An Underwater UFO Stole a Torpedo Out from Under a US Navy Recovery Team

A new account of an encounter between US Navy aviators and UFOs–or in this case an unidentified submerged object (USO)–has emerged, courtesy of Commander David Fravor, an F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot that encountered the now-famous “Tic-Tac” UFO that repeatedly buzzed the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in late 2004. Fravor recounted the story of his fellow aviator’s encounter during an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, an encounter involving an enigmatic submerged object, and the sudden and mysterious disappearance of one of the Navy’s practice torpedoes.

Fravor says  that while he working on a recent oil and gas contract, he was approached by a Navy helicopter pilot that recounted two encounters that happened to him and his crew in the mid-to-late 1990s.

“He was flying CH-53s, which is a big, heavy-lift [helicopter] that the Marine Corps uses, and the Navy uses, for certain things,” Fravor told Rogan. “And when they go off the East Coast they do a lot of shooting, at the time it was off Puerto Rico,” in particular the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, where the helicopter pilot was stationed.

The pilot was flying a helicopter tasked with retrieving a BQM, a jet-propelled aerial target drone that was, in this case, being used to track the movements of a practice torpedo called a “telemetry round torpedo”. On this mission, the BQM drone completed its mission and successfully parachuted into the ocean, ready for pickup.

But when the retrieval crew went to gather up the drone, they were in for a shock: with the helicopter hovering 50 feet (15 meters) above the water, the team’s diver was in the process of hooking the BQM up to the winch, when the pilot “sees kind of this dark mass coming up from the depths,” according to Fravor. “And they hoist the diver up… and [the pilot’s] looking at this thing going, ‘what the hell is that?’, and then it just goes back down under water. Once they pull the kid and the BQM out of the water, this object descends back into the depths.”

A few months later, the pilot is on a similar mission, although this time they’re retrieving one of the practice torpedoes. “They hook the diver up on the winch, and they’re lowering him in, and as he’s looking down he sees this big mass. He goes, ‘It’s not a submarine’. He’s seen submarines before. Once you’ve seen a submarine you can’t confuse it with something else,” Fravor recounts.

“This big object, kind of circular, is coming up from the depths and he starts screaming through the intercom system to tell them to pull the diver up, and the diver’s only a few feet from the water.

“So they reverse the winch and the diver’s thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And all of a sudden he said the torpedo just got sucked down underwater, and the object just descended back down into the depths. And they never recovered it, the torpedo.”

Fravor says that the pilot told him that the torpedo definitely didn’t sink due to a problem with its ballast system, but rather that “it didn’t sink. It literally looked like it got sucked down,” presumably by the mysterious submerged object.

The pilot told Fravor that he was interviewed by The New York Times for their 2017 article that exposed the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and accompanying gun camera videos, but the newspaper was looking for accounts of more recent events, and omitted the story in favor of the now-famous 2004 encounters involving the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group.