The Tic Tac UFO Story | David Fravor and Lex Fridman

so one of the reasons i wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of at least in my view one of the most credible witnesses in history of uh somebody who's uh witnessed a ufo literally an identified flying object and not only witnessed but got to how do you put it like chase it essentially chased it so let me just lay out i think it's easier than you telling the story maybe me and my dumb simpleton waist trying to explain the stories i understand it and then maybe you can correct me so on november 10 2004 the uss princeton which is one of the uh the carriers that's a cruiser it's a it's a cruiser it's a cruiser so you can't land on a uh no helicopter has a helicopter pad on the back gotcha and it has weapons on it okay goddamn it shoots the missiles up but it has a nice radar just an incredible spy one system phased array four panels so looks in quadrants perfect so they they started noticing on november 10th that there is a few objects flying around at 28 000 feet with speed of uh with what's i guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an hour don't know what that in knots but uh on the coast of california so and they kept detecting these objects for just about a week then comes in like your part of the story which is on november 14th from the i guess it's from the uss nimitz i you flew and witnessed a 40-foot long white tic-tac-shaped object with no wings flying in ways you've never thought possible and in some interview somewhere you said i think it was not from this world so there's a mysterious aspect to this object this entire situation uh there's videos involved the video of a flare forward looking infrared receiver receiver there's also visible light so you can switch tv mode as a tv mode so that gives you visible light and then it has a ir mode and uh chad underwood recorded that video so and those are the videos that were released by the pentagon later one of the three videos the two other videos go fast and gimble were recorded in 2000 something 14-15 on east coast of the united states they had different kinds of objects but they were weird in the same kind of way in terms of at least the videos and the experiences that people have described or similar in in the degree of weirdness but the difference is is actually on the the east coast of 2014 case very few people have spoken about it and even in your situation very few people have spoken about it so there's a mystery to it but it's in some sense this is a quite simple story without much resolution to the mystery and it's fascinating and there's a lot of opinions there's division of opinions because uh it's a mysterious i mean it truly is a ufo in the sense that uh you ap uh what is it i i unidentified phenomena so can you maybe correct me on any of the things i've gotten wrong elaborate on some key things and describe that experience in general so here's what i know so yeah we went out on our mission to go train and they canceled the mission and they set us down there's all kinds of rumors out here there's all kinds of after this has come out so originally it was the four of us there's two jets two people in each jet their f-18s okay there is no video from our event it was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing and then when we came back and told it when chad and his pilot took off that's when chad got the video of it and we're like that's it that's exactly that's it and um so when you say eyeballs you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing yep so so as we're flying out we get we get vectored they come up and tell us hey we're gonna cancel training this is a uss princeton so this is the siege's cruiser so we're talking to one controller um who is like hey sir first you ask what ordinance we have on board and i laugh because we don't carry live ordinance in training typically because batch stuff happens usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off and hits a good airplane and it's not good so we had what's called a catim nine which is really just a blue tube with the aim nine seeker on the front of it which is an ir missile uh so there's only two ways to get it off you can beat it off the sledgehammer you can take this thing and so you put a wrench in and it unlocks the lugs and pulls the lugs back in that hold it on when it really fires the impulse from the engine actually throws the lugs forward and breaks that release and it comes off down the rail that's how it works so they said hey well we have real world tasking so as we're going out my wingmen the other pilot uh she maneuvers the airplane to the left-hand side of me so she's kind of stepped up like this and i'll use your mic box to start so as we're going out they're calling ranges they're called bra calls bearing range in altitude and they're telling us hey it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles so they're saying hey 270 30 20 000. that's all i say so we got our radars we had we had mechanically scanned radars at the time apg-73 good piece of gear apg-79 new one's way better but anyway and i apologize if i interrupt the story hopefully it's useful but they're telling you a location of a thing that you should look at yep they're telling us they have a contact on their radar they don't know what it is they just have a blip they have a little blip well they've been watching these things and what he told me is they had been looking at these things as we're driving i said sir we've been tracking these things for about two weeks that's we had been at sea for two weeks because it's the first time we've had plains airborne we want you to go see what these are gotcha so they kind of interrupt the mission to say check it out so we start driving out there and uh as we get down to he's going you know 20 miles 15 miles 10 miles and then you get to a point where they call merge plot which means we are inside of the resolution cell of the radar because radars don't see everything they're so they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution right so and it's