[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: On November 14, 2004, Commander David Fravor
and his wingman pilot took off from the USS
Nimitz, which was on maneuvers south of San Diego.
DAVID FRAVOR: I was the commanding officer
of Strike Fighter Squadron 41, the Black Aces.
We were flying brand new Super Hornets.
It was an air defense exercise, two good guys
against two bad guys, probably 70 miles,
60 miles off the coast in the gap
between San Diego and Ensenada.
NARRATOR: Suddenly, the pilots are contacted by radar
operators on the Princeton.
DAVID FRAVOR: The Princeton control comes up and says,
we're going to suspend training.
We have real world tasking.
NARRATOR: The pilots are re-vectored
to a new destination but aren't told why.
So we start heading off to the west.
The other airplane is on my left-hand side.
I was the junior pilot, trying to keep up
with the senior pilot in the lead aircraft.
DAVID FRAVOR: We're looking.
And we don't see anything on the radars at all.
And we're talking to each other, trying to figure this out.
NARRATOR: The Princeton's Aegis Spy 1 radar system
is powerful enough to track an object as small as a baseball
at an altitude of 80,000 feet.
But the jets are flying blind.
We're trying to see what was out there,
which is difficult when you know what you're looking for.
It's even harder when you don't know what you're looking for.
DAVID FRAVOR: So it goes down, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20.
It gets all the way down.
They get to a point where they can't
separate us from the blip.
They call it merge plot, which means you're in the same space
as whatever you're looking for, and you've
got to start looking outside because the radar
can't help you anymore.
NARRATOR: And far below in the water,
they see what looks like a plane crash
or a submerging submarine.
[RADIO CHATTER]
But the weapons officer in the rear seat of Fravor's jet
spots something else.
I hear, hey, Skipper, do you see?
And as he's saying that, I noticed the Tic Tac.
It's white.
It has no wings.
It has no rotors.
I go, holy, what is that?
And he goes, I don't know.
NARRATOR: According to this leaked summary of the incident,
contact was made here, 30 miles off the coast,
70 miles south of the US-Mexico border.
At first, the strange craft stays close to the surface,
moving unlike anything the pilots had ever seen.
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 now we're
going to watch this thing.
We start a right-hand turn, and we're going from a clock code.
The object is in the middle of the clock.
And we're at 6 o'clock.
And we're driving around in circles.
So we get to about 9 o'clock, and it's just still doing
its little erratic thing, kind of moving around
this disturbance in the water.
And I go, hey, I'm going to go check it out.
I'm going down there.
As we're coming down nice easy, we reach
about the 12 o'clock position.
And all of a sudden, it goes, brrp, then it kind of turns.
And now it's mirroring us, and it starts coming up.
We're like, OK, now it knows we're here.
It seemed to be aware.
And it seems to recognize him.
It goes from basically just almost
a hover into a pretty aggressive climb up to our altitude.
So then there's a bit of fear because now, you're
out there dealing with something that you
have no idea what it is.
It's actually reacting to what we're doing.
I kind of pull a nose, you know, to where he's going to be.
And he's just coming up.
He just rapidly accelerates beyond anything
that I've ever seen, crosses my nose, and it's gone.
And I'm like, whoa.
NARRATOR: The Tic Tac appears to have vanished.
But as the jets streak towards a prearranged rendezvous location
known as the CAP point, the radio chatter becomes frantic.
The controller from the Princeton
comes up right as we're doing all this and says,
hey, sir, you're not going to believe this,
he goes, but that thing is at your CAP point.
NARRATOR: According to Fravor, the Tic Tac
accelerated from a standing position
and flew approximately 60 miles in under a minute,
as fast as 3,700 miles an hour.
How did the Tic Tac know the pilot's CAP point?
And how did it accelerate so quickly?
DAVID FRAVOR: You've got something
that can accelerate and disappear
and then show up 60 miles away.
Kind of in awe a little bit, because you go,
whoa, we don't have that, you know.
And I'm talking-- we're flying one of the premier airplanes
on the planet.
What was this?
There is a capability out there.
Don't know where it's from.
Not saying it's from outer space, but not saying it's
from here either.
NARRATOR: Back on The Nimitz, the pilots
tell the rest of the squadron what just happened.
DAVID FRAVOR: The next crew was getting ready.
So we're talking to them about this.
And they're like, you've got to be kidding.
They took us seriously.
And the WSO, the guy in the back seat,
said, I'm going to go find it.
NARRATOR: The next jets launch at a targeting pod with
an infrared sensor and camera.
DAVID FRAVOR: It jammed the radar, but he got a lock on it.
And that's the video that you see.
If that doesn't weird you out, then I don't know what does.