David Fravor, a pilot who was flying an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet that encountered a UFO in an incident that took place on 14 November 2004, stated in an interview with The Fighter Pilot Podcast that some of the tapes related to the event have since gone missing. Namely, the radar readings from guided missile cruiser the USS Princeton, which first detected the anomaly, were reportedly nowhere to be found.
"All the radar tapes from the Princeton are missing and they can’t find. I was chatting to someone at the archives and they’ve said someone has taken that page from the logbook", he said.
So, are these records gone for good? Well, not all of them, that much is certain, as footage taken from the jet surfaced in 2017 and made headlines, possibly due to Fravor making copies of his own tapes. But no one seems to know where the Princeton logs have gone.
"We came back from a cruise and they were [in place]. But then, somehow, they disappeared – no one knows where they went. There have been several COs [Commanding Officers] since then, no one knows where they went", he said.
The incident, which took place on 14 November 2004 during US naval exercises, is also known as the USS Nimitz UFO incident due to the name of the aircraft carrier where the jets that visually detected the UFO were stationed. The object was first spotted by the USS Princeton's radars.
Over a decade later, the US Navy acknowledged the footage of the incident, which was leaked to the media, saying that "unidentified aerial phenomena" had invaded the military drill area on that day. The military has still not identified it.