basically think of a little cube so they can and the whole sky is made of all these little cubes and they're looking so if you're inside a cube with something and you're both inside the same little cube then the radar can only see one thing does that make sense yeah so they call merge plot when we say merge plot to us it means he's right around something's around you get your head out so we're not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizards the wizards can look but everyone it's heads out when they say merge plot you're done looking at your displays inside you're doing this and you're trying to find it so as we look out to the right and you look high and low because he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up now keep in mind the ship is like probably 60 miles away so they can't see the surface and you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go hey it's the the thing is 40 feet off the water the panel can he really see you know there are radars that can see around the curve but let's just say that it can't at this time so you go is it you know where's it at so as we're looking around we see now this is a it's a clear day there's no clouds and there's no white caps it's just a calm it's actually a perfect day if you owned a sailboat it was that five to ten knots of wind and you just want to kind of go out there and you're not going to get beat up and have white water coming is the it was the perfect date on a sailboat how many miles out do you see like seven like you see just it's a clear day that's 50 it's unrestricted visibility you can see literally all the way to the horizon it's just clear it's nothing and we're basically off the coast if you look at a map and you go san diego and then inside of mexico we're kind of in between that and we're probably about by the time this all hits we're price i don't know 80 100 i don't know but somewhere out it's pretty far off the coast perfect visit from 20 000 feet you'd be amazed you can do the calculation you can see stuff you know you'll see land 50 miles away you can see you know and when you're looking at a continent it's really easy to see you're not looking at an island i mean you're looking at mexico and you can see on the white gaps in the water if there's any oh yeah they're easy yeah for us we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or so if it's a really white cap windy day then the ships just kind of barely be moving when we land on it it makes it actually easier if the ship has to move where it's got a big weight because it has to make its own wind when we land which is the day that it was this day you go oh okay and it creates what's called we call the verbal but when the air flows across the flight deck it drops behind the ship you know and then it kicks back up so when you're coming board to land it's going to make you go up a little bit and then you're going to fall and you got to con you got to anticipate that to stand glide soap so we're pretty we're pretty conscious of what's going on out there with the waves in the wind so we look there's no waves there's no wind there's no white caps and we look down and we see white water so if you put a if you put a piece of land a sea mount below the surface like you know even 20 feet below the surface that's big enough as the waves come in you know waves have height and length when they come in that's what happens on the shore when a wave comes in it hits and then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up because it can't go anymore and then it breaks the topic and that's where you get the white so what happens is at c when you get a sea mount you'll see stuff come in the wave will crash and you'll get white water you can go out when it's high tide in any one of the coasts you can go out here off of boston and go hey at low tide i can see those rocks and at high tide i can't see the rocks are covered but there will be white water around those rocks you'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface does that make sense yep so that's what it was we see we don't see an object because there's all kinds of oh they saw this they saw another craft below the way we didn't see anything below the water we just saw white water but the white water and i like to shape it you can say it was across i say it's about the size of a 737 so it looks like if you took a 737 put it about 15 20 feet below the water so the waves breaking over the top and you're going to get white water where the plane is at you'd see this this kind of shape so it looks like a cross so as we're looking down off the right side the back seater in the other airplane jim says this is that talking in parcels again he says hey skipper do you and that's about what he gets out of his mouth and i go what the hell is that in a nice do you see that essentially so we see the white water and that's what draws our eyes down or otherwise we'd have never seen it so we see this i would love to see the look on your face when you see that and then we see this little white tic tac because we're about 20 000 feet above it and it's doing it's going basically north south and then east west north and so it's abrupt it's very abrupt so it's not uh like a helicopter if a helicopter is going sideways and it goes once it's going sideways left and it goes right what it'll do is it'll go it's got a speed it slows down because there's inertia yeah and it stops and then it goes back the other way this thing's not it's like left right left right with no so moving in ways that doesn't doesn't feel intuitive to you at all of the things you've seen in the past so as a pilot the first thing you think is it's a helicopter right right so you go oh what is because when we see it's moving we're like oh helicopter so the first thing you look for to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing that because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet you'll get rotor wash you see it in the movies when the helicopter's by the water it kicks the water comes up besides because the downdraft you know like a thunderstorm