The Tic Tac UFO: Inside the USS Nimitz Encounter
Commander David Fravor's 2004 encounter with a wingless, white object off San Diego remains the gold standard of modern UFO cases. Here's the full story.
If you had to pick a single UFO case to show a skeptic, the USS Nimitz encounter would be it. It has everything: multiple trained military witnesses, radar data from one of the most advanced naval systems on the planet, infrared video footage, and testimony from pilots who have zero incentive to fabricate a story. The encounter happened in broad daylight, over open ocean, during a routine training exercise. And after two decades, nobody has offered a satisfying conventional explanation.
The Setup
In November 2004, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting exercises off the coast of Southern California. The group included the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton, and several other vessels. The Princeton was equipped with the brand-new AN/SPY-1B radar system, one of the most powerful and sophisticated radar arrays in the U.S. Navy.
For approximately two weeks before the famous encounter, Senior Chief Kevin Day, the Princeton's air defense controller, had been tracking groups of anomalous returns on radar. The objects appeared at altitudes around 80,000 feet (well above the operational ceiling of most aircraft), then descended rapidly to about 20,000 feet, where they would hover or move slowly before dropping off radar near the ocean surface. The radar tracks showed the objects moving at speeds of around 100 knots, much slower than a typical aircraft, but their descent rates were extraordinary. Day described them as behaving unlike any aircraft he had seen in his 20-year career.
The Encounter
On November 14, 2004, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich were flying a pair of F/A-18F Super Hornets on a routine training mission when they were redirected by the Princeton to investigate a contact. The controller told them the objects had been tracked for weeks and asked them to check it out.
As Fravor and Dietrich descended toward the coordinates, they noticed a disturbance on the ocean surface: a roughly oval area of whitewater, as if something large was just beneath the surface. Hovering above this disturbance, about 50 feet over the water, was a white, oblong object that Fravor estimated was about 40 feet long. It had no wings, no tail, no exhaust, no visible propulsion of any kind. It moved erratically, like a ping-pong ball bouncing in a cup, Fravor later described.
Fravor decided to descend toward the object. As he spiraled down, the object appeared to respond, rising to meet him. When Fravor cut across the circle to close the distance, the object accelerated and vanished. "It was like it was shot out of a rifle," Fravor told interviewers. "One second it was there, the next it was gone." The entire visual encounter lasted about five minutes.
The FLIR Video
After Fravor returned to the Nimitz, a second flight was launched. Lieutenant Chad Underwood, weapons systems officer in an F/A-18F, managed to acquire the object on the ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared) pod. The resulting video, known as FLIR1, shows the object as a bright, oblong shape against a dark infrared background. At one point, the object accelerates rapidly to the left and disappears from the sensor's field of view. This video would become one of the three Pentagon-confirmed UAP videos released in 2020.
The Aftermath
Fravor reported the encounter through official channels. He says his account was met with a mix of curiosity and dismissal. The story remained relatively unknown to the public until 2017, when it was reported by The New York Times as part of a story about the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The article, which also featured the three Navy videos, fundamentally changed the public conversation about UFOs.
Fravor has since given hundreds of interviews, testified before Congress, and appeared on major media outlets. His account has remained consistent over nearly two decades. Dietrich has corroborated his description of the encounter. Kevin Day, the radar operator, has described the weeks of anomalous tracking data. Multiple other personnel from the strike group have come forward to share their perspectives.
Attempted Explanations
Several explanations have been proposed. Some skeptics suggest Fravor saw a distant aircraft or drone distorted by atmospheric effects. Others have proposed it was a classified U.S. military project. Fravor has responded that he was one of the most experienced fighter pilots in the Navy at the time and knows what aircraft, drones, and atmospheric phenomena look like. The radar data from the Princeton, the infrared video, and the independent visual observation by multiple pilots all point to the same conclusion: something was there, and it wasn't anything in the known inventory.
The Tic Tac encounter is not proof of extraterrestrial visitation. But it is proof that trained military personnel, using the best sensor technology available, encountered something they could not identify or explain. Twenty years later, that's still where we stand.