knows where those tapes actually went.”
VA: “Did you end up with a copy of anything?”
DF: “I did not. Actually, the guy that was in my back seat had sent me…I was working…I had retired. About 2008, he had sent me a link to a website which I would…say, not suitable for work. But he sent it to me and it was on there. And it was, ‘Hey skipper, does this look familiar?’ And I’m like, ‘Holy shit, that’s the FLIR video that we had taken. Then it ended up on YouTube. And it was on YouTube for quite some time and then it disappeared. So you go, well how did people actually find out about this because it was never reported? Well what happened was, I was working and I had met some people and Cheeks (Douglas Kurth, who went on to work for Bigelow Aerospace and BAASS. ~Joe) had called me at the same time and says, ‘Hey, we’re doing some stuff and we have a customer (AATIP via BAASS ~Joe) that likes to investigate stuff like this. Can we do it?” And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
“And I had another friend that I had talked to because of the phone call that was prompted by Cheeks. And I was talking to her and I said, ‘Hey, I had this incident, you know. Is there anything you can find out?’ And she said, ‘Oh, let me see.’ Didn’t think anything of it and about a month later I had gotten a call from a guy and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to investigate this thing.’ So, they actually did. There was a report that just got released…that Harry Reid released. The former Senator from Nevada. Which was actually…I like to call it the unofficial, official report. Because it wasn’t an official report. It was just done to try and capture some of this. I look at it as more as exercising the system. I don’t know what the whole purpose was.
“So they did it and that became the unofficial, official report. It’s actually pretty well done. The are a few inaccuracies in it because, you know, it’s a lot of people’s story and at the time, it was five years after the event. So people start forgetting stuff. And I’m not saying that my recall is perfect but I used to have pretty good recall. Just from training and teaching BFM (Basic Fighter Maneuvers ~Joe) for so long. So, the report came out and I think that’s what helped prompt a bunch of the stuff. And then, since last year, when the article hit – you know that they’re trying to prove that this stuff is out there – it just went completely out of control.”
VA: “So, you said a moment ago, FLIR video. Did you mean from Nuts? The second wave or did you guys get FLIR video?”
DF: “No. We did not get any FLIR video. Nuts went out and took it. If you look at the video as you watch – because there’s all kinds of naysayers out there, ah it’s a blemish on the array – he goes between multiple sensor modes. He goes in EOIR, which is TV, black and white TV. And then he uses IR, which is infrared. And he intentionally goes through all the zoom lenses: narrow, medium, wide…you know. And you see that happen. You know, he does an auto-track on it, which is the bars on the side. And then all of a sudden it breaks and goes zooming off to the other side. For us, it’s like…you know, we saw it. When he brought the video back, we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s it.’ We could see the hi-res because it was the original tape of the airplane, which digitally pulled from the back. Not through cameras or anything like that. So, for all the Internet experts out there…don’t talk about what you really don’t know. Just because you heard it from a friend’s cousin’s friend’s sister at college roommate. You know? It doesn’t make it real.”
VA: “So, Skipper. I ended up flying most of my twenty-five years, accrued 3800 flight hours. I know many people with similar amount of hours. You probably have several thousand.”
DF: “Yeah, 3800.”
VA: “3800. And apart from November 14th, 2004, I’m sure you would say the same thing I have. And people have asked me since I began this show. I’ve never seen anything in the air that I could not identify. What do you feel, based on your experience and having spoken to the other people that were there that day…what did you see?”
DV: “We have no idea what it was. You know, there’s…”
VA: “It was unidentifiable.”
DV: “Yeah, we have no…there’s nothing…I had seen nothing in eighteen years and at the point it was sixteen years of flying. So I was about 3600 hours. And I never got out of the cockpit. As you know. I didn’t go to the Pentagon or anything like that. We saw it and literally, we’re all looking at each other and I’m talking to the guy in my back seat. And I’m just like, ‘Dude, I have…I have no idea what that was.’ And I had been around the block, so it wasn’t, you know…I wasn’t the new person right out of the rag that just got in the jet and went, ‘Oh my God, I saw something!’ And then like, ‘Nah, it was a weather balloon.’