will do that it pushes the air down and then it has to come out the sides so you see it and you go well there's no there's no rotor wash what is that thing so by this time we're driving around so as we're if we were at the six o'clock we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position and we're just watching this thing and it's just it's still pointing north-south and it's going left-right and it's kind of moving around the object and if it had if i had to say it biased itself it was biased towards the bottom half so if you've got the east-west and then the north-south kind of across it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out it's just kind of moving around up down left and it's crossing over it it's going up it's just kind of so now we're like what the hell is that so then i go hey i'm gonna go check it out and the other pilot says i'm gonna stay up here and i said yeah stay up high because now we get we get a different perspective so she's up here and i'm down here as i'm descending she can watch because right now all i'm watching is the tic tac she can watch me and the tic tac so she gets a god's eye view of everything that's going on which is really important you know you can you'll hear people say it's high cover whatever she's watching me which is it's perfect as the story goes on because it it gives us two perspectives you know of a perspective that's about 8 000 feet above us when that thing disappears and they don't you know because if it's just like oh i lost it and they go no it's over to the right we can still see it we all lost it at the same time so as we come down we get to about 12 o'clock and i'm descending it's an easy descent i'm doing about 300 knots which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering because i have i have everything available to me at that speed so i'm coming down and as i get to 12 o'clock because the tick takes doing this it literally it's like it be it's aware of us and it just goes blue and it kind of points out towards the west and starts coming up so now it's obviously knows that we're there whatever this thing is and knows over there so as we drive around it's coming up and i'm just coming down we're just i'm just watching it now you remember this whole thing is like this is like five minutes this is not like we saw it it was gone or oh i saw lights in the sky and they were gone we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers watch this thing fly around so we're like okay so i get over to the eight o'clock position and i'm a little i'm a couple thousand feet above it and it's about so i'm probably at about 15k i think it is i think that's my story's about 50. it's just estimating so you can see it's just really easy descent because so what's 15k fifteen thousand feet i thought it was eight thousand uh uh the the other airplane ends up about so yeah okay so they're still about twenty thousand feet so they're alright and i'm descending they're staying up there so i'm kind of doing this okay as they drive around okay so i'm looking at this thing and it's about the two o'clock position we're about the eight o'clock position and i'm like oh i've got i've got enough altitudes i'm gonna i'm gonna cut across the circle and i tell the guy in my back seat dude i'm gonna i'm gonna do this he's like go for it skip because i was a skipper so i cut across the bottom so i'm kind of almost coming out co-altitude as this thing's coming i'm gonna meet it and i'm driving and uh i get to probably it's i'm probably about a half mile away which you think well half miles pretty far half mile in aviation isn't it's nothing that's i mean you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane you can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile you can see pretty good detail so i'm like right there and it's coming across my nose so now i'm basically pointing back towards e so i'm cutting across because i'm going to the three o'clock position it's at two o'clock and i'm gonna meet it at three o'clock so as i do this it goes it just accelerates and disappears so it's this happens at around estimating about twelve thousand feet so they're at twenty so they've got about eight 000 foot of altitude above us when this happens and it just as it crosses our nose it just it accelerates and literally in less than you know probably less than a half second it just goes and it's gone and so we're like and i the first thing is dude do you guys see it the other airplane's like it's gone we don't we have no idea where it's at so we kind of spin around rook i go let's see what's down here and i turn around we're looking for the white water we can't the white water's gone there's nothing it's literally all blue so now you go and i remember telling the guy in my back seat like a dude i'm i don't know about you but i'm pretty weirded out because this is i mean you know i had at the time like 30 some hundred hours of flying i'd been doing it for 18 years it's nothing like anything you've seen no no so as we turn we go well let's just go back you know because now i got to put on my real hat which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy to you know overseas so we got to get our training done so that's my mindset especially as a ceo because i get i get it training out of the flight time because i'm responsible to do that so hey let's go back and the the the guy who's going to be the bad guys is the ceo of the marine squadron and uh so cheeks is at the he's listening to all this happen you know because he's just like because he they when he first went out they were going to do him but the little hornets the legacy hornets the f-18cs don't have as much gas as the super hornets so he had launched first and they were going to do him and then when they knew we were off the deck they just told him hey go to your cat point down south and we're going to send we'll pass this off to the the super hornets what's the cap point uh that's where we hold so it's called a combat air patrol point so we're just going to hold at one end he's going to hold at the