US Navy pilot Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich speaks out for the first time about Nimitz UAP encounter
Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, the female US Navy fighter pilot who flew the other Super Hornet alongside Commander David Fravor during their Nimitz UAP encounter, has just spoken out for the first time on 60 Minutes. We first wrote about this UAP incident here.
While Fravor and his back seater in their F/A-18 Super Hornet closed in on the unidentified object below, Dietrich and her back seater stayed up high, giving them a different perspective as the event unfolded. All four had “eyes on” the UAP for approximately five minutes as this unidentified craft demonstrated capabilities beyond any known technology. Alex Dietrich is now an NL310 Professor in the United States Naval Academy’s Department of Leadership Ethics and Law. She is a distinguished, intelligent, and brave individual whose credentials are undoubted.
60 Minutes - the American television news magazine, broadcast on the CBS network - began their report on UAP with Bill Whitaker introducing the subject as follows:
We have tackled many strange stories on 60 Minutes, but perhaps none like this. It’s the story of the US government’s grudging acknowledgement of unidentified aerial phenomena - UAP - more commonly known as UFOs. After decades of public denial, the Pentagon now admits there’s something out there, and the US Senate wants to know what it is.
Whitaker first interviewed Luis Elizondo, a former US Department of Defense official who investigated UAP for nearly a decade. Elizondo told him that these unknown craft display technological capabilities far superior to anything in any nation's inventory:
Imagine a technology that can do 600 to 700 G-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar, and that can fly through air and water and possibly space - and, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces, and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity. That's precisely what we're seeing.
Next, former US Navy pilot Lieutenant Ryan Graves was asked by Bill Whitaker how often he and the other pilots encountered UAP during training missions off the East Coast in 2014/2015. Shockingly, Graves replied: “Every day. Every day for at least a couple of years.”
Whitaker interviewed Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich and Cmdr. David Fravor together. When asked why she hadn’t previously spoken out, Dietrich replied “I never wanted to be on national TV, no offence”. Asked why now, she said: “Because I was in a government aircraft, because I was on the clock, and so I feel a responsibility to share what I can and it is unclassified.”
Whitaker asked Dietrich “Did the thought of UFO enter your minds?” to which she replied: “It was unidentified and that’s why it was so unsettling to us because we weren’t expecting it. We couldn’t classify it.”
Both Super Hornets were deliberately unarmed as they had been diverted from a planned training exercise. On encountering the UAP, Dietrich said “I felt the vulnerability of not having anything to defend ourselves, to not having any rounds, anything on the rails, if this was in fact a hostile threat”.
Agreeing with everything Fravor had to say, Dietrich added “I felt confused when it disappeared”. This reaction is hardly surprising because conventional aircraft do not instantly disappear.
Christopher Mellon is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and later for Security and Information Operations. He also formerly served as the Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Bill Whitaker interviewed Mellon for the 60 Minutes piece on UAP, who made clear the following: “It’s not us, that’s one thing we know. I can say that with a very high degree of confidence, in part because of the positions I held in that department, and I know the process.”
It was Mellon who was handed the original three Navy UAP videos - by an unnamed person from within the Pentagon - and he passed copies of them on to The New York Times for their first story back in 2017. Again speaking to Bill Whitaker, he explains: “It’s bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself has to do something like that to get a national security issue like this on the agenda.”
USS Omaha Credit: Creative Commons
The 60 Minutes broadcast comes just two days after a video taken from the USS Omaha in July 2019 was released by George Knapp - the Las Vegas television investigative journalist, news anchor, and radio talk show host, who has won dozens of awards for his reporting over the past 40 years. The video is a recording of a thermal imaging screen aboard the Omaha one night in July 2019, following a 6ft spherical object flying alongside the ship before it enters the water. No wreckage was found, which has led to speculation this might be a “trans-medium vehicle” able to travel through air and water. The USS Omaha has sophisticated surveillance equipment aboard. The featured UAP was just one of up to 14 unknown objects observed around the Omaha and four other naval ships during a three-day period. The Pentagon has confirmed that the video is authentic and you can watch it below.
There’s growing interest in these credible news stories of what US Navy personnel are reporting and recording. To borrow the title of our first article in this UAP category, it’s simply too real to ignore. Many of us, all over the world, are waiting in eager anticipation to find out what, if anything, the UAP Task Force report will reveal when it comes out next month.
Written by Jessica Nelson & Callum Cushen, 17th May 2021
UPDATE: Alex Dietrich has now also spoken to CNN’s Anderson Cooper and you can watch what she had to say here.
UPDATE (November 2022): The Tic Tac encounter was featured in our “The best UFO cases and what they suggest” film: