Alex Dietrich — American Veterans Center talk: “A Combat Pilot’s Experience with The Unknown”
- Speaker: Alex Dietrich (retired USN LCDR), solo first-person account
- Venue: American Veterans Center; ~26 min
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/ku9CYCKw4Aw
- Captured: 2026-05-29 via yt-dlp audio download → Whisper (speech_to_text_remote.py). The youtube-transcript-api and yt-dlp caption endpoints were both HTTP-429 rate-limited this session; the audio→Whisper fallback was used.
- Primary for dietrich-nimitz-witness.
I don’t think that the controller expected us to see anything, and that they were as surprised as we were when we had this intercept, this rendezvous with something strange that to this day I cannot explain, I cannot identify. And it really wasn’t clear how it was maneuvering and the way that it was moving. It was changing airspeed, it was changing direction, it was changing angles in a way that didn’t make sense and didn’t adhere to our understanding of physics and gravity. And by definition, it’s an unidentified flying object. When I was in high school, I had a college counselor who asked me to take a series of tests. All of my peers were getting ready to go to college and decide on their majors, and there was an expectation that we would go on to professional careers. I went to a math and science academy in Illinois, a boarding school, and the expectation was that the investment in our education would result in a return for the people of Illinois and the people of the United States. And so they wanted us to be engineers and doctors and to be professionals. And so when I took these battery of tests, it came back all over the map. I wanted to be a park ranger and an architect and a dog walker and everything in between. And so this college counselor that I had, he said, look, you just need to declare a major. You just need to decide on a college, and let’s reframe this. Imagine yourself when you’re 40 and look back. What do you want to have accomplished? What do you want to have done with your life to that point? And I said, oh, Mr. Hernandez, this is a great exercise. All the 40-year-olds that I know are getting divorced. They’re going through a midlife crisis. They’re switching careers. And he said, no, no, no. That’s not what I meant. But I said, no, this is actually a really good exercise. So I had a moment of clarity that I wanted to go and have an adventure. I wanted to travel the world. And I wanted to do something that I could only do when I was young. And I had the physical strength and the eyesight for it. And so that’s what led to pursuing a path through ROTC in college to graduate and commission as a naval aviator, going to flight school in May of 2001. So when I graduated and commissioned in May of 2001, I was selfish. I was self-centered. I was getting ready to go off on this big personal adventure. I wanted to travel the world. I wanted to do things that were exciting and interesting for me. And so I went down to Pensacola, Florida, for our initial, it’s called API, Aviation Preflight Indoctrination. It’s ground school. And so they teach you navigation. They teach you about engine systems. They teach you about weather. But you’re sitting in a classroom, and you’re reading books, and you’re taking tests. And so that summer was on the beach in Florida. It was anticipating this big adventure that I was on the cusp of. And then it came time for the first flight. And my first flight was on 9-11. Take me through that. Obviously, it started like a normal day for everybody. It was beautiful on the East Coast, that kind of thing. It was beautiful. I was in Corpus Christi, Texas, for primary flight training. And it was sunny. It was clear. It was exciting. I have a selfie in front of the aircraft, the T-34 Turbomentor, the little prop planes that we flew. And I had gone through the simulators, and I had gone through the checklists, and I was ready. I was excited. And again, I was very selfish. I was very self-centered that this was the beginning of my adventure, and that I was going to do something cool. I was going to do something interesting. I was going to do something fun. And everything changed in that day, in that moment. It was a paradigm shift. And I realized that it’s not about me, and that I’m a part of something bigger than myself. And so in that moment, and in the immediate aftermath, as we all tried to make sense of what was happening, and what it meant for us as newly commissioned ensigns, I had taken an oath. I had raised my right hand and sworn to support the Constitution, to defend the Constitution. And I needed to figure out what that meant. And I went back, and I reflected on that oath, and saw it in a new light, and had to figure out how I was going to contribute in a meaningful way. So then I went through the intermediate and advanced training in Kingsville, Texas. And from there, was winged and went to the F-18 Super Hornet fleet replacement squadron. From there, I went to VFA-41, black aces, first to fight, first to strike, and was deployed on the USS Nimitz in support of troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan for the global war on terror. So doing two combat