other end it's kind of like hey you guys are going to each think if it's a football field we're going to sit on one goal line he's going to sit on the other goal line and when they say go we're going to run at each other and try and do something in the middle of the field and then go back to our set reset points okay so you're talking to him he's he's he's listening to the he's just listening we don't talk to him at all he's just listening he just dials up because they know that we all know the frequencies so he's listening to what's going on because he's like because they cancelled training so what else is he going to do he's just going to hang out there and do circles while he's waiting him and his wingmen so they're just they're listening to all this go on and then at this point you move on yeah we come back up to train we go back as we're flying back the controller because we're talking to the the kid on the princeton the uh the uh they're called os's they're operation specialists they're the ones that run the radars and we're talking to him and he's like hey sir you're not going to believe this but that thing is at your cap it showed back up it just popped up you know this is like 60 miles away it just reappears we're like oh okay so we got the radars out we're looking for it uh we get out there we never see it we never see it again uh we do what we need to do we come back to the ship of course now we're like oh this is gonna be we're you know i told i told him i go dude you know we're gonna catch we're gonna catch [ __ ] for this when we get back to the ship word's gonna get out and we're just gonna catch maximum [ __ ] and we did yeah and it's kind of that joking you know so the ship plays movies we have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies so they repeat because there's a day check and a night check so the same movies in the morning and night plays so you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat which drives my wife crazy because i'll watch stuff on tv that way too i'll be like oh hey i've seen this and i'll jump into a movie in the middle and then i'll pick it up later and i'll see the beginning and i'll put it all together because that's how we have to do it because we're so busy well the movies became and i it was men in black aliens uh independence day definitely going to catch some [ __ ] but let uh let me just ask some dumb questions so just take him because whatev whatever the heck you saw whatever the heck happened it's you know one of the most fascinating things um events in recent history so whatever it was it's interesting to talk about it different kinds of angles there's no good answers but it's interesting to ask some dumb questions here uh so first of all you mentioned so you saw at some point xy and then somebody in the princeton said you're not going to believe the sir it's at your cap point that that's a different place how the heck did it know what your cap point is that's a good question and that's the one if you don't no one you know you don't we don't tell it it's we don't broadcast it we have a waypoint in the system but i don't know maybe it knew where we were going because we used the same one day after day after day but it it obviously knew but you never saw it there never saw it there chad when he took off when he got the video we landed we told them hey look we just we just chased this thing they're like when i go chased it and they're like why go dude and i told him i said dude get video and he goes so and that's how he is he's like i'm gonna go and he was he he was determined he was gonna find this thing so when you look at his video this is the stuff that isn't out that they don't see because not all the all you see is the flare tape that's the targeting pod the forward looking infrared receiver um i'll probably overlay the videos when he goes out it's uh you know what he's looking at on his displays is he has basically two radar displays up he has azimuth and range on the right one and he has azimuth and elevation on the left one so this is called the as l display and this is called this is basically the ppi which is the you're at the bottom of it you're at the bottom of the square it's really taking this it's taking a cone because a radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares it out so the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us because they do this they square it off so so he goes out and when he first sees it he gets a radar return on it because when he's not trying to lock it so the radar's just throwing energy out and getting it you know it's a doppler radar so when it's in search mode that's all it's doing it's going oh i can see you i can see and it's looking for return so he gets a return so he wants to see what it is because all you get is a little green square unless it builds a track file on it but the little green square is just sitting there it's not moving because it's it's sitting in one spot in space he locks it up when he goes to lock it up now he's putting a bunch of energy on it but he's telling the radar stare down that line of sight and whatever's there i want you to grab it and build a track file on it which will tell us how high it is how fast it is in the direction that it's going okay the radar smart enough that when the signal comes back if it's been messed with it will tell you it'll give you indications that i'm being jammed so that's all it is is you send the signal out something it manipulates the signal either in range and velocity or whatever and it sends it back and the radar was smart enough to go that is not a return that i'm expecting something's messing with me i'm being jammed and it shows you and it puts strobes up it gives these lines on the radar and it does some stuff so you can i mean well it does it goes full into it it's being jammed at about every mode you can possibly see because everything comes up and the the this aspect gets long it's all kind of i don't want to get into details but you can tell it's being jammed so and as you said on rogan by the way that jamming is an