Five former U.S. sailors who have come forward as witnesses in the USS Nimitz incident with an unidentified flying object described as a “Tic Tac” say that evidence was destroyed by unknown officials.
The witnesses, Gary Voorhis, Jason Turner, Patrick Hughes, Ryan Weigelt and Kevin Day, say they were enlisted in the Navy when the USS Nimitz UFO encounters happened on November 14, 2004, Popular Mechanics reports.
Footage of the incident has thus far only been seen on a grainy black and white video, but these witnesses claim there may have been footage that was destroyed.
After the incident occurred, Hughes had performed his routine task of storing the hard drives, which in this case contained evidence of the encounter, in a classified safe. Shortly after, Hughes said, his commanding officer and two unknown individuals asked Hughes to turn over the data.
“They were not on the ship earlier, and I didn’t see them come on. I’m not sure how they got there,” said Hughes of the two men.
Voorhis said he had a similar encounter, but he was also asked to wipe the tapes clean.
“These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn’t uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS system,” he said. “They even told me to erase everything that’s in the shop—even the blank tapes.”
The incident was first brought to public attention when retired U.S. Navy pilot commander David Fravor, who doubts the story of the five sailors, after described his alleged encounter with a UFO on TV in 2017.
He claimed his encounter with a strange object while he in flight in 2004 was “something not from this world.”
Fravor said the object was flying around a patch of white water in the ocean below.
“A white Tic Tac, about the same size as a Hornet, 40 feet long with no wings,” Fravor described. “Just hanging close to the water.”
“As I get closer, as my nose is starting to pull back up, it accelerates and it’s gone,” he said. “Faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life. We turn around, say let’s go see what’s in the water and there’s nothing. Just blue water.”
“I don’t think I was a nut-job as an officer in the Navy. I wasn’t drunk, I don’t do drugs. I got a good night’s rest, it was a clear day,” he said. “I think someone should have looked into it. Having talked to some of the other folks, it’s a big frustration that it’s coming out now and wasn’t discussed back in 2004.”
While Fravor is often ridiculed for his theories, the U.S. Navy recently admitted that a series of UFO videos are real.
Speaking on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast on Oct. 5, Fravor described another incident, this time of a mystery “dark mass” that emerged from the ocean depths and swallowed a torpedo whole when a sailor was diving in the water to inspect a torpedo.
“This big object, kind of circular, is coming up from the depths and [a sailor] 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,” he said.
“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.”
Fravor said a witness claimed the torpedo “didn’t sink” as it “literally looked like it got sucked down.”
