A FORMER US Navy fighter pilot who witnessed the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO has said her fellow aviators kept quiet for fear of being labelled kooky.

Lt. Commander Alex Dietrich was training with a strike group approximately 100 miles south-west of San Diego when she and another pilot spotted the mysterious object.

The Tic-Tac-like objects were recorded on video on the planes Credit: CNN

Alex Dietrich has now spoken out about the encounterCredit: CNNAlong with fellow former pilot Commander Dave Fravor, who was also on the training mission, she has now been speaking about the encounter.

Videos of the encounter, along with another one over Florida, were first released by the Pentagon in 2020.

Dietrich told CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ fighter pilots had struggled with how much to reveal about the encounter as the descriptions sounded “crazy”.

“Over beers we’ve said, ‘Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don’t know that I would have come back and said anything,” Dietrich said during the interview. “Because it sounds so crazy when I say it.”

Favor and Dietrich were each flying F/A-18F fighter aircraft when they said they saw an anomalous object flying in their vicinity.

“It was unidentified, and that’s why it was so unsettling to us because we weren’t expecting it. We couldn’t classify it,” said Dietrich.

Dietrich is a former US Navy fighter pilotCredit: Alex Anne Dietrich

Fellow pilot Dave Spavor has also been speaking out Credit: CNN
At the same time, the ship that was part of their training team, the USS Princeton, detected “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles” on the horizon that were descending 80,000 feet in under a second.

The former fighter pilot said she felt under threat from the mysterious object.

“I felt the vulnerability of not having anything to defend ourselves. And then I felt confused when it disappeared,” she said.

Dietrich, a 41-year-old mother-of-three, is now a tutor George Washington University. She told the Washington Post that people had got in contact over the years with her wanting to know more about what she had seen.

“I do feel a duty and obligation. I was in a taxpayer-funded aircraft, doing my job as a military officer,” she said.

“Citizens have questions. It’s not classified. If I can share or help give a reasonable response, I will. I don’t want to be someone who’s saying ‘no comment.’ ”

But Dietrich says she still remains reluctant to be associated with the Tic Tac sighting saying: “I don’t want to be the faculty UFO freak.”