act of war active jamming isn't when you actively jam another platform yes it's technically an active war feels like you should be freaking out at this point i mean so well he does it and then in the back seat so they don't have a stick and throttle they have their side stick controller so they can control all the sensors and they can just toggle around and do stuff so he can he has the ability to just move one switch real quick and it will go from that azimuth elevation on the radar to the targeting pod well as soon as he commanded the radar to look at that target the targeting pod goes oh what's over there and it'll stare because it goes down the line of sight because all the systems are hooked together you can decouple them but they're going to automatically couple up so when he castles over he it's a switch looks like a castle situation castle so when he moves that thing to the left and he swaps the displays out and he says instead of looking at the radar i want to look at the targeting pod he sees it on the targeting pod because the targeting pod's already looking there and now he's on a passive track because he's not literally sending any energy out he's just receiving ir energy from the tic tac and then the system itself will track the pixels and the contrast differences it depends on what mode you're in so it says oh and that's what those little bars you see in the video where the bars come up laughter doing some v vision based tracking that's exactly what it is um so that's the video he goes through changes zooms changes the mode he goes through all the modes so there's the narrow medium and wide so wide is far away medium and then narrow and then there's the tv mode and he goes from ir mode to the tv mode the cool thing with the tv mode is narrow ir mode is only medium tv mode so you can actually get closer with narrow tv mode it's got a better zoom capability when you go into tv mode um so he goes through all those things that's when you see it going from a black background to a white background trying to figure out what the heck is this well yeah and he wants to get as much data as he can on it based on the different modes instead of just staring at it going what is that thing yeah um green so the the video has been out it actually was on youtube for years and before the government released it leaked the guy that was in my back seat sent me an email and i had retired so this is about no because i was working i was working down in san diego so this is about 2008 early 2009 he sends me a link to strangeland.com which is not suitable for work oh yeah it's top-notch yeah and he says hey i can remember the email hey skip does this look familiar and i look at i'm like how the hell did that get on strangeland.com so the next thing you know it ends up on youtube which was cool because you can send a youtube link to someone you don't send strangeland.com to someone because you don't know what you're gonna get yeah it's like googling kittens yeah um so it ends up there somehow so it gets on youtube which was cool because i would go out with my friends and we'd be drinking and they they go dude what's the coolest thing you ever saw flying you know it's kind of like you were asking what it's like and i go oh dude i chased the ufo and they're like get out and i'm like no serious so this is literally how it happened so i was sitting with my friend matt so matt and i did our my he was the guy in my right seat of the a6 when i did my very first night trap right and we were friends to this day right because when you do stuff like people like that you know you had to have faith in him he had to have faith in me you know it's their they become like your brother yeah um and these are guys that literally you know i don't talk to him on a regular basis like chris who works at apple if if chris called me up tomorrow and said dude i need help i need this i'd be like all right let's figure this out and let's do it because it's they're like family you do it and most navy guys we don't we're not we don't send letters to each other weekly you know i have friends that could i haven't talked to in 10 years if they showed up on my door you know pop a bottle of wine grab a beer shoot the [ __ ] take about first 10 minutes to catch up and then it's it's like old times and it's it's amazing how fast this happened so incredible so i'm out to dinner with matt um and i'm telling him this story and he's like get out of here so he goes back and he tells our friend paco paco has uh fightersweep.com it's a blog site so paco's obsessed like he is way into ufos yeah so paco calls me up he says dude i was talking to maddie that's what we call him he goes i was talking to maddie he goes dude you got to tell me this story so i'm like all right so i spend a chunk of time and so he calls me one day and i'm like i get a voicemail hey give me a call so i call him up and he answers the phone but i can hear people in the background and i go hey dude what's going on he goes hey hang on i gotta put you on speakerphone i go what do you put me on speakers you gotta tell the story i'm having a dinner party you gotta tell the story so he's literally having a dinner party with his cell phone in the middle of the table as i tell a tic tac store so he calls me up again he says hey i got this blog and he just writes about fighter stuff like he wrote about that we call him the [ __ ] hot break that's a guy that when you land on a carrier comes and turns and gets ready to land really fast like breaks it off right at the back of the ship and uh uh one of the guys when we were junior officers on the uss ranger one of the apartments the other squadrons guy nasty and nasty was notorious for coming in in the tomcat and cranking off the [ __ ] hot break right so he he he literally wrote a thing about the [ __ ] hot break with nasty and there's another guy or mav was our uh one of our landing signals officers for the air wing it just it was it's just it's a good article on how this was and how you know it kind of forms you in naval aviation it's kind of becoming a part of the club so