2004 - USS Nimitz Encounter

Correspondent Bill Whitaker interviewed two former Navy pilots, Cmdr. Dave Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, who said they witnessed something "unsettling" and unexplainable while flying over the Pacific Ocean in November 2004. Fravor is a graduate of the TOPGUN naval flight program. He was a commander of the F/A-18F squadron on the USS Nimitz at the time of the encounter.

Dietrich, a former F/A-18F pilot, had never before spoken publicly about what she saw that day.

"It was unidentified. And that's why it was so unsettling to us. Because we weren't expecting it. We couldn't classify it," said Dietrich.

On November 14, 2004, Fravor and Dietrich were training with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. Unbeknownst to them, advanced radar on a ship that was a part of their training group, the USS Princeton, had been detecting what operators called "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" over the horizon, descending eighty-thousand feet in less than a second.

During their training exercise Fravor and Dietrich, each with a weapons system officer in the back seat of their F/A-18F, say they were diverted to investigate the anomalous object. They say at first they found an area of roiling whitewater the size of a Boeing 737. And then they saw something strange above the water.

"We saw this little white Tic-Tac-looking object… and it's just kind of moving above the whitewater area," Fravor recounted.

"No predictable movement, no predictable trajectory," said Dietrich.