“You know, cause we would see people do that, you know, like when we would go and practice bombing down by Huma. And you’d be on the downwind, away from the target. They have the balloons, the border balloons that are in the restricted. And people would see it and say, ‘Hey, I got a contact.’ And you gotta tell ’em, ‘No, that’s actually just a balloon that’s on a tether. It’s not going anywhere. It’s gonna be there all day long.’ So stuff like that. But to see something that could go from a hover with no rotor wash, no wings, no discernible propulsion…and you can see that on the IR. There’s no plume coming out of it. It’s just sitting there in space. And then to back that up with the coverage of what the radar was seeing. We don’t have, at least in modern, reactive propulsion – you know, suckers and blowers…jet engines – we don’t have the ability to react that quick and counter drag. I mean, this thing moved through the atmosphere like it just…like it, there was no constraints on it. It just did whatever it wanted to do.
“So that was the biggest deal, which is funny because the other pilot had a different, you know…the other pilot was relatively new. And so, as they’re going out there, the initial thing is, when they cancel it and you go real world and you’re off the coast of Mexico, what do you think? Drug runners, right? Hey, there’s an object out there. We gotta go check it out. Well, and you get out to the area and you look down and all of a sudden it looks like there’s something in the water, you know, that’s causing this disturbance under the water. Now it goes from excitement to search and rescue. You know, are we gonna have to do this? And then the next one is, you see something that you’ve never seen and you can probably hear it in our voice, you know, the experienced people in the airplane, you know, that are out there. And it goes to, you know…what is that? We haven’t been told…we had no idea what we were going at.
“No one ever gave us this…no one ever told us…there was no brief. As you know, there was no CVIC brief, ‘Hey, we’ve seen these objects out there.’ Kind of that you had on the other video that came out that was the Gimbal video where it rolls? That had been on the East Coast. There’s actually NOTAMs (Notice To Airmen ~Joe) out there that these objects were out there and…just to know they’re out there. Because one of the airplanes in a squadron almost hit one.”
VA: “On the East Coast?”
DF: “Yeah, yeah. It went about like a hundred feet down the side. They were in section and it went down the side and they just came back and said it looks like a ball with a cube inside of it. Almost like a square that has an aura around it. So, at what point do you go, ‘Hey maybe we outta, check this out.’ Cause someone goes, ‘Well, maybe it’s tests. Maybe it’s some test of a new system that no one wants them to know. And I said, ‘Well, that’s great. But they typically don’t go test new systems where we’re actually doing training with other aircraft. Because, if this is some really expensive toy that you’re playing with out there and it gets hit by a fighter. Well, one you lose the fighter, possibly kill the aircrew and two, your toy is destroyed. So, you know, normally they do those in areas where, you know, they’ll take it out to one of the ranges like Fallon or something like that. You know, they’ll have exclusive use of the restricted areas. But taking one to the warning area, which is not a restricted area…cause a warning area, anyone can fly through it. You can take a Cessna and fly though it. All it is is military training in this area, proceed at your own caution.”
VA: “Sure. Well, maybe the idea was that being out in the middle of the ocean, they would be away from any prying eyes. Which even over Fallon, arguably, you’ve got Highway 50 and some other stuff where people could catch a glimpse. If you really didn’t want anyone to see it. And maybe they just didn’t, you know, check who else was going to be operating in that area at the time and…you know how it is with government. It’s hard enough to coordinate anything, let alone between secretive programs. But I guess I’m just amazed to hear that there’s something on the East Coast as well. I mean, why do you think this isn’t more publicly spoken. Society loves movies and conspiracy theories. I’m surprised that this isn’t getting more press.”
