[Congressional staffer]: Can you provide us a specific example of an object that can’t be explained as having been human made or natural?— Scott Bray
[Bray]: I mean the example that I would say is still unresolved, that I think everyone understands quite well is the 2004 incident from [the USS] Nimitz [aircraft carrier]. We have data on that, and it simply remains unresolved...
Deputy Director Navy Intelligence
5/17/2022 | Congressional hearings
The most compelling case is the [USS] Nimitz case. Because you have so many witnesses and so many sensors and the FLIR [video] is part of that, but you have to look at the whole case. You have to talk to all the pilots involved [Commander Fravor and Lt. Dietrich and their backseat Weapons Systems Officers], which I have done. You have to talk to the radar operators on the [USS] Princeton [Kevin Day and Gary Voorhis]. There's also radar operators up on the E2C Hawkeye which was up there monitoring this... Then you have this third F/A-18 [pilot Lt. Underwood] that goes up and takes that [FLIR] video. So there is a lot of different information from a lot of different sources and the thing is, it is all perfectly congruent. It all hangs together. No one is contradicting someone else's story. And what people are seeing is what the sensors are reporting. So that case overall is the most compelling to my mind.— Christopher Mellon
Dep. Asst. Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
5/30/2021 | The Joe Rogan Experience
We were off the coast of San Diego, USS Nimitz carrier strike group was getting ready to go on deployment. At around the evening of the tenth of November 2004, all these contacts were popping up on my radar coverage right off Catalina Island right by Los Angeles. At first there were ten or twelve objects. Watching them on the display was like watching snow fall from the sky. Their relative position didn't change from each other moving real slow, 28,000 feet at 100 knots, which is extremely weird. Usually things that high don't travel that slowly because they'll fall out of the sky...— Kevin Day
Senior Chief, US Navy
Lead radar operator USS Princeton
The SPY [radar] guys came down and said 'Oh we got clutter'... Asked me to reset all the computer systems. Brought it all back up and lo and behold, they're there still. Then we started getting confirmation from the other ships that they were seeing it too. We were just seeing three tracks. Sometimes they were only going a couple hundred knots, sometimes they were stationary, sometimes they were going really fast. The way they went around us, it looked like they were just monitoring us.— Gary Voorhis
Petty Officer, US Navy
Radar technician USS Princeton
[The Aegis SPY-1 radar] eliminated the possibility that it could have been friendly aircraft of some kind, enemy aircraft of some kind. Nothing really fit... I was just chomping at the bit. I really wanted to intercept these things... All of a sudden this object drops 28,000 feet down to the surface, and I figured it out later, it was 0.78 seconds. [24,000 miles per hour, more than 30x speed of sound]. Captain said ok let's go intercept one and I said hell yeah.— Kevin Day
Senior Chief, US Navy
Lead radar operator USS Princeton
We were operating off the coast of California in a designated working area with our carrier strike group. We had launched to perform a practice flight against each other. Clear blue skies, middle of the day. We were interrupted by a ship born controller. The tone was urgent. Their requests were unusual. 'This is not an exercise, this is a real world intercept.'— Alex Dietrich
Lieutenant, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot
We grabbed one of the flights that was doing a check flight off the carrier. It happened to be Commander Fravor's flight. They got into an area which we call merge plot, where the pilot is in the visual arena with whatever they are intercepting.— Kevin Day
Senior Chief, US Navy
Lead radar operator USS Princeton
There was something in the water... There was churning... We were all clamoring to get on the radio. 'Do you see, in the water, what the f* is that?.' No windows. No flight surfaces. Smooth. White. No intakes. No smoke trails. It looked like a giant Tic Tac. Maybe 40 feet. Large enough to scare the crap out of me. It was so unnerving because it was so unpredictable. High g[-force turns], rapid velocity, rapid acceleration, so you're thinking 'How can I possibly fight this?'...— Alex Dietrich
[Commander Fravor] had that fighting instinct, so it wasn't surprising his actions on that day. This object seemed to recognize that we were there and went from low altitude to maneuvering in an erratic very rapid manner. The hair on the back of my neck is standing up. I am thinking I am going to be watching a disaster.
Lieutenant, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot
I wanted to see what it was. If I could have joined right up on it and gotten Blue Angel close, then I probably would have done that...— David Fravor
Commander, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot and Black Aces Squadron Commander
It's about 40 feet long. It's white. It has no wings. It has no rotors. It has no control surfaces. Think of a white Tic Tac.— David Fravor
Commander, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot and Black Aces Squadron Commander
This thing would go instantaneous from one way to another similar to if you threw a ping pong ball against a wall. And we start to kind of orbit because we are going to watch this thing... It is still doing its erratic thing around this disturbance in the water and I say 'Hey, I am going to go check it out, I am going to go down there'... And all of a sudden it goes [zip] and it kind of turns, now it's mirroring us, it seems to know we are here... It goes from almost a hover, to a pretty aggressive climb up to our altitude. So now there is a bit of fear because you have no idea what it is. It is actually reacting to what we are doing.— David Fravor
Commander, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot and Black Aces Squadron Commander
Pilots are screaming and everyone on the radio is screaming.— Kevin Day
Senior Chief, US Navy
Lead radar operator USS Princeton
2021 | In Plain Sight, p 141
Oh god. I'm engaged. I'm engaged. Oh shit.— David Fravor
Commander, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot and Black Aces Squadron Commander
11/14/2004 | In Plain Sight, p 141
I kind of pull a nose to where he is going to be, he just rapidly accelerates beyond anything that I have ever seen, crosses my nose, and it's gone. And I'm like 'woah'... The controller from the [USS] Princeton comes up right as we are doing all this and says 'Hey sir, you are not going to believe this. That thing is at your CAP [combat air patrol] point.' You got something that can accelerate and disappear and then show up 60 miles away [> 3,600 mph]. Kind of in awe a little bit because we don't have that...— David Fravor
Commander, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot and Black Aces Squadron Commander
So your mind tries to make sense of it. I'm going to categorize this as maybe a helicopter or maybe a drone and when it disappeared I mean it was just...— Alex Dietrich
Lieutenant, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot
5/16/2021 | 60 Minutes
It was there... then it rifled out of sight in a split second. It was as if the object was shot out of a rifle. There was no gradual acceleration or spooling up period, it just shot out of sight immediately. I have never seen anything like it before or since. No human could have withstood that kind of acceleration.— Jim Slaight
Lt. Commander, US Navy
Weapons System Officer
2021 | In Plain Sight, p 142
[It went] right back up to 28,000 feet... At that point you've got your other aircraft launching off the carrier, and all these other intercepts were happening. Before I knew it, I had these objects raining out of the sky. Choo choo choo choo choo, it was raining UFOs. I am telling you it was the most humbling experience of my life.— Kevin Day
Senior Chief, US Navy
Lead radar operator USS Princeton
The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving. And what I mean by erratic is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I've ever encountered before flying against other air targets. It was just behaving in ways that aren't physically normal. That's what caught my eye. Because aircraft, whether they are manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some propulsion. The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, 100 feet in like seconds, which is not possible.— Chad Underwood
Lieutenant, US Navy
F/A-18 Pilot
2019 | In Plain Sight, p 145
This thing was going berserk, like making turns. It is incredible the amount of g-forces that it would have put on a human. It made a maneuver like they were chasing it straight on, it was going with them, then this thing stopped turning, just gone. In an instant. The [FLIR] video you see now, that's just a small snippet in the beginning of the whole video.— Jason Turner
Petty Officer
USS Princeton
2021 | In Plain Sight, p 146