In March 2015, I published a story about my friend Dave Fravor's encounter with an unidentified object off the coast of San Diego. I thought maybe a few thousand people who read fighter pilot blogs would find it interesting. I had no idea I was lighting a fuse.
Back in 2015, writing seriously about UFOs was career suicide for anyone who wanted to be taken seriously. The field was owned by people in tinfoil hats and late-night cable shows with dramatic re-enactments. I knew that going in.
So when I sat down to write about what Dave Fravor had told me — what he'd told me in a bar, over drinks, about ten years earlier — I had a specific goal: write the first genuinely rigorous account of a UFO encounter by a credible military aviator. No wink-wink. No jokes about little green men. Just the facts, presented with the same clinical discipline we applied to any post-flight debrief.
I know Dave well. We flew A-6s together. He's sharp, professionally serious in the air, and — critically — not the kind of guy who invents stories for attention. When he first told me what happened off San Diego in November 2004, I thought he was pulling my leg. He wasn't.
Here's the short version, in case you're new to this: On November 14, 2004, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting routine training exercises about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. Radar operators aboard the USS Princeton had been tracking anomalous aerial vehicles dropping from 80,000 feet in seconds — for two weeks. Dave and his wingman were diverted to investigate. What they found was a white, oblong object — roughly 40 feet long, no wings, no visible propulsion — hovering above a churning patch of ocean. When Dave moved to intercept, it mirrored his movements. Then it disappeared. It reappeared at their pre-briefed rendezvous point — 60 miles away — almost instantaneously.
Four sets of eyes in two separate aircraft saw it. Multiple radar systems tracked it. The USS Princeton's AN/SPY radar — a system capable of tracking a golf ball from 100 miles away — confirmed it. Nobody could explain it.
Dave had been telling that story for a decade. I had been telling it secondhand for almost as long — putting Dave on speakerphone at dinner parties, watching people's faces. It made for a hell of a bar story. That's all it was.
Until I decided to write it down.
Why March 2015, Why Me
When I became editor of Fighter Sweep — an online magazine aimed at people who care about military aviation — I knew immediately what my first piece was going to be. I called Dave. He was supportive. And then he told me something that stopped me cold.
The investigators had just left his house. The door had literally just closed.
Eleven years after the incident, someone in the government had decided it was worth looking at. Dave shared a heavily redacted report with me — I later came to believe it was produced by AATIP, the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — and what I read convinced me this wasn't just a bar story anymore.
The other aircrew involved weren't ready to be named publicly at the time. I respected that. They've all since come forward on their own terms. But the story — the core of it, the facts of what happened that day — was solid enough to publish. So I did.
I wrote it with some humor. I wanted to bridge the gap between the fringy world of UFO culture and the serious world of military aviation. In retrospect, I'd ditch the jokes. I'd just tell it straight. The material didn't need them.
What the Last Ten Years Actually Looked Like
The article landed quietly. Fighter Sweep had a loyal but niche readership. The story percolated.
Then, in December 2017, the New York Times published its own account, and everything changed overnight. The Pentagon released the now-famous FLIR video — the one that shows a white object moving in ways that defy conventional aerodynamics — and suddenly Dave Fravor was on every major media outlet on the planet. Dave is naturally averse to the spotlight. But when he saw that people weren't laughing, when he saw they were taking it seriously, he leaned in. He had more to share. A lot more had been revealed to him by that point — people involved in government programs he'd had no idea existed.
I did the podcasts Dave didn't want to do. I'd tell producers: "I don't have anything that's not already in the article." They'd say: "That's fine." And we'd go.
The conversation among fellow pilots shifted noticeably. People who would never have touched this subject started talking. The stigma eroded. What was once a laughable topic became a legitimate national security conversation — which, if you think about it, is what it always should have been.
"It's Becoming Increasingly Difficult to Keep Secrets"
The government's posture on this has moved faster than I expected and slower than it should have.
We went from official denial to congressional UAP hearings in about eight years. That's not surprising — we live in an era where secrets have a shorter shelf life than they used to. What surprises me is that it's dragging out as long as it is. The longer it takes, the less credibility the whole process has. That may, in fact, be the intent.
The language keeps shifting too. UFO became UAP. UAP is now sometimes "non-human intelligence" in certain official contexts. I don't put much stock in the acronym changes. Governments love renaming things when someone new takes over a program. What matters is that serious people with serious credentials are now on record saying something real is happening — and that there's probably a kernel of truth buried under a lot of noise, disinformation from people who don't want disclosure, and hangers-on who want to appear more in-the-know than they are. The longer the process drags out, the muddier the picture gets. That may, in fact, be the intent.
Disclosure Day Drops Tomorrow
Steven Spielberg's new film opens June 12th, 2026. It's called Disclosure Day, and from everything I've seen, it looks like he's bringing the same energy he brought to Close Encounters of the Third Kind back in 1977, except now the cultural ground has shifted underneath him.
Good for him. He's a commercial filmmaker jumping on a moment that's genuinely here. What it signals to me is simpler than any plot analysis: this topic is no longer fringe. When Spielberg makes a movie about something, it's entered the mainstream. Full stop.
The more interesting question is what comes after the movie. Public attention is fickle. Congressional attention less so.
Where I Actually Land
People ask me constantly what I think the Tic Tac was. Here's my honest answer:
I have no idea. Neither does anyone else who's been willing to say so publicly.
What I know is what I knew in 2015: Dave Fravor is not a crackpot. The sensors that tracked the object are not unreliable. Four trained aviators visually confirmed something that moved in ways we cannot explain. The government investigated it quietly for over a decade before anyone said a word publicly.
What's changed in ten years is my sense of scale. When I wrote that first article, I thought maybe it was an isolated incident — one strange thing that happened one afternoon off San Diego. It increasingly appears to be nothing of the sort. There's more that is known. There's more that we have the right to know.
We'll see how long it takes.
My original Tic Tac article, published March 2015, can be found at SOFREP / Fighter Sweep.