A former commanding officer of a U.S. Navy squadron claims to have seen a flying object about the size of his F/A-18 fighter plane that resembled a white Tic Tac.

David Fravor said he saw the object after a break in a routine training mission off the California coast on November 14, 2004.

The former officer claimed the unidentified 40-foot-long wingless object moved rapidly, unlike anything he had ever seen in the air, and he has not forgotten it since.

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"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world," Fravor said in an interview with ABC News. "I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. After 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close."

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CNN screenshot

The ex-Navy pilot explained that he was on a training flight mission around 13 years ago when the incident occurred.

Controllers on one of the Navy ships on the water below reported objects that were dropping out of the sky from 80,000 feet and going "straight back up," Fravor told ABC. “So we’re thinking, OK, this is going to be interesting.”

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An object then appeared on the radar as another aviator spotted the unusual flying object. “I was like, ‘Dude, do you see that?’” Fravor recalled.

“We look down, we see a white disturbance in the water, like something's under the surface, and the waves are breaking over, but we see next to it, and it's flying around, and it's this little white Tic Tac, and it's moving around—left, right, forward, back. The radar immediately starts getting jammed, and all of a sudden it takes off," he continued.

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Fravor also said the planes flew lower to investigate the object. That was when the object started to mirror their movements before quickly disappearing, he added.

"As we start to cut across, it rapidly accelerates, climbs past our altitude and disappears," Fravor said. "When it started to near us, as we started to descend towards it coming up, it was flying in the elongated way, so it's a Tic Tac, with the roundish end going in the forward direction. I don't know what it is. I don't know what I saw. I just know it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it."

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Adding to the bizarre experience, Fravor claimed the disturbance in the water also vanished with the object.

"I have never seen anything in my life, in my history of flying, that has the performance, the acceleration,” Fravor said. “Keep in mind, this thing had no wings.”

Fravor’s story emerged just days after The New York Times reported the existence of a program by the Defense Department dedicated to studying unidentified flying objects. Funding for the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program began in 2007, and the Pentagon said it closed it in 2012, acknowledging the program for the first time publicly.

Fravor told ABC that there was no logical rationale for what he experienced that day. “I don’t know if it was alien life, but I will say that in an infinite universe with multiple galaxies that we know of, if we’re the only planet with life, then it’s a pretty lonely universe.”

He added, "You know, you see a lot of interesting things. But to show up on something that's a 40-foot-long white Tic Tac with no wings that can move, really, in any random direction that it wants and go from hovering over the ocean to mirroring us to accelerating to the point where it just disappears—like, poof, then it was gone."

In an interview with The Washington Post, Fravor said he is certain about one thing: "It was a real object, it exists, and I saw it." Asked what he believes it was, he responded that it was "something not from the Earth."

This article was first written by Newsweek

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