For most of his 18-year career as a U.S. Navy pilot, Cmdr. David Fravor said his mother-in-law used to ask him a question: Had he seen a UFO? For 15 years, the answer was no.

But one clear afternoon off the coast of California in 2004, he says, that changed.

Fravor, the commanding officer of a Navy squadron at the time, said he saw a flying object about the size of his plane that looked like a Tic Tac after a break in a routine training mission. The object moved rapidly and unlike any other thing he had ever seen in the air. He has not forgotten it since. Fravor’s story emerged this week after the Pentagon publicly acknowledged for the first time the existence of a recent program dedicated to studying unidentified flying objects. The funding for what was known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ran from 2007 to 2012. But officials familiar with it said some of its efforts have continued.

“My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone,” Luis Elizondo said in an interview on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.”

“These aircraft — we’ll call them aircraft — are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of,” Elizondo said of objects they researched.
He said the program sought to identify what had been seen, either through tools or eyewitness reports, and then “ascertain and determine if that information is a potential threat to national security.”
“We found a lot,” Elizondo said.

The former Pentagon official said they identified “anomalous” aircraft that were “seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics.”

“Things that don’t have any obvious flight services, any obvious forms of propulsion, and maneuvering in ways that include extreme maneuverability beyond, I would submit, the healthy G-forces of a human or anything biological,” Elizondo said. The Times’ report on the government UFO study included a pair of videos of pilots remarking on something mysterious they were seeing. One of the pilots, retired Cmdr. David Fravor, told CNN that he had witnessed an object that looked like a “40-foot-long Tic Tac” maneuvering rapidly and changing its direction during a flight in 2004.
Ryan Alexander of Taxpayers for Common Sense expressed dismay about the program and cast it as a waste of money in a piece that aired on CNN’s “The Situation Room” on Monday. “It’s definitely crazy to spend $22 million to research UFOs,” Alexander said. “Pilots are always going to see things that they can’t identify, and we should probably look into them. But to identify them as UFOs, to target UFOs to research — that is not the priority we have as a national security matter right now.” For his part, Fravor said the money spent on the program was a drop in the bucket relative to the military’s over half-a-trillion-dollar annual budget.