DF: “You know, my opinion and it’s not just my opinion…Lue, who did the…ran the Pentagon program. Him and I have talked extensively about this. It’s just…there’s an aura in the United States that when you see something like this. You know, normally the dude on TV that’s talking about, “Hey, I just saw a UFO,” he lives out in the middle of nowhere. Immediately, people discredit him. He’s alcoholic. Or, he’s kind of crazy. Or, this or that. So there’s always this perception that it’s better just to make fun of it. Because if it’s not real or we just ignore it, then it will just go away and it’s not a big deal. And I think now there’s a point of…cause you don’t know where it’s from. I don’t know if it was from China or Russia. And I always joke because, you know, right after we had that workup, I think it was Acani (?) who was out there working up when the sub surfaced in the wake and the whole world was like…it was a big deal. And I said, I guess maybe if the Tic Tac would have had like a symbol from a foreign country on it and we saw it, then it would have gotten paid more serious attention then.
“There’s a technology there that we can’t do much about. Because these things were coming for two weeks at will. And even if you go…what were they doing? Monitoring? Watching? Observing? Prepping the battlefield? You know? You don’t know what they were doing. But if you look at it and go…man for two weeks these things were showing up. They were coming from areas that we can’t do and then all of a sudden, they’re disappearing. You might wanna spend a little time to go, ‘God, what is that?’ What performance would it cost you to be able to do that? I mean we’re happy right now that Space X can land a rocket motor back on a pad. Well if you had that technology that we saw, it would make everything like that obsolete. It would make almost every propulsion mechanism we have, obsolete.”
VA: “So, based on that, in your gut, where do you think this thing came from?”
DF: “I don’t think it…honestly, I don’t believe the technology was developed here. And I mean like…”
VA: “Earth?”
DF: “…on this planet. I’m not…I don’t wanna…I don’t like to talk about aliens cause I don’t know what it was. You don’t even know…what…maybe it was unmanned. I don’t know. Because there’s also the theories that it accelerated so fast that a normal human, you know, a body…”
VA: “Fluids.”
DF: “…couldn’t sustain the force. But, I just don’t…I don’t think…I think, honestly if we had that technology, especially now that it’s been fourteen years since it happened…honestly if we had that technology in the last fourteen years, something would have leaked out. To hide that for that long, when it could benefit so many people, you know. Or maybe it wouldn’t? You know? I don’t know. But if you assume that they’ve got some new revolutionary propulsion that works by manipulating gravity, per say, then, I would like to think that…that’s a game-changer for mankind.”
VA: “Well, so is, I would argue, assuming that…and I’m not challenging you on this, but, you know…you saw what you saw. I didn’t. But I have to think, seeing something that you can only explain as coming from somewhere else…I mean, does that change your core belief in our existence and the Universe? I mean, what does that do to you?”
DF: “Umm…well, for me, I’ve always kind of believed, ah. And I asked my astrophysics prof(essor) when I was at the academy and we were going up to the thing. And I said, ‘Hey! You’re astrophysics, right?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Do you believe in like, extraterrestrial life? You know, not from this planet?’ And she looked at me and she said, ‘Absolutely not.’ And I said, ‘Really? And you’re in astrophysics?’ She says, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘But, we’re to this point where the Universe is infinite. It goes on forever, right? And, you know, we have one galaxy. But we know, for a fact that there’s more galaxies out there and that they’re investigating the Goldilocks belts and all this. And that’s….this is multiple galaxies. We still haven’t even really thoroughly looked at our own galaxy. And we’re the only ones? That’s honestly what you believe?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Doesn’t it make it really like, lonely?’
“I mean, even if there was like, you know, kind of Seinfeld…the bizzaro world, you know? Where maybe there’s a whole nother world that’s just like us but we’re kind of the opposites of the way we are in real life? I do that in humor, but…just because it makes it easier to talk about. But you go, and that’s it? And I go, ‘I don’t know.’ I go, because, I would say…because, you know, if you’re religious, and you go, hey, God created the Earth. And I go, ‘Okay, I’m totally on board with that because that’s what I believe. But who’s to say that he only created one?”
VA: “That’s right.”
DF: “Argue that point. I mean God created Earth but what about…maybe he made, ten of them. Just to see…and he made them a little bit different, just to see what happened. You don’t know.”
