US Navy crew who saw UFO in 2004 didn’t report incident over fear of being called ‘crazy’

A fighter pilot in the US Navy who claimed to have seen a UFO in 2004 says that her colleagues remained quiet on the incident over a fear of being labelled ‘kooky.’

41-year-old Alex Dietrich was one of several people who saw a now-infamous UFO on 14th November 2004, that is now being called the ‘Tic Tac’ after footage of it was released by the Pentagon earlier this year.

Dietrich recently appeared on 60 Minutes alongside her colleague commander Dave Fravor who along with four other pilots encountered the UFO in the Pacific Ocean near Mexico which was said to move at great speeds and could vanish within an instance and reappear miles away within seconds.

Speaking to the Washington Post, Dietrich who regularly speaks at House and Senate enquiries into UFOs said that unlike some of her colleagues she felt a “duty and obligation” to talk about what she had seen.

“I was in a taxpayer-funded aircraft, doing my job as a military officer. 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’.”

However, Dietrich admitted that she and the others who were there that day confessed that they probably wouldn’t have said anything if no one else was there.

“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 to 60 Minutes, adding “Because it sounds so crazy when I say it.”

Dietrich, who has recently joined Twitter has adopted a pretty good sense of humour about what happened to her recently joking that “some days your boss asks you to swab the deck. Some days he asks you to keep high cover while he spars with a UFO.”

There have been increased calls in the US to investigate UFOs after the Pentagon published their ‘authentic’ footage of the recorded incidents.

Earlier this month, Republican senator Marco Rubio called on lawmakers to take the reports more seriously and stop treating the findings like a “joke” and that they can’t allow “the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”