'Not Ours': Navy TOPGUN Pilot Recalls Unexpected & 'Unsettling' UFO Encounter

According to a 2026 poll by CBS News 63% of respondents believe aliens exist and that they are living out there in the galaxy somewhere, while 21% believe humans and aliens have already come into contact. No matter where you fall on the issue, there have been quite a few interesting developments in recent years, such as the Defense Department forming a new UFO task force in 2021 due to national security concerns. Elite military fighter pilots have also reported seeing strange things, further fueling public curiosity, especially since some instances occurred decades ago.

Take for instance, Cmdr. Dave Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, who disclosed a strange encounter back in 2004 while they flew F/A-18F Super Hornets. A hundred miles off the coast of southern California, the pilots were conducting training exercises and witnessed a white-colored, elongated cylindrical object in the air. Lt. Cmdr. Dietrich told CBS News, "It was unidentified. And that's why it was so unsettling to us. No predictable movement, no predictable trajectory." When Cmdr. Fravor tried to intercept, the strange craft took off unbelievably fast, which is something considering the top speed of the U.S. Navy's F/A-18 Super Hornet is well over MACH 1.

To the pilots' knowledge, no official action from the military was taken. The pilots were even subject to some ridicule from other service members as a result. Other pilots have come forward with eerily similar experiences while training over the Atlantic in 2014 and 2015, although all reports describe these crafts as UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon).

A common mistake is to immediately equate something mysterious in the air with extra-terrestrials, though you can hardly blame those that do. Back in the late 1940s, reports of disk-shaped flying crafts or "flying saucers" entered public attention after a man (Kenneth Arnold), reported seeing them around Washington's Mt. Rainier.

Over the decades, more sightings were reported alongside the term UFO (unidentified flying object). Some stories were sensationalized and all the while Hollywood entertained audiences with various depictions of beings from outer space. Steve Hudgeons, Mutual UFO Networks director of investigations told Astronomy.com, "You wouldn't believe some of the photographs people send us. People who don't know what they're looking at will send us a picture that they think is the holy grail, and it's simply an airplane."

Some aren't jumping onboard with the alien narrative, as they believe there is a far more straightforward and plausible answer: secret military projects. The U.S. government has a "black budget," which allocates money toward classified endeavors, military or otherwise. This fund can run upward of $80 billion, though that varies from year to year. In 1994, Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works president at the time Ben Rich, told Popular Science, "There are some new programs and there are certain things — some of them 20 or 30 years old — that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about." This secrecy is behind the problem of studying UFOs, at least according to an astrobiologist.