VA: “Right. And they all have their own version of the Bible.”
DF: “Well, you’re right. And we have a hubris about our own selves. You know, as human beings…that we are it, we’re all that, we’re the smartest, we’re the best. You know, it would be terrible for us to realize that maybe we weren’t. You know we do that with animals. We figure out that, you know, some of these animals that are out there, the more we study, they’re actually really, really intelligent. And can do some pretty amazing things that we can’t. And we could never do, so…”
VA: “Well, it’s a very deep topic and certainly I didn’t intend to go there but I appreciate you bringing it up (laughter). I will tell you, I have a college friend, who was on one of the last space shuttle flights before it retired. And I visited her as I was delivering an airplane across the country in my last capacity at the depo. And I asked her about her space flight. I said…because she had grown up in the church as well. And I said, ‘Does that change your outlook on anything?’ And she took it from a slightly different, nuanced perspective than apparently your professor did. She said, ‘When you consider,’ – like you said – ‘the amount of galaxies and the Goldilocks belt and everything else that’s out there…if you just think statistically, it’s almost impossible that there’s not other life or something.’
“Because, if you flip a coin a hundred times, it’s virtually impossible that you’re not going to get a heads at least once. Now multiply that times…That’s obviously a poor example. I’m sure mathematicians will holler at me. But, you flip it a thousand times, a million times. And there’s how many billions and trillions of galaxies? So, I’m not using this podcast as a platform to suggest that, you know, we’re going to sit here and tell our listeners that we think there’s life outside of the Earth. But, you know, certainly Hollywood likes to venture into that. And here you are, a very clear-eyed, sober, publicly trained person who knows what you know from that day. And it has left you to believe that there’s no there explanation. I mean, is that a fair summary?”
DF: “Oh very much. You know, there’s a funny story that ties to that. I’m gonna throw it out here. Get my mother-in-law’s kudos. But…for years, literally, from the time I started flying, my mother-in-law would ask me, ‘Have you ever seen a UFO? Have you ever seen a UFO?’ And the answer was, ‘No, no, no.’ So this incident happened. I never told her. I didn’t tell them until November of last year. My wife and I had went home and everyone had kind of left after Thanksgiving as we’re sitting around the table. And I said, ‘Hey.’ I said, ‘I gotta tell you guys something cause there’s gonna be an article that comes out in the New York Times and it’s gonna be big. And I’m in it.’ And they’re like…And of course she’s looking at me like…Oh God. (laughter).
VA: “What did you do?”
DF: “And I said. I said, ‘I chased a UFO.’ That’s literally what I would say. And they go…and she goes, ‘Ah-ha!!!’ She looks at my father and goes, ‘Ah ha!!! I told you!’ She goes, ‘You never told us!’ I said, ‘No.’ As a matter of fact, when the article hit, my sister, you know, because it was all over Google. My sister’s like, ‘Why didn’t you ever tell us?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. It’s not something we normally talked about.’ I never really got into details with my wife or my kids. They kind of knew the story because they would hear me tell it. But it as really just, like I said, it was great story when you’re hanging out with your friends, having a beer and they go, ‘What’s the weirdest thing you saw?’ And you tell them and then they go, ‘No way!’ And you go, ‘Yeah.’ That’s really what it was until the article came out.”
VA: “How have people responded to you? I know you said, you had people, your friends, and here I am, chasing you down, for that matter. But, have you had whackos trying to find you? Like, ‘Okay, I’ve been trying to say this forever’? I maybe shouldn’t call them whackos. Let me ask this again. I mean, have you had people that, you have somehow now solidified in their minds, what they’ve known all along? And so they’re looking to you to help corroborate that UFOs are among us? Or aliens. Or, I mean…What kind of responses have you received?”