he's like i got to write about this thing i'm like what do you guys got to write about i go all right i go because at first i would say no i'm like dude i don't want this out there just you haven't really before then talked about it much my wife didn't even really know the whole story what just as a comment is it just because you caught some no uh it was just i'll tell you what three days we we had the incident for about two days they played the goofy movies there's a comic on the back of the air wing schedule that they would put it was like first one was a far side and the second one was me and the guy in my back seat and it was men in black but it had our names you know protecting the world protecting the nimitz battlegroup type stuff it's just funny [ __ ] like that um so to me it wasn't that big of a deal it was like okay that's weird we're never going to know what it was i want to get out because this is important because there's all kinds of rumors there's a group of folks no one ever came out in suits to talk to us nobody looking like me no came out no on a uh no no one came out of the helicopter no one came out on an airplane you know you get oh i i was told to turn over this classified what's funny is all the cos and several are still in the navy uh there's one that is a he i think he just finished up he was a captain of an aircraft carrier you know so he'll end up making admiral and all that stuff those guys are all my friends i talk to them daily just just to clarify so just for people who don't know there's a story that both on the nimitz and the princeton folks in a helicopter landed they showed up they took the data quote-unquote so all the sort of recordings associated with this incident and they took it and presumably deleted it there's a kind of story to that and then uh from what i've seen you said that you believe just like we were talking about offline that jokes spread faster than uh or just rumors spread faster than anything on on these ships uh that it might have been a joke that started and uh well they did so here's here's the joke yeah so they had come down right we had the tapes um and they were chad's tapes so we use those tapes over and over again you know they're they're consumable but remember i have a budget as a squadron so you have a budget so i have to buy those tapes i have to all that stuff that we use i'm accountable for and the tapes are actually classified secret because of the data that's on them okay so we had the tapes so the the secure the intelligence guys the intel officers came down from what's called civic it's cvic which is carrier intel center came down and said hey we need the tapes these guys are going to come they're going to come and get them this is so like i'm like oh whatever you know so we hand them the tapes and then someone because i have you know you know people shortly after they came and got the tapes someone came to me and said you know they're they're messing with you they're playing a joke so i said oh let's see how well that goes because you know i'm a ceo and they're not and so i went down to civic and uh it was a probably he was a lieutenant or a lieutenant jg so he's way junior to me and i said hey uh i want my tapes back and he looks at me and i go i know you guys are pulling my leg i know you there's no one came out and i go and you have about 30 seconds to get me my tapes before i start tearing this place apart that's literally what i told him and i said and if your boss has an issue he can come and see me because it's not going to go well i said because this is [ __ ] and i need those tapes then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet opened it up they weren't a safe he opened up a filing cabinet and pulled him out and hand them to me i said and i basically said a few things to him like don't ever [ __ ] with me again and i left i had the tapes so this no one came out there's no flying going on when all this is happening and i took the tapes back and then i copied the tapes so i took two brand new eight mil tapes and i copied the sections that i want so there's a rumor too that oh the original flea video is 10 minutes long and there's some one of these petty officers saying i saw it that's total crap the original video is about a minute 30 seconds long what you see on the release video is the entire video so you have mentioned uh i apologize if i say stupid things please correct me but you you have mentioned that uh like on rogan i think that you watched it on you know on a bigger screen it felt like it was higher definition so let me ask the the question is there a higher definition version do you think of the flare video that would give us more pixels and more information presumably because of the um i would doubt it because i don't know where the stuff that the government released i don't know where they got okay so the stuff that was on strangeland and youtube you know someone pulled off of a secret it looks like a rack you know there's tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on youtube um no it's it's just like you know anytime even a digital media the more you copy digital media there's some quality that gets it degrades so this you don't know how many times this has been copied so we were looking the videos i've seen are right off the original they're high eight tapes that's basically pulled off the back of the display so it's not filmed with cameras it's literally a digital feed that's pulled off the back and put onto a high eight tape that's how the recorders work now it's actually digital to digital it's not even on tapes anymore it's it's a digital recording system but we were still in that process of slowing up because originally we had little cameras here that shine so if the light hit it would wash out the displays so this it's a pretty good feed um when you put it on so we're instead of looking at it on your tiny little computer monitor whatever i'm looking at it on a like a 19-inch because it was still normal tvs back there we had just put flat screens in the ready room that i had bought so we could watch