What happened on November 14, 2004?
The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was running training exercises roughly 100 miles southwest of San Diego. One of the group’s ships was the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton. Its radar operators had been watching something unusual.
Commander David Fravor led an F/A-18F Super Hornet squadron aboard the Nimitz. He later said a radar operator told him the Princeton had been tracking odd contacts for about two weeks. Other Navy personnel who later spoke publicly put it at about a week. In the version Fravor relayed, the contacts would appear at around 80,000 feet, drop rapidly toward the sea, stop near 20,000 feet and hover.
That day Fravor and fellow pilot Alex Dietrich were diverted to check out one of the contacts. Each flew a two-seat jet with a weapons systems officer in the back. What caught their attention in the target area was the water: a disturbed patch of whitewater on the ocean surface.
Above it, Fravor said, was the object. In a 2021 interview with 60 Minutes he recalled asking whether the others could see it, then describing “this little white Tic Tac-looking object” moving around above the whitewater. He estimated it was about 40 feet long, roughly the size of his own jet.
Fravor spiraled down toward it. According to his account, the object started to climb, mirroring his path as though it were tracking him. “It was aware we were there,” he said. When he tried to cut it off, it accelerated so fast it seemed to disappear. Less than a minute later, he said, a contact was picked up roughly 60 miles away.
Who saw it, and what the radar recorded
The Tic Tac UFO case was not a lone witness on a dark road. Four trained aviators, two pilots and two weapons systems officers, watched the object together for about five minutes, according to Fravor and Dietrich. Both have described the encounter publicly, and Fravor testified about it before Congress in 2023.
Fravor’s description includes:
- A white, smooth, oblong shape, about 40 feet long
- No wings, no markings and no visible exhaust plume
- Movement just above the disturbed water
- A climb that seemed to mirror his jet, followed by a sudden burst of speed
The ship’s side of the story came out later. Radar and combat systems technicians from the strike group said the Princeton’s AN/SPY-1B radar and its Aegis Combat System (the Navy’s integrated radar and weapons control system) had tracked similar unidentified contacts for about a week before the intercept. A data technician said he secured recordings from the E-2 Hawkeye, the airborne early-warning aircraft involved that day.
What the public knows about the radar comes mainly from those personnel accounts and from Fravor’s retelling of what the operators told him. Detailed tracking data has not been part of the official public releases. This gap matters for everything that follows.
The FLIR video: how the Tic Tac UFO footage became public
After Fravor and Dietrich returned, a second wave of fighters launched from the Nimitz. One crew member was weapons systems officer Chad Underwood, whose jet carried an advanced FLIR pod. FLIR stands for forward-looking infrared, a targeting camera that images heat rather than visible light.
Underwood recorded the now-famous clip and came up with the “Tic Tac” name for the infrared image. He later said it was partly inspired by a joke in the 1980 comedy Airplane!. He never saw the object with his own eyes. He has said he was focused on tracking it and making sure the tape was running so the intelligence staff would have something to analyze.
The resulting Tic Tac UFO video is a grainy black-and-white image of a small oblong shape on a targeting display, with cockpit data overlaid. It does not show the close encounter Fravor described. It was recorded by a different crew on a later flight, and on its own it is far less dramatic than the pilots’ story.
From forum upload to official release
The footage took a winding path to the public:
- By 2007: According to reporting in Wired, a copy of one of the videos had been online on a UFO forum since at least 2007.
- October 2017: Luis Elizondo, director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a Pentagon effort to study unexplained aerial reports, resigned. In his letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis he protested secrecy and said the program was not being taken seriously.
- December 16, 2017: The New York Times reported on the encounters and published two videos, “FLIR” from the Nimitz and “GIMBAL” from the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The Washington Post published a third, “GOFAST.” The clips were provided to the press by Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
- September 2019: Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough confirmed the videos were made by naval aviators and called them part of a larger issue of increasing “training range incursions” by unidentified aerial phenomena.
- April 27, 2020: The Pentagon formally released all three videos.
Around this time officials began using the term UAP, for unidentified aerial phenomena (later unidentified anomalous phenomena), instead of UFO. Our explainer on what UAP means and why the term changed covers how that shift happened.
How fast was the Tic Tac UFO?
Speed is the core of the mystery, and also where the record is thinnest. No measured velocity for the Tic Tac UFO has been published. The figures in circulation come from two claims:
- The descent. In his 2023 congressional testimony, Fravor said Princeton radar operators described “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles” descending 80,000 feet in less than a second. Taken literally, that is more than 54,000 miles per hour.
- The departure. Fravor said that less than a minute after the object vanished, a contact was picked up about 60 miles away. If that contact was the same object, it covered the distance at more than 3,600 miles per hour, close to five times the speed of sound at sea level.
