David Fravor

David Fravor commanded Strike Fighter Squadron 41 on the USS Nimitz in November 2004. On 14 November, directed by the cruiser USS Princeton toward a radar track off Baja California, he and three other aviators saw a white oblong object about forty feet long moving erratically above a patch of disturbed water. When he descended toward it, he said, it rose to meet him and then accelerated away faster than anything he had seen; the Princeton then reported it at the pre-set rendezvous point sixty miles away. A second flight recorded the object with a targeting pod, producing the video released in 2017.

Fravor has repeated this account under oath before the House Oversight subcommittee in July 2023, and it is corroborated by the other three aviators in the flight, by Princeton radar operators and by the FLIR1 video. What the object was is not settled. Fravor has said he does not know and has rejected explanations such as a distant airliner or a parallax illusion; sceptics have argued the video alone is consistent with a conventional aircraft.

The corpus does not interview Fravor but discusses the Nimitz encounter in several episodes, chiefly through Ryan Graves, who recounts a squadron brief in which Fravor described the object, and through physicists who use the reported accelerations as a test case. The knowledge base records the sighting as documented testimony from multiple military witnesses and treats the identity of the object as open.