By this time you may already be familiar with Cmdr. David Fravor (US Navy, retired) as the fighter pilot who engaged what’s come to be known as the white Tic-Tac UFO back in 2004, leading to one of the remarkable videos released by the Pentagon over the past couple of years. He’s given a number of interviews to various mainstream news outlets recently, talking about his remarkable experience. But yesterday he showed up on the Joe Rogan show for a nearly two-hour discussion and it turned into a serious deep dive. I’ll embed the full video of the interview below, but first I wanted to cover a few of the highlights. (The entire show is worth your time, however, even if you’re already familiar with the story. Fravor goes into a lot of details we hadn’t heard before.)

Also on the show was filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who recently released a movie about Bob Lazar. (Ugh.) He briefly derails the conversation a couple of times talking about Lazar and some Ancient Aliens type stuff, but also adds in several good details about the recent revelations.

Sometimes when people go on Rogan’s show it turns out to be something of a disaster. Just ask Elon Musk or Tom DeLonge. Joe has a way of dragging them down various rabbit holes or getting them to engage in antics that wind up being embarrassing. That didn’t happen with Fravor, who maintained an air of cool professionalism throughout. (Well, there’s one possible exception I’ll get to in a moment.) But here are some of the highlights.

One detail he revealed early in the interview while describing the Tic-Tac encounter was that his F/A-18F Super Hornet was not equipped with any live missiles. Dummy loads were installed because they were scheduled to go on a training mission. This would have presumably left him with nothing more than his 20 mm rotary cannon if things had gotten tense with the unidentified craft.

Another fascinating detail he included was that during multiple encounters with the Tic-Tacs on both coasts, pilots were able to determine that the objects were actively blocking their radar systems, making it impossible to get a lock on them. And we’re talking about one of the newest, best radar systems in the world. This is interesting because it at least implies an actively engaged, intelligent force controlling the Tic-Tacs. (Whether that’s local or remote, biological or AI-driven we don’t know.)

Fravor additionally revealed that government and military investigations into these incidents are far from over. He has personally been summoned to Washington multiple times this year for private, confidential meetings with “high ranking government officials.” (He wasn’t authorized to be any more specific than that.)

One potentially disturbing story Fravor tells at the 49-minute mark in the interview (in case you want to skip ahead) deals with his “sense of humor” and some antics he and the other pilots get up to on occasion. This story involves them basically making their planes appear like a UFO in the night sky when they see people camping in remote areas.

Fravor: We used to fly night vision goggles in Hornets a lot. And with night vision goggles you can see a campfire from like fifty miles away. We used to do it, the good spots were down in like El Centro California. There’s some bombing ranges and people go camping in the Superstition Mountains… so we would go out at night flying around on goggles. You’d see a campfire and go, “Oh. UFO time.”

And then you get the airplane going around 600 knots and then you pull the power back to idle so you can’t hear it. Then you get zinging toward the fire and you turn the lights all down because we’re in a restricted area so you can do that. There’s lights on it you can only see if you’re on vision goggles. So the other airplanes can see us, but no one else can see us. Then you go zinging at it and right when you get to the campfire you pull the airplane into vertical and stroke the afterburners, let ’em light off, you count to three and then you just go away. Instant UFO reporting.

Sadly, Fravor may have just wiped out half of the UFO reports made to MUFON by people camping in Southern California over the years. Still, I don’t doubt the story a bit. I knew plenty of pilots during my years serving on an aircraft carrier and they tended to have rather “sick” senses of humor, as Fravor describes it.

Anyway, those were some of the highlights that stuck out for me. Here’s the video. As I said, it’s rather long, but definitely worth the time if you have any interest in this subject at all.