Lex Fridman
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2020–2022
3:56:24 · 6.9M views · Sep 8, 2020
Lex Fridman interviews Navy pilot David Fravor, a primary witness of the 2004 Tic Tac UFO encounter, about the sighting, military aviation and aerospace engineering. The conversation runs close to four hours.
HN commenters send people here for a detailed first-hand account from the pilot, and some say it changed their view on the sightings.
16 comments from Hacker News
You should check the interviews (there are several, including a 60 minutes) with the pilot David Fravor (1). There are two pilots and two wizards that saw the same with their own eyes (even I have only see the other pilot confirming it). That's an UFO. That doesn't mean that it's extraterrestrial. To say that it's extraterrestrial at this point, is, in my opinion, so ridiculous like to say that there is nothing to explain (like the author of the article seems to believe). (1) - this video (this is a great interview interesting in its own right, even without the UFO part)
Lex did one [1] with the same pilot that saw the ufo (commander fravor). I went from "no friggin way do they exist" to "shit... it actually sounds plausible". [1] this video
I guess somebody had to cherry pick that line from the 3+ hour long interview, because it makes a good click-bait headline. But there's a lot more to the interview with Fravor than that. I still have over an hour of it left to watch, but I'd already say it's well worth watching. And don't get me wrong: I'm not some "UFO believer" or member of the "UFO community" or anything. I'm a skeptic by nature and I'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to some of the more radical claims made by ufologist types: the "extraterrestrial hypothesis" in particular. But Fravor does come off a very reasonable, intelligent, level-headed, sincere witness to something highly unusual. And he makes a point of distancing himself from claims of, as he puts it, "little green men". That said, he also allows that what he saw is not, as far as he knows, possible with any human technology. Net-net, if you enjoy this kind of thing, regardless of whether or not you have any pre-existing biases regarding what UFO's "really are", I'd recommend this podcast episode. At the very least, it's a chance to hear first-hand testimony by a very credible witness to something extraordinary. this video
Might be worth something to watch part of the Lex Fridman interview with one of the pilots, David Fravor. The entire podcast is four hours long and goes over his career and experiences, I'd argue establishes him as a competent naval officer and pilot. The timecode is when he describes the actual event- this video In the interview he also describes the record keeping process and basically some of the head scratchers you're bringing about. One other thing the pilot confirms in that interview is the validity (authenticity) of the leaked "Executive Summary" report, which, was leaked to media and (as far as I know) not really pursued for authenticity verification by others (PDF): [LINK]
Here's a 60 Minutes piece discussing it: [LINK] Here's a 4 hour interview with the pilot, David Fravor, on Lex Fridman's show where he goes into much more detail than you'll probably read elsewhere: this video This wasn't just a single radar. It was an AEGIS system compromised of multiple ships with state of the art radars, multiple plane radars, and visual confirmation by several pilots. They were tracking it for multiple days.