60 Minutes
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2022
6:45 · 1.4M views · May 16, 2021
A 60 Minutes segment in which Navy pilots Dave Fravor and Alex Dietrich recount their 2004 encounter with the 'tic tac' UAP during training with the USS Nimitz group.
Cited in UFO threads as a short, first-hand pilot account worth hearing, even without papers or data.
4 comments from Hacker News
Can you just... please... at least just watch the damn 7-minute video (shit, if you watch it at 1.5 speed it's only 5 mins!), because as it turns out, not all truths can be reached via scientific papers, with some truths you have to actually listen to people talking about their subjective experiences (more pedestrian cases in point: kids claiming they are trans or gay despite no obvious mechanistic explanation for it, women claiming they were sexually assaulted, guys claiming that blueballs exist (did you know there's no actual evidence for that and that the predominant explanation is "testicular torsion", which is insane, as that condition is an extremely rare medical emergency, according to my nurse friend?), anyone reporting anything as an eyewitness to a police or legal authority... etc. etc. etc.) I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm not making any money on this (and neither are these folks), and 60 Minutes is a (mostly) reputable information source with a long history. this video
For one thing, first-person accounts, which are notoriously inaccurate to begin with, don’t provide enough information for an empirical investigation. Scientists can’t accurately gauge distances or velocity from a pilot’s testimony: “It looked close” or “It was moving really fast” is too vague. What a scientist needs are precise measurements from multiple viewpoints provided by devices that register various wavelengths (visual, infrared, radar). That kind of data might tell us if an object’s motion required engines or materials that we Earthlings don’t possess. It's true that first-person accounts are sometimes inaccurate, but in the Nimitz case, we have, I believe, eight pilots in total who actually saw the object. The first incursion by David Fravor and his co-pilot Alex Dietrich and a second plane; and the second incursion - by other pilots which I don't know the names of - on which there's brief footage of the object[0]. Not only there's first-person accounts there's also devices which registered these objects. Nimitz caught these objects, in fact, they not only caught several of them, the incursions were made in order to check out what was going on. I wish these "devices can be faulty," (knowing that people actually looked at the object in loco ) "people can be bad first-person accounts" memes actually died once and for all in this particular case. It feels like people don't actually go out and do their due diligence. I feel people either aren't listening or paying atten
Ahh, so if the monster exists then it must, like the porpoises, only rarely travel to Loch Ness from the ocean, so that few sightings per century can be expected. I thought all alien craft sightings were BS until four separate Navy pilots came forward to say they all saw that white tic tac in 2004. And three of the four pilots have done television interviews, most recently this 60 Minutes one: this video If not for the link between Loch Ness and the ocean I'd think the existence of the monster could probably be ruled out as attention seeking liars. But now that we know porpoises sometimes make the rare trip from the ocean, we can't 100% rule out the monster never does. Does Dochfour Weir have 24/7 thermal and sonar monitoring and recording? Would Dochfour Weir capture on video and count every single porpoise that passes through at 3am, 365 days per year?
Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich was with Fravor and also saw the tic tac: this video Also would be surprised if military pilots were allowed to carry their cell phones with them, nor would it likely be advisable to take a phone video while you're piloting a fighter jet.