DF: “You know…cause you think…ah alright, you’re gonna get called a whackjob. And uhh, there was some good advice my daughter gave me: Don’t ever read the comments below the article. Don’t ever do that. And so I’ve avoided that, most of the time. But for the most part, I’ve been treated extremely well. The press guys that have talked to me. Because I’ve been very vocal that, you know, as I told them when they first came out with stuff, when they did the New York Times, I told Helene, (Cooper) cause she actually did the story with me. I said, ‘Don’t mess up the facts. I’ll be really upset cause it gets twisted. And so the articles that were well done that I can just name right off the top of my head are: The New York Times, The Washington Post article was very well done cause Eli had called me multiple times. There was an article in the Sun Times in London that was extremely well done.
“And most of that is…it wasn’t a drive by, like fifteen-minute, type article. It was a…there was an iteration as they wrote the article and then they…to make sure that they had it right. So that stuff, you know, that helps. Because if you take…there’s a lot of people out there that’ll look and they’ll look at all the articles. And they’ll find one thing. And they’ll assume that, you know, maybe you’re changing your, you guys are changing your story. And it’s not. It’s just a misinterpretation by the media when they do it. It’s not intentional. It’s just…it’s the way they write it. And I’m a big, you know, don’t embellish stuff. Just tell it what it is. The story, if you talk to us, the story is the same. It’s always been the same. It hasn’t changed. It’s the same story that we told in 2004 after it happened, to the same story that went into the New York Times. Are there people out there that have tried to track me down? Oh yeah.”
VA: “I’m thinking of like, the “Independence Day” character, Dennis Quaid was it?”
DF: “Randy Quaid.”
VA: “Randy Quaid, thank you. Who maybe would be a real life guy like that, perhaps trying to find you to pal up with you or something. I mean, anything like that?”
DF: “Umm, no. Some of that happened with the “Carrier” documentary. This one has been…I’ve gotten letters from, literally, all around the world. I mean, this thing’s global. I just did. I’m waiting for the magazine to show up. But I did an interview for…I can’t pronounce it because it’s…it’s basically the Dutch version of GQ Magazine. The article just hit.”
VA: “We’re not gonna see a picture of you in your underwear, are we?”
DF: “No, no, no, no. God, you don’t want to see that right now.”
VA: “Okay. Thank you. No, I think it saw it on the ship once and I’m scarred for life.” (both laugh)
DF: “No, this is uhh…I mean, it’s literally all over. But it’s funny is cause the media has a very short attention span. So when it happened, it was like, exponential. It was out of control.”
VA: “Oh, I remember.”
DF: “The news dies really fast. Old news goes away. Then rolls in the documentary people and the TV people. Like right now, I’m rolling around like four different TV shows cause they all want to interview me because it’s important. And I did one with…Lue is doing a set with ‘To The Stars’ on this whole thing. That one I like because the girl that’s doing it did ‘Chain of Command,’ which was on The History Channel, where they actually went around with the Generals. And what really sold me, believe it or not, with her, is…Jesse had…we were talking and she goes, ‘Oh yeah. I was out on The Bush.’ Well, you know, Skids was the captain of The Bush an Kenny was the battle group commander when they were doing all the ISIS work. So I wrote Kenny and I said, ‘Hey! You know, these people were out on the boat with you. What can you say about Jessie?’ And he basically wrote back and said, ‘Really good group. Very professional. Did a nice job.’ So that’s important to me because that’s a…that’s an instant credibility, you know, if I talk to, you know…If Kenny tells me, ‘They’re good, Dave,’ then I don’t need to ask anyone else. If I get it from a source like that…like if I call you up and go, ‘Hey, are they good people?’ And you go, ‘Yeah, you can trust them, they’re good,’ I don’t need to call anyone else. I don’t need to go do research. Your word is more than enough for me to go…it’s…You know how the network works. You know, when that came out, I said, ‘Okay,’ and they asked me to do it. We’ll see how it comes out.”
VA: “Well, it sounds like you’re going to be very busy with some various projects. I do want to thank you for adding in “The Fighter Pilot Podcast” to your lists of projects.
“I think we earlier added it up. You’re up to about forty-five minutes of fame. It’s gonna be, probably closer to two hours here, Sex, when you get done with the documentaries and everything you’ll be doing. Any thought of going out on the speaking circuit?”
