A Navy Helicopter Tried to Lift a Drone From the Sea, and Something Pulled It Down

The pilot could see straight down. He was in the front seat of a CH-53 Sea Stallion, a large Navy transport helicopter, holding at about 50 feet over the ocean off Puerto Rico. Through the windows by his feet, he watched his crew member in the water below.

The crew was doing routine work. Sometime in the 1990s, a BQM, a 20-foot target drone the Navy uses for practice and then fishes out of the sea, had been dropped in the Caribbean. A diver had gone in to attach the drone to the helicopter's lift cable so it could be hauled out.

Just as the lift was about to begin, the drone was pulled violently downward.

That yank is why the story is still told. It describes an encounter with something under the surface that was different from every submarine or sea creature the pilot had known.

The pilot later said he saw a large, dark shape rising from deep water. He described it as different from every submarine or sea creature he had known.

F/A-18 commander David Fravor, a Navy fighter pilot who had his own unexplained encounter while flying off the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, later repeated the pilot's account. Fravor said of the retrieval: "The helo drops a swimmer in the water, he hooks the whole thing up, and they fly back." Describing what the helicopter pilot said as he watched the mass, Fravor said: "He's looking at this thing going, 'What the hell is that?'"

Then the object went back down underwater. The crew pulled the diver and the drone out of the water, and the object descended back into the depths.

The Sea Stallion pilot never put his name to the account. Years later, after Fravor went public about what he had seen, the pilot contacted him privately to tell it, and Fravor began repeating it publicly in 2019.