deployments with that squadron in 2005 and 2007. So let’s go back to 2004, flying around off the coast of San Diego. Paint that picture for, before we get into the actual Tic Tac story, why are our aviators down there? What are they doing around there? We have, again, this just incredible advantage of having the resources and the space, the ranges and the ability to go out and do this extensive training before any of our operations. And so in November of 2004, I was with the VFA-41 black aces flying off the USS Nimitz, and we were in a pre-deployment workup phase. So we were getting ready to go on our deployment that following spring, and we were training. We were practicing, just as you do in sports. We were scrimmaging against each other, setting up plays and running them, and then debriefing, watching the tapes and seeing what we could do better, how we could fine tune, whether it was our maneuvers, whether it was our operations around the ship, the launch and recovery of aircraft is highly technical and calibrated to make sure that we’re really efficient with it. We launched and we were flying out on just a normal average day, expecting to run our maneuvers and then come back and recover and do it again later that evening and the next day, just in this cycle of preparedness that we were in. And so we were surprised when we got a call after launch and a vector away from our pre-planned, pre-briefed airspace. So before you launch, you agree on a rendezvous point and cap points where in this scrimmage, you say, okay, blue will set up over here and red will set up over here and we’ll run at each other and do our fight and then reset to the caps. And so we were doing our administrative phase of flight. We were checking our fuel state. We were doing other checks on our systems and taking sips of water and getting ourselves ready to get into this practice mode when we got a vector to go over to a different piece of airspace in the general vicinity and check out a real world contact. And I don’t think that the controller expected us to see anything and that they were as surprised as we were when we had this intercept, this rendezvous or a merge with something strange that to this day, I cannot explain, I cannot identify. And so by definition, it’s an unidentified flying object. Take me through coming up on this object. What did you see first that made you go, what the heck is that? So I was new to the squadron. I was a lieutenant junior grade and on the wing of the commanding officer, Commander David Fravor. He had a senior lieutenant in his backseat and I had a department head, a lieutenant commander in my backseat. So I was hanging on, trying to make sure that I didn’t make any gaffs or goofs and trying to just be a good wingman, which means keeping sight of your lead, not hitting them and not getting lost and showing up as the support that you need to be. So as we came to the merge plot, which is where the radar points, you know, come together on the scope, we’ve transitioned our scan to outside, you know, instead of looking at our instruments, looking and scanning the horizon and scanning around. And so amongst the four of us, somebody shouted out, hey, look in the water. And when I looked down, I saw a strange churning in the water. So there was a otherwise calm ocean. And then this bit of white water that was churning with no apparent source. So it didn’t seem to be, you know, a vessel or anything there. And if it hadn’t been for that white water, and I don’t know if it’s related, but if it hadn’t been for that as an anchor point for my tally, I don’t think that I would have picked up the actual UFO itself, because that flew very close to it. And from there, I saw this strange thing that we affectionately termed the Tic Tac, because it looks like a little breath mint. And when I say little, I mean, you know, from a distance, it’s small, but we estimated that it’s about the size of our own fuselage. So about 30 to 40 feet long and smooth, just like a Tic Tac breath mint, sort of a matte white color with no windows, no flight control surfaces, no visible forms of propulsion. So when we’re trained and when we practice, we look for surface-to-air missiles, we look for other aircraft, and we train our scan in a way to look for paint schemes and identifying artifacts. We look for a smoke trail, we look for contrails, other things that will help us figure out what it is and where it’s coming from and what its intent is. In this particular case, we couldn’t figure out any of that. And so we all got very excited on the radio, talking to each other amongst the flight, amongst the two aircraft, and the back and forth in the cockpit, and then to the controllers, so the air traffic controller in the area of our military exercise. So as I understand, and I could be mixing up the details, I understand that this object was off the surface of the water, more or less, and then there was a moment where it shot up to about 80,000 feet very quickly. Could you describe that moment? So not only did it look strange and not have, it wasn’t obvious how it was flying, because again, we look for wings and rudders and smoke trails and things that will help us understand