DF: “You know, it’s funny you say that. I’ve been asked. I’ve been told to get on the public circuit. I’ve been told to get an agent. It’s not me.”
VA: “You don’t like the spotlight?”
DF: “Nah…you know, it gets old really, really fast. Because you realize there’s…You know 99% of the people are awesome. It’s the one percent that wants to pry and get into your life, that just, you know. And I am not…I would say I’m far from famous. You know, I like to joke that I’m more like Forrest Gump that just happens to get put in situations. Like not…like how’d that guy end up there?
“If people wanna talk about it, I’ll talk about it. I’m pretty open. But, you know, I asked for that, you know, when they do these, don’t prod me. Cause people will find you. Like I had notes in my mailbox, at my house.”
VA: “Oh my gosh. Stalkers.”
DF: “And…we can talk later about some other things.”
~~~
I skipped a lot of transcribing towards the end. If it wasn’t related to the Tic Tac incident, I went past it. If you want to hear how Fravor got his “Sex” callsign, click here.
After thanking Fravor for allowing him into his home, Vincent Aiello closed with this:
VA: “And for you dear listener, I leave this open. I don’t know what to tell ya. Prior to this interview, I would have told you there is no such thing as UFOs or extraterrestrial activity here in our atmosphere. But after listening to Commander Fravor’s story – and I was even on the ship that day. I don’t remember why I didn’t get more involved with it – but after looking him in the eye and hearing his explanation as you just did, I don’t know what to think. So, I’ll leave it up to you. Could be from somewhere else. It could be from another government or maybe our own.”
~~~~~
Joe’s comments:
Who Gave Approval/Permission?
Fravor says that Elizondo told him, “we’ve gotten approval to announce that this program existed inside the U.S. government.”
Tom DeLonge spoke about being given permission on the Joe Rogan Experience:
“I fly out to Colorado Springs and there’s a general and a colonel. And they look at me and they said, ‘Okay, do you need anything else? Are you good?’ And I said, ‘Well, I think you guys should talk to the Defense Intelligence Agency.’ And they go, ‘Why?’ I go, ‘Well, I just don’t want to upset them. I wanna make sure everyone’s kosher with what I’m about to do.’ And the colonel looks at me and he goes, ‘Do you ask your dad for permission after your mom’s already given it to you?’ And I go, ‘No.’ And he’s all, ‘You’ve been given permission, shut the fuck up and get to work.’ And I was like, ‘Alright.’ So I did.”
Are those the guys who gave Elizondo the approval to announce the existence of the Pentagon’s secret UFO (AATIP) program? Or was it the “certain agency” represented by six guys who DeLonge says interrogated him for two days straight in a hotel near his home in San Diego sometime after that meeting with the general and colonel took place? Elizondo has said he resigned due to frustration because the DoD wasn’t dedicating enough time and effort to studying the phenomenon. And he also told the New York Times that he had, “received two threats from people inside that building [the Pentagon]…I had somebody call me and actually tell me maybe I should be threatened for my personal safety.” So, some folks are extremely upset with Elizondo for speaking out and others were encouraging DeLonge to pursue Disclosure, confirmation or whatever you wanna call it. As others have noted, there seems to be a battle between two factions within our government. So, who gave the approval? And how high up in the government food chain are those folks?
~~~~~
Was There Something Under The Ocean?
Fravor described what he saw when he first arrived on the scene:
“We look down…and what it looks like is something like a sea mount under the water. Because it’s a…no whitecaps, beautiful clear day and there’s just this white water. And if you’ve seen a sea mount – which I know you have – where the waves come in, they just break over this, in the middle of the ocean. And it tells you there’s probably something under the surface.”
