David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #122
Lex Fridman8 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2020–2022
podcast · general · evergreen · 2020–2022 on HN
Lex Fridman interviews Navy pilot David Fravor, a primary witness of the 2004 Tic Tac UFO encounter, about the sighting, military aviation and aerospace engineering. The conversation runs close to four hours.
HN commenters send people here for a detailed first-hand account from the pilot, and some say it changed their view on the sightings.
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12 comments from Hacker News
Lex did one [1] with the same pilot that saw the ufo (commander fravor). I went from "no friggin way do they exist" to "shit... it actually sounds plausible". [1] ▶ this video
You should check the interviews (there are several, including a 60 minutes) with the pilot David Fravor (1). There are two pilots and two wizards that saw the same with their own eyes (even I have only see the other pilot confirming it). That's an UFO. That doesn't mean that it's extraterrestrial. To say that it's extraterrestrial at this point, is, in my opinion, so ridiculous like to say that there is nothing to explain (like the author of the article seems to believe). (1) - ▶ this video (this is a great interview interesting in its own right, even without the UFO part)
So actually Commander Fravor saw the object with his own eyes, he is one of the pilots who was sent in to engage the craft after it appeared on radar from the carrier group, here is a detailed video of him talking about the incident with Lex Fridman(AI reasearcher - MIT) on his podcast - ▶ this video
Here's a 60 Minutes piece discussing it: link Here's a 4 hour interview with the pilot, David Fravor, on Lex Fridman's show where he goes into much more detail than you'll probably read elsewhere: ▶ this video This wasn't just a single radar. It was an AEGIS system compromised of multiple ships with state of the art radars, multiple plane radars, and visual confirmation by several pilots. They were tracking it for multiple days.
Here's a _long_ conversation with one of the pilots with eye visibility that day, David Fravor, though I'm linking you to the start of that specific topic: ▶ this video
That article completely ignores the eyewitness testimony from the navy pilots of the Tic Tac incident where they visually identify that the Tic Tac: 1) can hover a few meters above the ocean without generating rotor downwash 2) can accelerate away at 100+g Both of those rule out any known drone or helicopter. David Fravor, one of the pilots, explains this in an interview here ▶ this video
Might be worth something to watch part of the Lex Fridman interview with one of the pilots, David Fravor. The entire podcast is four hours long and goes over his career and experiences, I'd argue establishes him as a competent naval officer and pilot. The timecode is when he describes the actual event- ▶ this video In the interview he also describes the record keeping process and basically some of the head scratchers you're bringing about. One other thing the pilot confirms in that interview is the validity (authenticity) of the leaked "Executive Summary" report, which, was leaked to media and (as far as I know) not really pursued for authenticity verification by others (PDF): link
I guess somebody had to cherry pick that line from the 3+ hour long interview, because it makes a good click-bait headline. But there's a lot more to the interview with Fravor than that. I still have over an hour of it left to watch, but I'd already say it's well worth watching. And don't get me wrong: I'm not some "UFO believer" or member of the "UFO community" or anything. I'm a skeptic by nature and I'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to some of the more radical claims made by ufologist types: the "extraterrestrial hypothesis" in particular. But Fravor does come off a very reasonable, intelligent, level-headed, sincere witness to something highly unusual. And he makes a point of distancing himself from claims of, as he puts it, "little green men". That said, he also allows that what he saw is not, as far as he knows, possible with any human technology. Net-net, if you enjoy this kind of thing, regardless of whether or not you have any pre-existing biases regarding what UFO's "really are", I'd recommend this podcast episode. At the very least, it's a chance to hear first-hand testimony by a very credible witness to something extraordinary. ▶ this video
We have video from the government that is matched with eye-witness testimony from David Fravor, a pilot who taught at the Navy's Top Gun school. I'm not suggesting this is iron-clad evidence of anything, but nothing about this incident (and others) has been "debunked". The first-hand account of one of the Navy's most accredited naval aviators along with matching video and sensor data more credible than some random person on Youtube who "debunks" it by saying it was the moon. If the evidence points to a phenomenon that doesn't operate inside the laws of physics as we understand them, then we have to adjust our understanding. Perhaps there are very good, mundane explanations for this and another incidents, but its foolish to simply ignore or downplay the significance of things we can't understand. link ▶ this video
For one thing, first-person accounts, which are notoriously inaccurate to begin with, don’t provide enough information for an empirical investigation. Scientists can’t accurately gauge distances or velocity from a pilot’s testimony: “It looked close” or “It was moving really fast” is too vague. What a scientist needs are precise measurements from multiple viewpoints provided by devices that register various wavelengths (visual, infrared, radar). That kind of data might tell us if an object’s motion required engines or materials that we Earthlings don’t possess. It's true that first-person accounts are sometimes inaccurate, but in the Nimitz case, we have, I believe, eight pilots in total who actually saw the object. The first incursion by David Fravor and his co-pilot Alex Dietrich and a second plane; and the second incursion - by other pilots which I don't know the names of - on which there's brief footage of the object[0]. Not only there's first-person accounts there's also devices which registered these objects. Nimitz caught these objects, in fact, they not only caught several of them, the incursions were made in order to check out what was going on. I wish these "devices can be faulty," (knowing that people actually looked at the object in loco ) "people can be bad first-person accounts" memes actually died once and for all in this particular case. It feels like people don't actually go out and do their due diligence. I feel people either aren't listening or paying atten
Those explanations are misguided and thunderfoot is just rehashing (badly) the points raised by Mike West. See commentary by David Fravor, one of the jet pilots in the incident ▶ this video
See David Fravor's commentary on the videos. He's one of the jet pilots from the Nimitz incident. ▶ this video Specifically in the Go fast video: ▶ this video The object is shown colder than the ocean; it can't be a bird.