FigureDavid Fravor (b. 1962)

United States Naval Academy 1984. Naval aviator across 18 years of active service; commanding officer of strike fighter squadron VFA-41 “Black Aces” aboard the carrier USS Nimitz during the November 2004 Pacific work-up cycle. On 14 November 2004, Fravor and his wingman Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight were vectored from a routine training intercept by the air-defense controllers aboard the cruiser USS Princeton to investigate radar contacts the Princeton’s SPY-1 radar had been tracking intermittently for several days — contacts that had appeared at altitude 28,000 feet and descended in seconds to ~50 feet above the ocean, motion incompatible with any known platform. At the intercept point south of Catalina Island, Fravor and Slaight visually observed a white object approximately 40 feet long, smooth surface, no wings or exhaust, hovering above an area of disturbed water. Fravor descended toward the object; as he closed, the object accelerated and disappeared at a rate he described as “instantaneous.” He returned to the cruise altitude and the Princeton’s radar relocated the object at the next CAP point, 60 miles away, in seconds. The wing aircraft of the following intercept — Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich and her WSO Lt. Cmdr. Mike Day — captured the FLIR1 video subsequently released by the Pentagon in April 2020.

Fravor was the named on-record source for the 16 December 2017 New York Times article (“Glowing Auras and Black Money”) by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean — the first time he spoke publicly about the encounter, 13 years after the event. He testified under oath before the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation on 17 May 2022 (the first congressional UAP hearing in over 50 years). He appeared again on 26 July 2023 before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security alongside David Grusch and Ryan Graves. Fravor’s public-record position is that the object he encountered exhibited capabilities outside U.S. or peer-adversary engineering envelopes; he has not advocated a specific origin hypothesis. He retired from active service in 2006; his Joe Rogan appearance in November 2019 (#1361) and his October 2023 Lex Fridman appearance (#400) are the most-cited long-form interviews.