Lieutenant Colonel Doug “Cheeks” Kurth (who later went to work for Robert Bigelow and BAASS (under AATIP) as the program manager from 2007-2013) arrived before Fravor, Slaight and the others. Paco Chierici, who was the first to break the Tic Tac story, described what Kurtz saw:
“The sea was calm, almost glassy smooth and it was late morning on a beautiful SoCal day. Perfect conditions. As Cheeks flew over the spot he saw a disturbance on the surface of the ocean. A round section of turbulent water about 50-100 meters in diameter. It was the only area and type of what he called, “whitewater” describing that it looked as if there was something below the surface like a shoal or what he’d heard a ship sinking rapidly would look like.
“He overflew the disturbance and circled back in the direction of Nimitz without ever seeing what caused the water to froth. As he turned away, which happened to be the moment the Super Hornets converged on the location, the whitewater cleared and the ocean surface returned to its smooth state. The spot of the previous disturbance was completely indiscernible.”
It certainly appears that something was just under the surface of the ocean. But this report, acquired by George Knapp and allegedly put together by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, (BAASS) came to a different conclusion.
From Tic Tac Executive Report via To The Stars
~~~~~
Did The Tic Tac Try To Jam The Radar?
Fravor:
“As we hit it with the radar, it started to jam. Went to the jam extrapolate and the aspect vector started spinning around because it didn’t want to be locked up. And Chad saw that, you know, that’s what he had seen when he did it. And then, obviously the video. But all the radar tapes from the Princeton…there’s a bunch of stuff that’s missing that they can’t find.”
The Chad referenced is Chad Underwood, who was the one who piloted the jet that acquired the Tic Tac FLIR video. The one controlling the radar (I assume it was his WSO/back-seater) spoke about tracking the Tic Tac in this executive report:
“LT. (name redacted) was controlling the radar and FLIR and attempted multiple times to transition the radar to Single Target Track (STT) mode on the object. The radar could not take a lock…When asked, LT. stated that there were no jamming cues. ‘It just appeared as if the radar couldn’t hack it.’ The radar couldn’t receive enough information to create a single target track file.”
So did the object Underwood captured on FLIR jam the radar? Depends on who you ask.
~~~~~
What Happened To The Radar Tapes And First Generation FLIR Tape?
Fravor discussed the missing items:
“all the radar tapes from the Princeton…there’s a bunch of stuff that’s missing that they can’t find.”
Plus:
“I was talking to someone that has access to this stuff – the log book, someone has taken that page.”
And, regarding the FLIR tapes:
“We came back from cruise, they were in the ready room safe. And then somehow, they disappeared
With the missing copies of the FLIR tape, Fravor leans towards someone inadvertently taping over them by mistake. And with the missing page from the log book, he thinks someone may have just wanted it as a souvenir. He seems hesitant to consider the possibility that someone or a group of someones did their best to try to hide all traces of this incident. But as we’ve seen from my last two blog posts, (here and here) other servicemen who were on Nimitz and Princeton that day had a different view of things.
~~~~~
Is That a UFO Or A Nuclear Missile Heading For Us?
Aiello mentioned the SPY-1B radar:
“I mean they can track, incoming ballistic missiles and target them with other missiles. Which is a miracle in its own right.”
In the executive report, Senior Chief (redacted) said that the AAV (Anomalous Aerial Vehicle) or UFO:
“exhibited Ballistic Missile Characteristics in reference to its appearance, velocity and indications on the radar. Since the radar was in the mode to handle Air Intercept of conventional aircraft, it never obtained an accurate track of the AAVs and was quickly “dropped” by the radar, meaning it was eliminated by the computer to reduce the amount of clutter on the radar, as any other false target is handled. If the radar were set up in a mode for Ballistic Missile tracking, they likely would have had the capability to track the AAV. They were detected three separate times during the week, operating off the western coast of the United States and Mexico.”
So, it makes one wonder if there have been any incidents in the past where UFOs showed up on radar and the operator mistook them for Ballistic Missiles? That’s a massive disaster waiting to happen and I think that qualifies as a national security threat. It’s amazing we’ve haven’t had any accidents or close calls. Or, maybe we have and it’s still classified?
~~~~~
UFOs or Oil Platform Flames?
