UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RECORDPERSONNEL FILE

Alex Dietrich is a retired U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and former F/A-18F strike fighter pilot. She was commissioned through George Washington University’s Naval ROTC program in 2001 and holds a civil engineering degree and an MBA from the university. Her university biographies describe a 20-year naval career with two combat deployments and a year on the ground in Afghanistan with a reconstruction team, and list a Bronze Star and Air Combat Medal.

In November 2004, not long after finishing flight training, Dietrich was flying the second jet in Commander David Fravor’s flight off Southern California when the pair were sent to investigate radar contacts. She has described a smooth, white, oblong object over disturbed water, and told ‘60 Minutes’ that at first she would have categorized it as ‘maybe a helicopter or maybe a drone.’

Dietrich first spoke publicly on CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ in May 2021, explaining that she did so ‘because I was in a government aircraft, because I was on the clock.’ She said she doubted she would have reported the sighting on her own because ‘it sounds so crazy when I say it.’ She has since focused on reducing the stigma that discourages pilots from reporting unusual sightings.

She has been careful not to claim more than she saw. In a June 2021 Reuters interview she said, ‘I don’t identify as a UFO person,’ and that ‘we don’t know what it was,’ adding: ‘the point was that it was weird, and we couldn’t recognize it.’ She also said she hoped not to be ‘the UFO, Tic Tac person for the rest of my life.’

After flying, Dietrich taught naval science at a consortium of Washington, D.C. universities and served as a military professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. She joined the University of Colorado Boulder’s engineering faculty in 2022 and became a scholar in residence there in 2023. Syracuse University’s leadership page now lists her as its interim chief human resources officer.