David D. Luxton, PhD., is an author, clinical psychologist and a musical artist. A former military psychologist and research scientist, he has authored more than 100 academic publications in the fields of artificial intelligence, ethics, and psychological health. He is Associate Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. David is also U.S. Air Force veteran, and founder of the Wayfarer Records music label.
We took this opportunity to chat with David about the content of the Pentagon UFO Report—which has been called, “an unprecedented act of transparency from the Pentagon.” In this report, they reviewed 144 UFO sightings by military aviators between 2004 and 2021, and of those, they could only determine the explanation for one (their investigation found it to be a deflated balloon). The other 143 sightings remain a mystery.
We also talked to David about the research that went into his latest novel The Goldilocks Zone, that included a couple of meetings with former Navy Commander, David Fravor, who witnessed the now famous ‘tic tac’ UFO. David got a chance to ask him some questions, and he shares Commander Fravor’s answers with us in this interview—answers that seem to only deepen the mystery of this unknown craft.
David also shares with us his views on how information is being used to control the masses—a form of ‘mind control’ as he sees it, with people being bombarded with information (or ‘misinformation’) through various outlets like social media and the main-stream media (topics he tackles in this latest novel). David advices that, like the protagonist in his story (a millennial, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter), one should have a good BS detector to make sense of what’s going on.
Here’s a partial, edited transcript of our interview.
We asked David about his meeting with Commander Fravor that took place in 2019, in which he recounts what he saw and the events that followed. As David tells us:
“Back in 2004, [Cmdr. Fravor and his squadron] were doing training missions off the coast of San Diego. While they were out there, they got a call from another ship and they were told that there’s been some objects that had been observed. These objects appeared to be coming from high in the atmosphere, from like 80,000 ft., and coming down rapidly down toward the surface of the ocean—so they were dispatched to fly over there to see what was going on.
So Fravor says, ‘okay I see this object down on the surface’—they got a visual of it. It was a white object that he describes as oval-shaped, like a tic tac, and about the size of an F-18 (18.31m/60ft. in length). So he goes down to take a closer look at it, and he does this kind of curve as his coming down, and then he cuts across the circle so he can dive faster and get closer. As he does that, that object takes off from the surface, and starts to mirror his position (as if it’s kind of getting away from him), and as he comes around, that object takes off and basically disappears.
Now, he said that they didn’t have video on, so unfortunately there’s no video of the visual that he saw. However, after this, they sent out another couple of F-18s and they did get confirmation of the object as well, they tracked it, and they got it on some sensors. That is the video that you actually see that has been all over the media—the video from this other F-18 with a sensing device that’s observing this object. You see it is kind of oval-shaped and then it just zooms-off.
Navy video from 2004 declassified by the Pentagon shows the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO
Fravor said that it was right on the surface of the water, which got me thinking: well, is it a rotary aircraft like a helicopter on the surface? Is it a submarine that had surfaced? He said that the object, the tic tac UFO, was moving very rapidly. He describes it like a ping-pong ball, and it was kind of bouncing around almost in a random movement—which really didn’t make any sense. He said that when he got back to the carrier, he did tell people about it, and they (as they would in the military) ridiculed [him] for reporting seeing a UFO.
DoD authorized release of this Navy video taken in 2004. What was observed in this video remains “unidentified.”
The other part of the story is that, when they take video from the aircraft, there’s basically recording devices inside. They take those recordings inside the ship, and then they upload them into some kind of computer—those tapes (apparently) are the ones that somehow were taken off the ship and leaked to the press some years later. Very mysterious, that piece of it.
Fravor said that, to his knowledge, there were admirals who were notified of the incident—that it had gone up the chain of command and, really after that, he didn’t talk much about it. In 2017, that is when the report and the videos were released (and there’s the famous New York Times article about this), that’s when the public first learned about it, and since then, there’s been a couple of other videos that the Navy has admitted that they are official Navy videos.