Fravor:
“the top video of the year for the 2004 year which came out in January of 2005, for Comcast videos, was the Mexican Air Force tracking like six of these things with a FLIR. In the same area. So, it wasn’t just us.”
In my mind and in the minds of most people, that video has been explained and has a prosaic explanation. Fravor probably doesn’t keep up on the latest UFO news so I can’t fault him for that.
~~~~~
The Gimbal, Pilot Safety and National Security
DF: “No one ever gave us this…no one ever told us…there was no brief. As you know, there was no CVIC brief, ‘Hey, we’ve seen these objects out there.’ Kind of that you had on the other video that came out that was the Gimbal video where it rolls? That had been on the East Coast. There’s actually NOTAMs (Notice To Airmen ~Joe) out there that these objects were out there and…just to know they’re out there. Because one of the airplanes in a squadron almost hit one.”
VA: “On the East Coast?”
DF: “Yeah, yeah. It went about like a hundred feet down the side. They were in section and it went down the side and they just came back and said it looks like a ball with cube inside of it. Almost like a square that has an aura around it. So, at what point do you go, ‘Hey maybe we outta, check this out.’
Christopher Mellon appeared on Fox News Channel with Tucker Carlson in March of 2018. Was he referencing the Gimbal incident?
“After my Op Ed appeared with video, I got a call from an individual retired from the defense department, and who had worked on these issues. And I asked him…I said, ‘Do you have any context for that video? Do you have any details?’ He told me that was one of two videos that came into the Pentagon from the commander of a carrier battle group. And these are his words. He described it as, ‘a plea for help.'”
The video that appeared in Mellon’s Op Ed in the Washington Post is of the Go Fast UFO. That video has been connected to the Gimbal video which took place off the East Coast of Florida in 2015. So, the “plea for help” seems to be related to those two videos/incidents. And now that we know one of the jets almost hit a UFO, it makes sense that the commander was seeking assistance for a very dangerous situation. Once again, how is this not a national security issue? Or at the very least, a safety issue for our servicemen and servicewomen?
I think the Gimbal and Go Fast videos and surrounding incidents/details that are connected to those sightings will turn out to be some of the most important events in modern Ufology. I base that opinion on what Fravor said and what Elizondo told George Knapp on July 15th, 2017, on Coast to Coast AM:
“I think, when you hear the pilots talking, you’re talking about an object that is at 25,000 feet and it is orientating itself at a 90° angle and 120 knot headwinds. Now, aircraft fly…they are a function of their design. An airplane flies in the atmosphere. It has a nose. It has a tail. It has an engine. And it has a definitive shape because it has to fly in the atmosphere. It has to have a leading edge. It has to have ailerons and all the things you would normally characterize and associate with an aircraft. In this particular case, you have something that has no exhaust…something that has no obvious wing surfaces. And something that was orientating itself at a 90° angle without falling out of the sky! It doesn’t lose altitude! And in fact, it’s still doing it moving in a forwarded direction. Now, what makes it even more interesting is when you hear the audio. The individual says there’s an entire fleet of them. I cannot go into detail why that’s important. I hope at some point, the details of that will come out but it will not come out from me. It isn’t just one. And if you know the back story behind that incident – you’re just looking at a very short video maybe 30, 35 seconds worth – but there’s an entire story, weeks & weeks & weeks worth that go behind that video. And that is what’s so compelling. And if those details should come out, I think that’s gonna be the ‘A Ha’ moment, the epiphany, so 2 speak, where people are going to look and say, ‘Holy smokes! That really IS an important video! That’s not just some blurry thing on the screen.’”
Fravor said he was told that one of the objects related to the Gimbal looked, “like a ball with a cube inside of it. Almost like a square that has an aura around it.” That’s the first time I’ve heard of that type of UFO. Earlier this year a source mentioned a new type of UFO related to the Gimbal and I’m assuming this is it.
And finally…
Did it resemble this? And is resistance futile?
Borg Cube
aatip, aiello, cap, Elizondo, fighter pilot, fravor, knapp, nyt, pilot, slaight, tic tac, uap, ufo
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