David Fravor

Commander David Fravor was a career Navy fighter pilot with 18 years of service and over 3,500 flight hours when, on 14 November 2004, he encountered a Tic Tac-shaped object during a training exercise off the coast of San Diego. Flying an F/A-18F Super Hornet from the USS Nimitz, Fravor and his wingman Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich were vectored to investigate radar contacts that the USS Princeton had been tracking for two weeks.

What Fravor described was a white, featureless object roughly 40 feet long with no wings, no exhaust, and no visible propulsion. It was hovering over a churning patch of ocean. When Fravor descended to intercept, the object mirrored his manoeuvres, then accelerated away in less than two seconds, crossing to a CAP point 60 miles away that only Fravor's crew and the Princeton should have known about.

Fravor stayed quiet for over a decade. The story broke publicly in December 2017 when the New York Times revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Fravor's account, corroborated by multiple radar operators, FLIR footage, and Dietrich's independent testimony, became the single most cited military UAP encounter in modern history.

He testified before the House Oversight Committee on 26 July 2023, stating under oath that the technology he witnessed was "far superior" to anything in the US inventory.