The Pentagon confirms leaked UFO video is real.
One is called the Go Fast, and it’s an object that was moving pretty fast which they tracked; and there is another object that they observed as well. More recently in the last couple of months, there’s another object that looks like a balloon-type object that was observed off the USS Omaha; and then there’s another video recently as well of these triangular shaped lights in the sky filmed by US Navy Sailors, also released to the press. So it’s quite fascinating—the first time in history the US Navy/US Government has admitted that they don’t know what these are.”
David asked Commander Fravor what his thoughts were on this strange object and what it could be, to which he answered:
“Commander Fravor is a top-gun graduate and instructor—he’s the top-of-the-top of Navy aviators. Again, he was a squadron commander, so he has all kinds of responsibility and he’s not someone who is going to make up stories about UFOs. I asked him this myself, ‘personally: have you ever seen anything like this before?’ He’s reply, ‘no never seen anything like this before.’
He still doesn’t have any idea what it is—and he thinks that it may be extraterrestrial. Completely unknown. I asked him if he thought what he saw was something that was being launched from a submarine? He said to me, ‘I’ve seen submarines many times from above, and it did not look like that at all.’
Then I got to thinking about, was this potentially something like a dirigible—a blimp? The US has had blimps. In fact, it had them up from the mid-2000s up until 2017. There was a dirigible called the MZ3A that was a bit larger than an F-18, and was an official Navy blimp, but it was operated by a contractor. When you think about the shape of a blimp: its white, its oval-shaped (like a tic-tac) could that be what it was? Fravor said there’s no way—this thing was moving around sporadically and it was definitely not a blimp.
I also started to think, is it some sort of drone that could be launched from a submarine or satellite? He again said, he had never seen anything like this. I asked him, again—I am a psychologist, so I’m thinking: what about the potential for an experiment that was going that, just because you’re in the military, and even if you are a commander of an F-18 squadron, that doesn’t mean that there are other operations going on that you’ve not been told about?
I know this from my own experience serving in the military—there can be things that are going on you just don’t know about because you don't have the-need-to-know. He said, ‘No way. I would’ve known.’ There’s nothing he’s ever seen that has moved around like this before—and the other pilot said the same thing. So, highly credible witness. Video evidence that’s been released. The Navy has officially said they don’t know what the these things are.
One of the main topics covered in his novel is the topic of misinformation—asked if we should question the timing of the Pentagon’s UFO report, David said:
President Barack Obama on his knowledge about UFOs.
“The timing is kind of interesting with everything else that’s going on in our world, and now this comes out and is leaked. There’s definitely what I would call a “campaign of promotion” of this with some TV shows, and people coming out and talking about it—I definitely see that. People who are into this often think that maybe those that come out and talk about this are intentionally leaking information, or are operatives themselves—that they’re being used to disseminate information. Certainly it’s a hypothesis, I’m not saying that’s the case. That is a topic in the novel that I explore.
When asked if there were other colleagues in his field who were researching (or at least open to explore) the UFO mystery, David answered:
“I’m a licensed clinical psychologist, and there aren’t a whole lot of clinical psychologists that I am aware of, who are into this UFO stuff—who at least speak about it publicly, and there’s probably some reasons for that. But, I’ve always been surprised why there aren’t more psychologist involved? Whenever there are sightings, it’s great when you have pilots talking about it, or an astronomer, but we need more psychologists involved because there’s a lot of phenomena that is just in your mind. You’re fooled by perception and things like that—they’re studied in labs.
We know that people can be fooled to think that they see something when they don’t, or they’re seeing an object moving when its really not (the autokinetic effect). I’d love to see more psychologists involved and, for me, this is really a first: to step-out of my very dry, academic world, and talk about this topic. But I think it’s time—with this report, it’s like: you gotta be paying attention to this.”
Click on the YouTube link at the top of this page for our full interview with David Luxton—and don’t forget to pick up a copy of his novel, The Goldilocks Zone here.
