Fravor was asked if he's aware of any instances where experimental aircraft are used or tested against/around our own armed forces without notifying said forces first (I'm paraphrasing the question from memory here).
His answer was "no, we have testing facilities for that."
Military drills out at sea are also testing ranges. He is making a sweeping assumption on behalf of the whole DoD which he possibly cannot know and which simply not true. There is nothing that prohibits testing experimental capabilities and technologies (for instance for radar and IR spoofing) at training ranges (naval or otherwise) and during military exercises on
unsuspecting test subjects who are, obviously, also military personnel. For the deception test to work, the subjects must by default be 'unsuspecting'. And if the experimental tech or program is highly classified, Fravor doesn't have a need to
ever know about it. Fravor's et al 'UAP observations' may well be a case of such spoofing tests.
The existence, since 2014, of
the classified NEMESIS program (mentioned earlier on other threads as the successor of PALLADIUM) addresses the need
"to generate the appearance of a realistic naval force to multiple adversarial surveillance and targeting sensors simultaneously", using, amongst other things, "reconfigurable and modular EW payloads, distributed decoy and jammer swarms (DDJS), effective acoustic countermeasures (CM), and multiple input/multiple output sensor/CM (MIMO S/CM) for
false force generation to both above and below water sensors". The generic term "sensors" seems to imply they're not merely experimenting radar spoofing through real or artificial objects appearing on,
navigational radars but all manner
of military-grade sensors for instance on
military fighter jets
Whether the NEMESIS program includes false IR image generation tests, I do not have the slightest clue, but I'm almost certain such a capability is under development across the world, owing to its great potential in tactical deception.
Anyway, submarine-launched balloon-based metallic spheres being used in deception tests already decades ago by CIA under Eurgene Poteat and the likes of the "Cormorant" MPUAV launched from the Ohio Class submarines in the early 2000s, complete with rocket boosters falling off the UAV after launch and burn-out, are guaranteed to create very strange IR imagery in addition to radar signatures for the unsuspecting test targets (e.g. Fravor and crew).