Joe Rogan Experience #1361 - Cmdr. David Fravor & Jeremy Corbell

And here we go. Uh, first of all, gentlemen, thanks for being here. Jeremy, thanks for coming back again.

Thanks, Joe.

And, uh, thanks to you, sir. It's very excited to be here, very exciting for me to be here to be able to talk to you about your story.

Uh, thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Uh, David, tell everybody who you are, and tell everybody your background, please.

Okay. My name is David Fravor. Uh, I served 24 years in the military, enlisted Marine for a couple years. They sent me to the Naval Academy. And I flew for 18 years for the Navy. Um, had, literally flew A-6s, Hornets, and then Super Hornets. Had every qualification you could get in the airplane, everything, even the stuff they're not doing anymore, so I had NVG high and low, went to Top Gun. And at the time of the incident that we're gonna talk about, I was a commanding officer of VF-A-41, the Black Aces.

I'm, uh, I've gone through a, a journey with this whole UFO stuff, from being a full-on true believer, to being incredibly skeptical, to trying to be open-minded, to, uh, uh, being more of a believer now than I think I've ever been before. And one of the things that I've always said is, the people that I believe, the, th- there's a lot of loony people out there, but the people that I put my trust in are high-level military people, like yourself. So, when I hear someone like you, who has a story that defies logic or defies conventional understanding of how aircrafts work, that's when, that's when I sit back and I go, "Okay, this, this is a different thing." Because, you, you know, there's always people that are telling you they're psychic, or they can s- you know, they sense things, or they're in communication with Bigfoot. There's always loony people out there. But when someone is in the military, someone who's trained to fly these incred- I mean, how, how expensive are those jets?

Uh, when we had them, they were about $70 million apiece.

Yeah, they don't give those to morons.

Mm, typically not.

(laughs)

(laughs) Some people in my family would probably argue that point.

(laughs)

But, uh, hey, better lucky than good.

It just seems to me that this is, uh, for rational people, uh, that want to look at this whole UFO phenomenon objectively, you're the type of person that I wanna talk to. So, I was very excited to have you in here. So, what year was your incident? And you, you have a very, very famous incident that's corrob- corroborated by actual evidence, which is one of the rarer ones. What year was it, and where did it take place?

So, it was 2004, November 14th, off the, it's really, if you draw San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico, we're about 60 miles off the coast in between the two. We're doing workups, so when we get ready to deploy, this was for the 2005 deployment. Uh, we were going at sea for November and December of 2004. So, we had been out, I had just taken over the squadron mid-October, so I'd been the CO for a month. So, we go out, uh, and we're putting the battle group pieces together, so it's not just the, the air wing, but we were, you know, we're, uh, we're on the carrier. We've got the cruiser. We've got all the support ships out there. And we're gonna integrate all the defenses and train as one unit. So, the exercise that we're gonna do is an air defense exercise, where there's good guys, bad guys. They're all from internal from the air wing. So, the bad guys today are gonna be the Marines, uh, VMFA-232, the Red Devils. So, they're gonna launch and they're gonna go about 100 miles south of the ship, and we're the good guys. And it's, we call it a 2v2, so it's two of us against two of them. And we're gonna work with the USS Princeton, which is gonna be the controller, and they're gonna control the blue forces. And then the red guys are gonna give us a presentation that, you know, they're gonna try and intercept so we can stop them from getting up towards the carrier. So, that's kind of the training set that we're all good. So, the Marines take off first, and they start heading to the south. Now, we have no idea that for two weeks, this, the two weeks we've been at sea, they've been tracking these things coming out of the sky. And when I talked to the Princeton controller, he's like, "Up to about a dozen of them." They would come down from above 80,000 feet. They'd drop down to about 20,000 feet, they'd hang out, and then they'd go straight back up after about three or four hours.