Unidentified: Naval Pilot's Shocking UFO Encounter (Season 1) | History

NARRATOR: On November 14, 2004, Commander David Fravor and his

pilot

took off from the USS Nimitz, which was conducting maneuvers south of San Diego. DAVID FRAVOR: I was the commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41, the Black Aces. We were flying new Super Hornets. It was an air defense exercise, two good guys against two bad guys, probably 70 or 60 miles offshore in the gap between San Diego and Ensenada. NARRATOR: Suddenly, the

pilot

s are contacted by radar operators on the Princeton. DAVID FRAVOR: Princeton control comes over and says, we're going to suspend training. We have real world tasks. NARRATOR: The pilots are redirected to a new destination but are not told why.

Then we started heading west. The other plane is to my left. 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. And we're talking to each other, trying to figure this out. NARRATOR: 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 planes fly blind. We're trying to see what was out there, which is hard 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 go down, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20. Go all the way down. They reach a point where they cannot separate us from the problem. They call it a fusion plot, which means you're in the same space as what you're looking for and you have 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 submerged submarine. But the weapons officer in the back seat of Fravor's plane sees something else. Hey, hey, Skipper, do you see it? And as he said that, I noticed the Tic Tac.

It is white. It has no wings. It does not have rotors. I go, holy man, what is that? And he says, 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 remains near the surface, moving like the pilots have never seen before. This thing would instantly go back and forth, similar to throwing a ping pong ball against a wall. And we start orbiting, because now we're going to observe this thing. We begin a right turn, and we go from a time code.

The object is in the middle of the clock. And we are at 6 o'clock. And we're going around in circles. So we get to 9 o'clock and it's still doing its little erratic thing, like moving around this disturbance in the water. And I'm like, hey, I'm going to go check it out. I'm going down there. As we went down very easily, we reached approximately the 12 o'clock position. And suddenly he says, brrp, then turns. And now it is reflecting us and beginning to emerge. We thought, OK, now he knows we're here. He seemed to be conscious. And he seems to recognize it.

Basically, it goes from almost a hover to a pretty aggressive climb up to our altitude. So there's a little bit of fear because now you're dealing with something that you have no idea what it is. It's actually reacting to what we're doing. I'm kind of getting closer to where it's going to be. And he's just coming up. He just accelerates rapidly beyond anything he's ever seen, crosses my nose and disappears. And I say, wow! NARRATOR: The Tic Tac seems to have disappeared. But as the planes head toward a prearranged rendezvous location known as a CAP point, the radio chatter becomes frantic.

The Princeton controller walks up just as we were doing all this and says, hey, sir, you're not going to believe this, he says, but that thing is on his CAP point. NARRATOR: According to Fravor, the Tic Tac accelerated from a standing position and flew approximately 60 miles in less than a minute, at a speed of 3,700 miles per hour. How did Tic Tac know the pilot's CAP point? And how did he accelerate so fast? DAVID FRAVOR: You have something that can accelerate and disappear and then appear 60 miles away. A little amazed, because you're like, wow, we don't have that, you know.

And I'm talking... we're flying one of the best airplanes on the planet. What was this? There is a capacity out there. I don't know where it's from. I'm not saying it's from outer space, but I'm not saying it's from here either. NARRATOR: Back on El Nimitz, the pilots tell the rest of the squadron what just happened. DAVID FRAVOR: The next team was getting ready. So we are talking to you about this. And they say, you've got to be kidding me. They took us seriously. And the OSM, the guy in the back seat, said, I'm going to go get him.

NARRATOR: The following planes launch toward a targeting pod with an infrared sensor and camera. DAVID FRAVOR: He disrupted the radar, but he identified it. And that is the video you see. If that doesn't scare you, then I don't know what does.