MYSTERY WIRE — Paco Chierici knew it for years as “the best bar story ever:” The Tic Tac UFO. He had heard the story directly from U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor “in a bar having drinks” seven or eight years earlier.

When he had the opportunity, he wanted to tell it to a bigger audience.

That opportunity came in 2015 when Chierici, a former Navy fighter pilot and author of “Lions in the Sky,” became the editor of the online magazine Fighter Sweep.

When Chierici called his longtime fellow pilot, Fravor told him that investigators from the Office of Naval Investigations had just left after interviewing him, 11 years after the initial report of a UFO sighting during operations off the coast of Mexico, near San Diego.

Chierici got his hands on a report that was chock full of information. He now believes that report was produced by AATIP — the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

He wrote the first story about the incident: “There I Was: The X-Files Edition.”

Chierici recounts the experience above in a Dec. 9 interview with Jim Breslo on the “Hidden Truth” show. The full video from YouTube appears above. In the excerpt below, Chierici talks about where he got the information:

Chierici: As far as I understand, this was an AATIP report, because it was never released, and it was FOIA exempt — Freedom of Information … An ONI report would not be FOIA exempt.
Breslo: So in other words, this may have been a different investigation than the Navy investigation?
Chierici: No, it’s the same, it’s just that they said they were ONI. That’s my understanding, I don’t know what the truth behind that is. I have absolutely no proof on that other than it was not …
Breslo: OK, so sorry, so as you sit here today, you believe that when Fravor was contacted in ’15, really that was a result of AATIP investigating this incident.
Chierici: That’s my guess. Yeah. That’s the only thing I can come up with.

Does Chierici believe everything Fravor reported?

“UFO stories have always been a little bit … “fringy” … tough to believe,” he says. “But after reading this (report), I’m convinced that this event happened.”

The 2004 incident is not an isolated case, according to Fravor and others who have investigated UFOs.