The Tic Tac UFO: USS Nimitz Encounter

On November 14, 2004, two F/A-18F Super Hornets from the USS Nimitz were pulled off a training exercise off Southern California to look at a radar contact. Four aircrew saw a small white object, shaped like a Tic Tac, moving over a patch of churning water. It climbed toward them and then vanished. A second crew later filmed a similar object on infrared. The case stayed out of public view until December 2017, and it is now the best-known military UFO encounter of the modern era.

The Carrier Strike Group

In November 2004 the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was at sea off Southern California. It was early in the workup cycle before a combat deployment to the Persian Gulf in support of operations in Iraq. Fravor, then a commander, was the commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41, the Black Aces, part of Carrier Air Wing Eleven. In his 2023 statement to Congress he said the at-sea period ran from early November to late December, and that the group had been at sea for about two weeks.

The air controllers for that day’s exercise sat aboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton (CG-59). The Princeton carried the Aegis combat system and its SPY-1 radar.

The Radar Anomalies

According to Fravor, the Princeton’s controllers had been watching strange objects on Aegis for the previous two weeks. He said they were coming down from above 80,000 feet to about 20,000 feet, staying for hours, and then going straight back up.

Kevin Day, an operations specialist senior chief on the Princeton, has since said in interviews that he was one of the sailors tracking those contacts. His account comes from later interviews, not from released Navy records, so we report it as his recollection.

November 14, 2004

Fravor was due to lead a two-versus-two air combat drill. His pair of two-seat F/A-18Fs was “Blue Air”. The opposing “Red Air” was flown by the Marine squadron VMFA-232. Soon after launch, the Princeton told them that training was suspended for a real-world task. The controller sent them west toward a contact. Their own radars showed nothing.

When they reached the spot at 20,000 feet, the controller called “merge plot”, meaning the jets and the contact were in the same radar cell. The crews then noticed white water on the surface. Fravor described a clear day with calm seas, so the disturbance stood out. Above it, all four aircrew saw a small white Tic Tac-shaped object moving abruptly. Fravor said it had no rotors, no rotor wash and no wings or other visible control surfaces.

Fravor and his WSO dropped down for a closer look. Dietrich’s jet stayed high as cover. As Fravor circled down, he said, the object turned its long axis toward his aircraft and began a climbing turn. He cut across the circle to meet it. He put its range at about half a mile when it “rapidly accelerated and disappeared right in front of our aircraft”. The jet flying high cover lost sight of it too. When the crews looked back, the white water had also gone.

Speaking to the Washington Post in December 2017, Fravor called it “a White Tic-Tac, about the same size as a Hornet, 40-feet long with no wings”. He said it accelerated “faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life”.

The CAP Point

As the two jets turned back toward their combat air patrol point, which Fravor put about 60 miles east, the Princeton reported that the object had reappeared on radar at that same point. Fravor told Congress it had covered the 60 miles in less than a minute. That claim rests on the radar track as relayed to him by the controller. The underlying radar data has not been made public.

The FLIR Video

Back on the Nimitz, Fravor told a crew that was about to launch what he had seen. That crew, also from VFA-41, took the now-famous infrared clip with their jet’s targeting pod. Fravor says it runs about 90 seconds. Chad Underwood, then a lieutenant in the squadron, has been identified in press interviews as the aviator who recorded it.

The clip shows a small, bright shape that the pod tracks for a time before it moves off the left of the frame. Fravor told Congress that the video shows no infrared plume of the kind a normal engine would give off. He said a radar tape, never released, showed jamming of the jet’s APG-73 radar.

What Happened Next

Fravor said in 2023 that the incident “was never investigated”. No one questioned his crews and no tapes were collected. He said that in 2009 Jay Stratton contacted him on behalf of the Pentagon program led by Luis Elizondo. That program, AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), produced a report on the incident.

On December 16, 2017, The New York Times published an article by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean that revealed AATIP. The paper published the infrared video alongside it. To The Stars Academy, the company Elizondo had joined after leaving the Pentagon, played a part in getting the material out. The government did not release the video itself in 2017.

In September 2019 a Pentagon spokeswoman, Susan Gough, confirmed that the videos were taken by naval aviators. On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense formally released this clip and two others recorded off the East Coast in 2015. It said the objects remained unidentified.

The Witnesses

David Fravor spent 18 years as a Navy pilot and retired as a commander. He has told the story many times since 2017. In December 2017 he told ABC News, “I can tell you, I think it was not from this world.” On July 26, 2023, he testified before the House Oversight Committee alongside Ryan Graves and David Grusch. He said the object “was far superior to anything that we had at the time, have today, or are looking to develop in the next 10+ years”.

Alex Dietrich flew the second Super Hornet. Fravor’s statement calls her “the other pilot in my flight”. She has since spoken in interviews and says she still cannot explain what she saw.

Kevin Day, the Princeton radar operator, has spoken in documentaries about the weeks of contacts and their effect on him.

Chad Underwood has given few interviews. He has confirmed that his crew took the video.

Analysis

The case is strong because it joins several lines of evidence. There are four visual witnesses with combat training, radar tracks reported by an Aegis cruiser, and an infrared video from a separate flight. The details people find hardest to explain are the near-instant departure, the reappearance at the CAP point and the lack of any visible engine or wings.

Each of those details has limits. The 60-mile jump depends on radar data the public has never seen. The video was taken by a different crew at a different time, so it does not record the close encounter itself. Skeptical analysts, Mick West among them, argue that the FLIR clip on its own is consistent with a distant aircraft at the edge of the pod’s resolution. They point out that the apparent sudden move to the left can come from the camera losing its track. Supporters reply that the clip is only one piece of the case and that the eyewitness accounts stand apart from it.

Other suggestions include a secret US aircraft or drone, a foreign craft, or a spoofing or electronic warfare effect on the radar. None has been shown to fit. Fravor’s own view is that nothing then flying could do what he saw.

Legacy

The Nimitz encounter helped change how the US government treats these reports. It was a central case in the 2017 coverage. It fed into the Navy’s 2019 move to formalise UAP reporting, the June 2021 intelligence report to Congress, and the public hearings of 2022 and 2023. It also shaped the creation of today’s official office for the subject, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

More than twenty years on, the object is still officially unidentified. The core of the case is the testimony of the four aircrew and the controllers. The radar data that could settle the hardest claims has never been released.

Sources

• David Fravor, Statement for the House Oversight Committee, July 26, 2023
• House Oversight Committee, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency”, hearing page, July 26, 2023
• Bangor Daily News (with Washington Post reporting), “Former Navy pilot describes encounter with UFO studied by secret Pentagon program”, December 19, 2017
• Fox News, “‘Stunning’ Tic Tac shaped UFO encounter by US Navy pilot? ‘It was not from this world’”, December 2017
• Wikipedia, “Pentagon UFO videos” (release timeline and skeptical analyses)