David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #122

“a conversation with Commander David Fravor, who was a Navy pilot for 18 years”

“the Black Aces, a squadron of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people”

“from my perspective as a curious scientist and an open-minded human being is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at least that I'm aware of”

“His story corroborated by several other pilots”

“I went through in 97, Class 4, 97”

“first I was in, I was enlisted. I was a Marine.”

“the Marines actually sent me, recommended me to go to the Naval Academy. So... I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished”

“since 1969 when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. At that point, I asked my mom... I was just prior to being five”

“i ended up getting a6s on the west coast which is a side-by-side bomber so it's a pilot on the left seat and the bombardier navigators on the right seat it was built in the 60s”

“I started off an A6, was a two-seater. Then I went to single-seat F-18s, and I flew those all the way up until 2000 and... to the end of 2001. And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets, and I've flown both of those, the E's and the S”

“when I had command of VFA-41, I had the two-seat. They were F-squadron.”

“So the Tic Tac's coming up and I'm at about, and I've been doing this for, at the time, 16 years.”

“So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton... they started noticing on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around at 28,000 feet with speed of what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an hour... but on the coast of California.”

“They're telling us they have a contact on their radar. They don't know what it is. They just have a blip... I said, sir, we've been tracking these things for about two weeks... He goes, this is the first time we've had planes airborne. We want you to go see what these are.”

“So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train, and they canceled the mission. And they sent us”

“If you look at a map and you go San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we're kind of in between that and we're probably about, By the time this all hits, we're priced, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know, but somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast.”

“this is a it's a clear day there's no clouds and there's no white caps it's just a calm it's actually a perfect day if you own a sailboat it was that five to ten knots of wind”

“the white water and i like to shape it you can say it was a cross i say it's about the size of a 737 so it looks like if you took a 737 put it about 15 20 feet below the water so the wave is breaking over the top and you're going to get white water where the plane is at you'd see this this kind of shape so it looks like a cross”

“And then we see this little white tic-tac, because we're about 20,000 feet above it.”

“Smooth, white. tic-tac you know we don't you don't see there's no no wings no visible propulsion no windows no probes that we could see”

“And it's doing, it's going basically north, south, and then east, west, north. And it's abrupt. It's very abrupt. So it's not like a helicopter... This thing's not. It's like left, right, left, right, with no...”

“I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering, because I have everything available to me at that speed.”

“I get to probably, I'm probably about a half mile away, which you think, well, a half mile is pretty far. Half mile in aviation isn't, it's nothing... You can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile. You can see pretty good detail.”

“So as I do this, it goes, it just accelerates and disappears... it just, it accelerates in literally in less than, you know, probably less than a half second. It just goes, and it's gone.”

“Now you gotta remember this whole thing is like, this is like five minutes. This is not like a, we saw it and it was gone... We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers to watch this thing fly around.”

“I go, let's see what's down here. And I turn around, we're looking for the whitewater and we can't even, the whitewater's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue.”

“the controller, because we're talking to the kid on the Princeton. They're called OSs. They're operations specialists. They're the ones that run the radars... that thing is at your cap. it showed back up it just popped up you know this is like 60 miles away it just reappears”

“There is no video from our event. It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing. And then when we came back and told it, when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when Chad got the video of it.”

“He locks it up when he goes to lock it up. Now he's putting a bunch of energy on it, but he's telling the radar, stare down that line of sight... build a track file on it, which will tell us how high it is, how fast it is in the direction that it's going... it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed.”

“There was no plume, no IR, no visible propulsions, even heat signature.”

“when you see it, because he's coming almost co-altitude with it, you can see the bottom of it. It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a Cessna, there's little antennas hanging out of the bottom... There's two little things out of the bottom. There's nothing on the top.”

“there's a rumor too that, oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long... The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds long. What you see on the release video is the entire video.”

“the intel officers came down from what's called civic cvic which is carrier intel center came down and said, hey, we need the tapes. These guys are gonna come, they're gonna come and get them... someone came to me and said, you know, they're messing with you, they're playing a joke.”

“No one ever came out in suits to talk to us... No, no one came out on a helicopter. No one came out on an airplane.”

“when they did the unofficial official investigation in about 2000 and let me think about 2009 um i'd gotten a call on my cell phone from a guy who government employee... we're gonna investigate your Tic Tac thing. This is literally five years later.”

“he does the report. He sent me the report... Please don't distribute this report... The report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp. And they were good enough to redact it, but there's a few versions of it unredacted.”

“Lou Elizondo, as you mentioned, was a program director. David Fravor: He ran the AATIP program at the Pentagon. Lex Fridman: And AATIP was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of UFOs, UAPs.”

“the original stuff that AATIP did was FOIA exempt. and people go how do you know that i go because i stood there with the memo in my hand... i watched the dod memo that said it and it was signed”

“The two other videos, Go Fast and Gimbal, were recorded in 2000 something, 14 or 15. on the East Coast of the United States that had different kinds of objects, but they were weird in the same kind of way”

“there's at least 60 people that have seen these things on radar off the vacates.”

“this thing passed between two airplanes and it was, I think it was like 100 feet or something like that of the airplane that almost hit it... This floating beach ball with this cube inside of it.”

“let's assume that it didn't have a conventional propulsion system in it, because I don't think it did, I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds ... then it would start coming out. But to hide something like that for 16 years”

“these things were coming down when the cruiser tractor from above 80,000 feet, which is space. And they would come down and they would come straight down. They'd hang out at like 20,000 feet. And then three or four hours later, they'd go back up.”

“I think you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to total. And that includes the newspapers and stuff. And I've been selective because there's so much. I mean, I turned down Russian TV.”

“if i take money like bezos money elon money and they let's just say they want to work together they can split it up 50 50 ... now i'm not constrained by who has to do the work”