which way is it going and how is it doing that. And then how can I get an advantage over it? Is it going to have a slow turn rate? How can I get angles to get a shot off if I need to? Not that we had live armament. We were off the coast of San Diego in a training mode, but we’re always thinking about, can I shoot that down? Can I take that? And in that case, it wasn’t clear what it was, and it really wasn’t clear how it was maneuvering and the way that it was moving. So it was changing airspeed, it was changing direction, it was changing angles in a way that didn’t make sense and didn’t adhere to our understanding of physics and gravity and all of the aerodynamics that we study and really live and die by, literally, in our aviation training. Is there a speed that this thing was measured at? An estimate of how fast it traveled at maybe its fastest point during this whole encounter? So I don’t have… In our aircraft, we didn’t have a radar lock on it. We had visual of it. There’s another aircraft that came out from our squadron the following cycle that got the FLIR footage that you might’ve seen, the black and white grainy footage. But the air traffic controller that was on the other ship, on the Princeton, was the one who identified this blip on the radar that didn’t make sense in terms of the speed and the altitude. And I wish that they would have told us before we launched what they were seeing. I think that they thought it was a glitch in the system, and it’s my understanding that they turned the system off and turned it back on to reset it, as you do with a computer. And so we were the first aircraft that were airborne after they were seeing these glitchy hits. And so they vectored us to see if there was anything there. And again, I think they were just surprised that there was something there there. And so in terms of the altitudes and the airspeeds that they were seeing, I can’t speak to that except to say that it was strange enough that they vectored us out to check it out. Now, you said this thing was making turns and doing things like that. So what kind of turns are we talking? Are we talking hard right angle turns? Yeah. So if you’ve ever driven a boat or just turning in your car, you have a turn radius that’s required. It takes a while to actually move the vehicle or the vessel around. Same thing in the air. We put a turn in, and then we can pull high G turns to make it a smaller turn radius. But there’s a limit to that. And so when we talk about the envelope or pushing the envelope, it’s literally a graph in our aerodynamics textbooks that you can see where this is the edge. If you turn this, this amount of G and this amount of angle of attack, and if this is your weight and this is your configuration. And so we’re very sensitive to that. And this UFO, unidentified flying object, didn’t adhere to any of those rules. So it was really turning what to our naked eye visually looked to be instantaneously. It seemed to be changing airspeed and altitude and direction just without having to go through the normal contortions that we normally have to go through and the complicated ballet that we practice in our air combat maneuvering, our BFM, our basic fighting maneuvering, our dog fighting, which is, you know, it made us both alarmed and also really impressed in the moment to say, you know, what is that doing? How’s it doing it? And I would like to be doing that. And so that’s interesting to me because you’re saying this from the perspective of assuming that there’s a man or a human being flying this thing and you’re going, well, that… So I don’t assume that there was anybody in it. Yeah, I don’t assume, I can make no assumptions about it. People ask me, you know, if it’s extraterrestrial, if it’s, you know, something else, and I stick with the literal term of unidentified flying objects and that it’s unidentified. And so we don’t know what it was and what it was doing. But we certainly raised the alarm in the moment. We were shouting at each other and anybody who would listen on the radio. And then when we came back to the ship, we reported it, we debriefed it and said, hey, there’s something out there. And we’re in the middle of a military training exercise. And we’re off the coast of California, post 9-11. That’s still very real and very raw in all of our psyche. And so shouldn’t we investigate and shouldn’t we divert some assets to really figure out what that is? Because if it’s an adversary spying on us or otherwise doing some sort of ISR surveillance, then, you know, wouldn’t we like to know that? And if it’s hostile, you know, absolutely, we’d want to know that. So I can’t speak to what it was or where it came from, or how it was moving in the way that it was moving. All I can do is put a pin in that moment and say, that was weird. And it would have been worth checking into, especially in the moment. I know I was gushing a moment ago about how competent and professional and able we are as a military. This was a, and continues to be, a crack in our dominance, really, in every other area. Because it doesn’t fit neatly in any of the conventional bins. And I suspect that that’s why, in the moment, the chain of command said, that