David Fravor
| David Fravor |
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David Fravor (born c. 1964) is a retired United States Navy commander and fighter pilot with a 24-year military career, who is most widely known as the primary eyewitness to the 2004 Nimitz UAP incident of November 14, 2004, in which he and his flight crew observed a UAP — since designated the "Tic Tac UFO" — performing maneuvers beyond any known human technology.
Biography
Fravor enlisted in the United States Marine Corps before being recommended to attend the United States Naval Academy. He subsequently flew F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets for 18 years, attending the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun). At the time of the 2004 incident he was serving as commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41), the "Black Aces," aboard USS Nimitz. He later graduated from the Naval War College and received the Legion of Merit with Combat "V" device.
The 2004 Tic Tac encounter
Radar background
For approximately two weeks prior to November 14, 2004, the USS Princeton — the Aegis cruiser accompanying the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group — had been tracking anomalous aerial objects on its SPY-1 radar. The objects would drop from above 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in seconds, hover for hours, then return to altitude; none of this activity was relayed to the air wing.
Visual encounter
On November 14, 2004, approximately 60 miles off the coast between San Diego and Ensenada, Mexico, the Princeton controller cancelled a training exercise and issued Fravor's section a real-world intercept vector. Fravor and his wingman — a female pilot and their respective WSOs in two F/A-18F Super Hornets — were told nothing of the two-week radar contacts before being dispatched.
At altitude they observed disturbed white water at the sea surface — roughly the size of a Boeing 737 — with a white, elongated object hovering just above it. The object was approximately 40 feet long, with no wings, no rotors, no exhaust plume, and no visible control surfaces. It moved radically in all four lateral directions with no apparent inertia.
Fravor descended to intercept; the object mirrored his banking maneuver, ascending as he descended. When he cut across the circle to close on it, the object crossed his nose and vanished instantaneously — reported by the wingman from 8,000 feet above. The Princeton controller then reported that the object had reappeared at the combat air patrol holding point — approximately 60 miles away — within roughly 30 to 40 seconds.
FLIR1 video
A subsequent sortie by a second F/A-18F crew, carrying an ATFLIR targeting pod, obtained infrared footage of the object. The radar attempted to lock the target but was actively jammed; the back-seater switched to a passive FLIR track, producing the footage later known as the FLIR1 video. The video shows no exhaust plume in either infrared or optical modes; the object departs the pod's field of view at high speed with no detectable propulsion signature. The Pentagon released the video in April 2020 as an officially declassified U.S. Navy recording.
Fravor's assessment
Fravor has stated consistently that the object displayed capability beyond any aircraft in human inventory, describing it as "a 40-foot long tic tac that can move at will through the air at speeds well beyond what we've ever witnessed." He has explicitly ruled out conventional explanations — helicopter, balloon, or drone — on the basis of the object's observed performance characteristics and the absence of any propulsion signature. He does not publicly commit to an extraterrestrial explanation, characterizing the incident purely in terms of observed physics. Steven Greer has claimed that he spoke directly with Fravor after being connected through Sully Erna, lead singer of Godsmack, who happened to be Fravor's neighbor — Erna's daughter had backed into Fravor's mailbox, leading to the introduction. Greer told Fravor the Tic Tac was a Lockheed Skunk Works craft, and claims that "very recently a Lockheed executive admitted to David Fravor, that was theirs."
Public disclosure
The incident was not publicly known for thirteen years. In December 2017, The New York Times published a front-page investigation featuring Fravor's testimony alongside the declassified FLIR1 footage, the first major mainstream U.S. newspaper disclosure of a Navy UAP case. Fravor has stated that Luis Elizondo, then head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), approached him to participate in the article.
On July 26, 2023, Fravor testified before the House Oversight Committee at a historic open hearing on UAP, alongside David Grusch and Ryan Graves. His testimony drew attention as the only account at that hearing based on a direct, first-hand visual observation of an unidentified object by a credentialed military pilot.