David Fravor, former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, describes little-known details about the Tic Tac UFO he encountered in 2004, and dismisses some of the explanations that have been offered since the story was reported by the New York Times in Dec. 2017. Previously unaired interview from May 18, 2019. Second of 3 Parts.
George Knapp: Dave, we’ve seen the video clip, the world has seen the video clip and there’s speculation that there’s a lot more. Is there?
David Fravor: No, the video clip that has been posted — it’s about a minute and 30 seconds — that is the entire video. There is not a … there’s people there saying, oh, they saw a 10 minute video, and they saw this … There were two … there’s two tapes in the airplane. One is the video that you saw. The other one was taped on the other side. There’s two displays in the airplane that are taped at that time. You can tape all of them, but you can only pick two. So, it was the left one. That’s the targeting pod that you see. The right side is the radar, which I have seen. I’ve seen them both on high-res, big screens. And the right one never got copied because they usually don’t use that because it was just showing the radar being jammed. And the folks in intel, you know, the petty officers in intel, they don’t understand what that means. To us it meant a lot because it showed a capability that was just literally crushing the APG 73 which is the old mechanically scanned radar that we had in the Super Hornet.
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Knapp: What it also showed … some other details that’s generally not known to the public.
Fravor: No. When you when you see it up close … when it gets to the end, you know, because they’re driving at this thing. When he goes to those, screen’s white, the little object’s black, when you zoom in, when you see it on a big screen, there’s actually two small things sticking out of the bottom of the Tic Tac. They kind of come down just like “L”s. Like little feet sticking out. Those you can see on high-res. You don’t see ’em because it’s been copied so many times. And you think, “Oh, digital, we don’t lose any …” You always lose quality when you copy. Ones and zeros get misplaced and so you get degraded video.
Knapp: A lot of different theories about what it is. It’s flares. It’s birds, it’s plane exhaust. It’s kind of an insult to a guy like you, highest clearances in our government, flying a $70 million plane, the best of the best, and that you don’t know what a bird is out there.
Fravor: No, you know, it’s I think there’s a big misconception that we took the video The video was taken by a crew after us when we came back and landed. There were four of us. We chased it visually. And I looked at it for over five minutes. I watched it moving around. I watched it interact with me, I cut across the circle when it disappeared. So it’s not a bird. It’s not a weather balloon. It had no wings, it had no rotors, there was no wash. You may have heard all the Internet, you know, people, what it is. Most of them have no idea what they’re talking about. And the four of us will to this day tell you that we have no idea what we saw, as far as where it was from or what it was. But it had incredible performance characteristics that were well beyond brand new Super Hornets right out of the factory, which is what the jets were we were flying.
NEXT STORY: Navy pilot on Tic Tac details: What was in the water? — Part 3
