Former U.S. Navy pilot who saw UFO speaks to local high school students

RIO RANCHO — It’s not every day that a retired U.S. Naval officer and strike fighter pilot would receive a spoof package of Tic Tacs, but that’s what happened to Alex Dietrich following her highly publicized close encounter with an unidentified flying object, known as the “Tic Tac UFO.”

The package supposedly containing the popular breath mints has still not been opened by Dietrich because she is mindful of the playful warning label, she told Cleveland High School students on Thursday.

“My husband says, ‘Just open it!’” said Dietrich, a scholar in residence at the University of Colorado-Boulder, during a speech in the high school’s theater.

Dietrich, dressed in her flight suit, delved into some of the ways her routine training mission in November 2004 captured the national spotlight — from interviews in glossy magazines to gifts — but her appearance at Cleveland and Rio Rancho High School was at its core motivational, telling students to engage in critical thinking and be leaders.

Her speech, coincidently, came as the renowned James Webb Space Telescope spotted the first potential signs of life outside of the solar system, a development Dietrich told students Thursday.

Dietrich’s visit to the two schools also presented the opportunity for her to see the National UFO Historical Records Center, a large collection of artifacts related to unidentified flying objects that opened in October at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School.

Dietrich said in an interview Thursday that the center intrigued her, and she has been in talks with the center’s executive director about collaborations for over a year.

The center, however, was not the centerpiece, so to speak, of Dietrich’s speech; her UFO encounter was.

Dietrich, newly graduated from flight school, was flying a routine training mission for the USS Nimitz off the Southern California coast with other pilots on Nov. 14, 2004. While it was initially agreed for the pilots to meet at a certain point over the ocean, they received direction from radar control: “’This is real-world contact; you need to go check it out,’” Dietrich recalled controllers saying.

“The hair on the back of my neck stood up,” she told students.

Dietrich did not see anything at first but soon noticed a disturbance in the water.

“If it had not been for the water disturbance, I would not have picked up a visual response,” Dietrich said. “We call it the Tic Tac.”

She then held up a 3-D model a friend made her of the a 40-foot-long, white, oblong shape she saw.

“This is what it looks like,” Dietrich said, before asking students how many of them liked Tic Tacs.

Dietrich later spoke with investigators about her UFO encounter, which became part of a June 2021 report from the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence. The report examined 140 incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena and determined all but one of them could be traced to a source, the report said. The other incidents, however, could have been anything from a balloon to technology from a foreign country, according to the report. It also determined the phenomena “clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security.”

Dietrich’s speech detoured into getting students to engage in critical thinking by examining different philosophers and reading the U.S. Constitution. She called her pocket version of the document, “my pocket critical thinking guide.”

Dietrich ended with a stark message to students about their future.

“You’ve probably heard this a lot — ‘We’re looking to you; the burden is on you, the next generation; you’ve got to step up and lead,’” Dietrich said.

It’s true, she said softly into the microphone before the crowd of students.

“We need you to step up and tackle big problems, whether it’s the opioid crisis or ... the UFO phenomenon,” Dietrich said.