David Fravor

David Fravor is a retired U.S. Navy commander who enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 before transferring to the Naval Academy and building a 24-year career as a Navy fighter pilot, including combat sorties during Operation Desert Storm, and eventually commanding Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41), the 'Black Aces,' aboard the USS Nimitz. On November 14, 2004, while flying a training mission roughly 100 miles southwest of San Diego, Fravor and his weapons systems officer, vectored by the cruiser USS Princeton after days of anomalous radar tracks, encountered a roughly 40-foot white, wingless, oblong object hovering above disturbed ocean water; Fravor descended to engage, and the object matched his maneuver before accelerating away and disappearing in under a second, only to reappear on Princeton's radar at the flight's pre-briefed rendezvous point 60 miles distant minutes later. The encounter, corroborated by wingman Alex Dietrich and radar operator Kevin Day, became public in the New York Times' 2017 AATIP story and the associated FLIR1 infrared video, and Fravor became the case's most prominent and consistent narrator, testifying under oath before the House Oversight Committee in July 2023. His calm, technically detailed public account, delivered by an unimpeachably credentialed combat aviator, has made the 'Tic Tac' encounter the single most-cited case of the modern UAP era.