was weird. We don’t know what it was. We’ve got a job to do. We’ve got a deployment to get ready for. We need to focus on that. One of the reasons that I have accepted and done many interviews on this topic is to advocate for the fact that people, when they see something strange, should have a way to report something strange, not to fuel any conspiracy theories about aliens or extraterrestrial life or anything like that, but to say, as a service member, if you’re out in training, or if you’re out on the front line, there should be a mechanism where you can report and you can register not just your own anecdotal experience, but compile it with radar data, FLIR footage, high-resolution photos, anything else that you have, and then we can build a database that then can be used to, and especially in this day and age when we have AI and such high sophisticated technology available to us, that we would be able to find those needles in the haystack and hopefully turn those things that are unidentified into identified. I know you have to give sort of a measured answer, and I respect that. What do you think it is? I have no idea. People always ask me that, and I literally don’t know, and I don’t really care. In the moment, I cared because it could have been a safety of flight issue. It could have been a 9-11 nightmare. Again, all those folks in San Diego and LA and off the coast of California, that felt incredibly vulnerable to have something in our airspace unaccounted for. When you have an air traffic controller saying, I need you to go over and check this out and get a visual tally and tell me what this is, that’s really unsettling in the moment. We checked it out. We said, this is weird. We don’t know what it is, and we don’t know what it’s doing or how it’s doing it. We came back to the ship. Nothing happened in that nobody was hurt. There was no damage. Then I went on with my life, with my career. I don’t lose sleep over it. People ask me if it haunts my dreams, if I ever have gone out and tried to investigate it on my own. No, I just don’t. I’ve done a lot of other things with my life. I deployed to Afghanistan, boots on ground. I’ve had three kids. I’ve had breast cancer. There have been a lot of other things that have happened in my life that I choose to focus on. When people ask me to, I will speak, and I will be interviewed, and I will tell the story and advocate for having an office. What are we calling it now? The AARO. Yes, the AARO is the current version of the office in the Pentagon that investigates UFOs. I think that’s a good idea. I don’t know that they’ve gotten it exactly right to this point, but at least we’re trying to fill in that crack of vulnerability that we had 20 years ago and work on what’s the best way to make sure that service members feel encouraged and empowered to report, and that they know how. What’s the mechanism? Is there a sort of 911 number that they pick up and call? Is there a web portal that they put it into? And then what happens to that information once it’s been ingested into a system? So this is kind of full circle. I’ll bring it back to my high school experience at a math and science academy. And you would think that that really taught me and my peers at that school to say everything has to be scientific and proven and factual. Yes, and that experience also taught us that science happens because we’re curious. And we cannot rest on our laurels and we cannot be arrogant and assume that we understand everything because then we don’t make any progress. You know, I think about the first human organ transplants. Those only happened in the mid 20th century. You know, before that, it was science fiction. It was like Frankenstein, right? If you’re going to take your heart and put it in my chest, like, fuck you. You have a God complex. You’re, you know, a mad scientist. There’s no way that’s going to happen. But now I go to the DMV and get my driver’s license and they say, hey, do you want to be an organ donor? And I’m like, yeah, no big deal. I don’t like, you know, turn the table over and say, how dare you? But like the idea that we could overcome something like that, something that is unimaginable for one generation of people to then for the next generation to say, like, yeah, that’s totally possible. And like, it’s an everyday thing. I not only assume, but I hope that we have so many more miracles ahead in discovery and technology and, you know, so I don’t know what it was that we saw that day. You’re not going to pin me down by saying it’s extraterrestrial or it’s something or something because I really don’t know what it was. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not open minded and would accept some non prosaic, you know, sort of otherworldly explanation, something otherworldly, like other dimension in meaning that it’s would break the current paradigm of what we know and think. And I’m not going to pin you down by saying it’s extraterrestrial or it’s something otherworldly. I don’t know what it was that we saw that day. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not open minded and would accept some non prosaic, you know, sort of otherworldly explanation, something otherworldly.