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Navy pilots recall “unsettling” 2004 UAP sighting

6 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this interview1 month2021–2022 score 1.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Cited in UFO threads as a short, first-hand pilot account worth hearing, even without papers or data.

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.

“Can you just... please... at least just watch the damn 7-minute video” (HN, 2022)

1 strong recommendations · 3 citations · Interviews

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@pmarreck Mar 2022 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)
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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]
Short pilot testimony worth hearing despite lack of papers.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@creedleshrump May 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Radar data confirms: USS Omaha was surrounded by swarm of UFOs
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.
Navy pilot Alex Dietrich recounts seeing the tic tac object.
@throwaway29303 Jun 2021 Cites it
on HN thread The UFO Sightings Don't Impress This Physicist
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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
@dandotway Oct 2021 Cites it
on HN thread The Obsessive Life of the Fisherman Who Discovered the Loch Ness Monster (2020)
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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?
Pilot interviews on the 2004 tic tac sighting.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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