A retired Navy pilot is offering new details about an unidentified flying object he saw in 2004 off the coast of San Diego, saying “it’s easy to doubt what we can’t explain.”
Retired Cmdr. David Fravor told CNN Tuesday night that the UFO was a “white object, oblong, pointing north, moving erratically” and that “as I got close to it … it rapidly accelerated to the south, and disappeared in less than two seconds.”
Fravor said he “looked at” the object “for somewhere around 5 minutes before it rapidly accelerated.”
“When helicopters move side to side, they kinda slow, and then they pick up speed going the other way,” he said. “This was extremely abrupt, like a ping-pong ball, bouncing off a wall. It would hit and go the other way.”
Fravor’s comments come days after a New York Times article reported the existence of a secret Pentagon office that tracked UFOs before it was shut down. Former Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., acknowledged steering $22 million in secret funding from 2007 to 2011 to an effort largely contracted to his friend, Nevada businessman Robert Bigelow. The program reportedly ended in 2012.
The reporting, along with a story that came out the same time in Politico, has flourished on social media and even made its way into the White House daily briefing on Tuesday.
A sidebar accompanying the New York Times article chronicled Fravor’s observations. He said the UFO hovered erratically about 50 feet above water. As he got closer, he told the Times, it ascended toward him, as though coming to meet halfway.
In the CNN interview, he described the craft’s “ability to hover over the water, and then start a vertical climb, from basically zero up towards about 12,000 feet, and then accelerate in less than two seconds, and disappear.”
“It's easy to doubt what we can't explain” – Commander David Fravor, a former U.S. Navy pilot, encountered an unknown flying object, calling it “something I had never seen in my life” https://t.co/SiPTYb2xM1 pic.twitter.com/mpaiudlnVL— OutFrontCNN (@OutFrontCNN) December 20, 2017
Fravor told the Times in an article published Saturday that after appearing to meet halfway, he decided to fly straight toward the object, abandoning a circular approach, and the UFO “accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
The Defense Department released video showing only parts of what Fravor says he witnessed.
The Times said a fellow pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight, was in a nearby two-seat F/A-18F Super Hornet and gave a similar account, but it’s unclear to whom.
Fravor told the Times a dispatcher had asked him to investigate an aircraft detected at 80,000 feet before plunging to 20,000 feet and hovering at that altitude before going lower and shooting straight back up.
In both the CNN and New York Times interviews, Fravor describes a wingless white craft. Fravor told CNN it was “oblong.”