movies so a nice huge 19-inch screen this is maybe 20. it was a nice wow that's huge gigantic um hey i can get for like 50 bucks you can kill like 60 engines this is 2005. yeah um so so you look at this big thing and but you could see so when you get to the tv mode when i say there's little things coming out of the bottom of it you could see those it was very clear but in terms of the actual visual on the tic tac was it did you get much more information from the hired from the clear little things out of the bottom to the bottom information so when you see it because he's coming almost co-altitude with it you can see the bottom of it looks like little you know like if you look at a cessna there's little antennas hanging on the bottom kind of like that there's two little things on the bottom there's nothing on the top there was no plume no ir no no visible propulsions even heat signature you know it's all that stuff and then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the the radar display uh which that that really raises the classification level especially to see what the radar does when it's being jammed um you know what i matter of fact when they did the unofficial official investigation in about 2000 and let me think about 2009 um i got a call on my cell phone from a guy who government employee and said hey he told me who he was he's still in the government um i'm friends with him and he said hey we're gonna investigate your tic tac thing this is literally five years later yeah five years later and i said okay whatever and he did a pretty good job i caught the unofficial official report because um it was really never official it wasn't but i'll give you the history of why i say that and why it never came out in foia requests so he does the report he sent me the report and all he said is hey i'm going to send you this report please don't distribute this report i said okay the report is now out because harry reid got it to george knapp and they were good enough to redact there's a few versions of it unredacted and i'm very protective of the other people that were involved in this so jim has talked but he's off the grid he doesn't talk to anyone now the pilot of his airplane she has come out on unidentified but they don't release her name although people are starting to do it and she's had weird [ __ ] happen around her house she's got kids you know so i'm very protective of her and i've told people like jeremy and george if i know that the names ever came from you i will never talk to you again about this and jeremy's been really good about it and so is george and then but george george knew who the names were because he had he got the report from senator reid um and then the other crew so the pilot of the airplane that took the video that chad was in if you talk to that individual they really don't have the recollection they were just out flying that day and it wasn't a big deal um so it's it's you you need to protect because not everyone wants people knocking i don't want people knocking on my door and you know and there's rumors oh you talk to everyone i think you're about the 23rd person that i've talked to total and that includes uh you know the newspapers and stuff and i've been selective because there's so much i mean if i turn down like i turn down russian tv uh i can give you her name when we're done here she called she not only called me she called my wife she called my daughter she called my son and she called my son-in-law because they're persistent so i'm i'm pretty protect i'm very particular i mean the reason i'm talking to you is because i knew we would have a conversation that wasn't based just on the tic tac and the incident but we can actually talk about some of the science and some of the theoretical to get into to get more people involved to go because i think there's you know and when you talk to you know lou elizondo or chris mellon you know the group at ttsa you know that that whole thing was that's to the stars uh academy okay that's the tom delonge group that got started so and you go well uh you know because i think tom has caught a lot of crap for this but he's actually when you talk to him he's he's he's very smart and i asked him how'd you get into this and he goes oh when i was traveling around with blink 182 he goes you read a lot of books when you're laying in a van as you're driving to your next gig before you make it big and he goes and he read he was reading books and he read one of them on ufos i'm trying to think the title that's one of the big ones that's out there real popular and so he started just he started asking more and through his fame with blink 182 in the band he got more and more connected you know if you talk to chris mellon who is an under secretary of defense for intelligence and he's part of the melon you know dynasty you know from carnegie mellon type very very smart he knows he he he definitely knows how the government works because he worked there and so when i went down to dc to talk to people he's one of the first people i'll go to when i did uh tucker carlson about a month ago month and a half ago um i asked i i he texted me i i texted him tom liu to go hey because they were like you got to do it because i turned to i turned tucker down a couple times before and his uh his producer had called me and i'm like all right i'll do it because those guys like you got it you got to do this for us you

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Views: 502,525

Rating: 4.835165 out of 5

Keywords: david fravor, lex fridman podcast, artificial intelligence, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence podcast, lex clips, lex fridman, lex friedman, joe rogan, elon musk, lex podcast, lex mit, lex ai, mit ai, ai podcast clips, ai clips, deep learning, machine learning, computer science, engineering, physics, science, tech, technology, tech podcast, physics podcast, mathematics, math, math podcast, friedman, consciousness, philosophy, turing, einstein

Id: 5HInaJxFxWs

Length: 38min 34sec (2314 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020