A witness who personally encountered one of the eerie and still unexplained objects that were sighted off the coast of the US in 2004 has revealed that the alleged UFO committed an "act of war".
Commander David Fravor, the pilot who is credited with having witnessed the Tic Tac-shaped object perform extraordinary aerial manoeuvres that human technology is incapable of, recently appeared on a podcast hosted by MIT research scientist Lex Fridman.
Touted by the host as "one of the most credible witnesses" in the history of UFO research, Fravor said the encounter lasted just a few minutes, with the flying craft seemingly reacting to pilots’ manoeuvres, turning on a dime and rendering itself invisible to radar.
"This is not like, 'we saw it and it was gone', or 'I saw lights in the sky and it's gone' - we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers", said the former pilot, who was flying a mission off the USS Nimitz when he spied the object.
Commander Fravor was dispatched to investigate the area after radar anomalies were detected there. The object reportedly travelled at a speed he had never seen before.
"There’s no propulsion, there’s no wings. It rapidly accelerates and disappears. Weirdest thing I have ever seen in my life", said Fravor.
The former pilot said he attempted to get closer to it, but once he got within a few hundred metres, it swiftly gathered speed and disappeared in half a second.
"I remember telling the guy in my back seat, 'Dude, I dunno about you but I'm pretty weirded out'".
After landing, Fravor narrated the encounter to another pilot, Chad Underwood, who was about to take off. Underwood also encountered the alleged UFO, aiming his radar at it. However, the device became jammed.
“He's telling the radar, 'Stare down the line of sight, whatever is there I want you to grab it and build a trace file on it', which will tell you where it is, how fast it is and the direction that it's going”, said Fravor.
According to the ex-pilot, radar typically informs you if it’s being “messed with”.
“…You can tell it's being jammed. When you actively jam another platform, that's technically an act of war", said Fravor.
The former fighter pilot claimed that the manoeuvres performed by the bizarre object displayed remarkable technology at its disposal. He dismissed speculation it might have been some state-of-the-art craft made by the military.
"I don't like to get into little green men but I don't think we've developed it... I think you can hide things for a while. This is a giant leap in technology".
Accordingly, other pilots successfully recorded footage of the strange phenomena, with a video obtained by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a public benefit corporation founded by former senior CIA intelligence officer Harold E. Puthoff and musician Tom DeLonge, and uploaded to the company's YouTube account in 2017.
The authenticity of the footage was finally confirmed by the Pentagon in 2019, with officials admitting they still had no idea what the recorded object was.
The Pentagon explained its decision to release the videos by the fact that they did not reveal any sensitive capabilities of US surveillance systems.
Suggestions that it might have been weather phenomenon, birds, or a manmade craft have all been ruled out.