Both numbers need care. The descent figure is a description of radar returns, not a released dataset. The 60-mile figure rests on the assumption that the later contact was the same object, which no public record confirms. Radar can produce false or jumping tracks, and humans judging timing during a fast-moving intercept make mistakes.
On the other hand, Fravor’s account of the acceleration did not depend on radar at all: he describes watching the object speed away so quickly that it seemed to vanish. The 2021 intelligence report on UAP noted that, across its whole dataset, a limited number of incidents seemed to involve unusual flight characteristics such as high velocity and no discernible means of propulsion. It added that these observations could reflect sensor errors, spoofing or observer misperception and needed more rigorous analysis.
What is documented and what is claimed
Much of the confusion around the Tic Tac UFO comes from mixing these two layers together. Here they are side by side.
| Element | Status | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Nimitz strike group training off Southern California, November 14, 2004 | Documented | Navy accounts and official acknowledgement |
| Four aviators saw a white oval object for about five minutes | Witness testimony | Fravor’s 2021 60 Minutes interview; interviews with Fravor and Dietrich |
| Princeton radar tracked unusual contacts for days beforehand | Personnel accounts | Statements by strike group technicians; tracking data not publicly released |
| Object descended 80,000 feet in under a second | Claimed | Fravor’s description of what radar operators reported |
| Object reappeared about 60 miles away within a minute | Claimed | Fravor’s account; link to the same object unconfirmed |
| FLIR video recorded by a second crew | Documented | Pentagon confirmation in 2019 and formal release in 2020 |
| Identity of the object | Unknown | Described by the Department of Defense as unidentified as of 2020 |
Explanations for the Tic Tac UFO, from ordinary to strange
Commentators have offered a wide range of explanations. Fairly weighing them means asking which parts of the evidence each one accounts for and which it leaves out.
Sensor error and spoofing
The most technical ordinary explanation is that the instruments were wrong, either through malfunction, software artifacts or deliberate deception. Writer Jeff Wise has argued that electronic warfare techniques, descendants of older “radar spoofing” methods, could feed false position and velocity data to sensors and produce the unusual flight patterns seen in UAP reports. Astronomer Thomas Bania has also suggested some form of electronic warfare by China or Russia, aimed at learning what American weapons systems can do.
Strength: it would explain the extreme radar figures without new physics. Weakness: spoofing radar does not obviously explain what four people say they saw with their own eyes over the water.
Misperception and video artifacts
Skeptical investigator Mick West and others have argued that recorded UAP like these might well be commercial aircraft or balloons distorted by infrared glare, and that parallax, the illusion of motion created by a moving observer, can make slow objects look fast. Over open ocean there are few reference points for judging size, distance or speed, and the eye can be fooled. Readers interested in how perception shapes these experiences can find more under consciousness and the mind.
Strength: the FLIR clip by itself is ambiguous, and a small infrared shape can be many things. Weakness: the visual encounter involved several experienced observers watching for minutes, and was reportedly backed by radar.
Drones or foreign technology
Astrophysicist Adam Frank speculated that UAP like these could be drones deployed by Russia or China to lure American pilots into switching on their sensors and revealing their capabilities. Senator Marco Rubio, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, voiced a similar fear. A Navy spokesman also suggested that the rise in availability of unmanned aerial systems, such as quadcopters, could be one reason for the increase in reported intrusions.
Researcher Adam Dodd and security expert Jack Weinstein countered that neither country is known to have aircraft with such performance, and that a rival would normally keep that kind of technology from being observed and documented by the US. Weinstein added a caveat that China has developed some technology faster than expected. Retired Admiral Gary Roughead, a former Chief of Naval Operations, said in 2020 that in his time most of the assessments were “inconclusive.”
Secret American technology
The 2021 intelligence report listed US government or industry development programs as one possible category for UAP. Critics of this idea ask why a secret program would be tested in the middle of a carrier group’s training range without the Navy being told. Supporters reply that compartmented programs are, by design, hidden even from people who might run into them. This line of thinking leads into territory explored in our conspiracy theories section.
Something genuinely unknown
The stranger case starts with the witnesses. Fravor, a graduate of the Navy’s Top Gun school, told Congress that what he experienced was “well beyond the material science and the capabilities that we had at the time, that we have currently or that we’re going to have in the next 10 to 20 years.” Those who believe the Tic Tac UFO was non-human technology point to the combination of multiple sensors, trained observers and the reported absence of wings, markings or exhaust.
Skeptics answer that “we cannot identify it” is not evidence of any particular answer. Journalism professor Keith Kloor criticized the early coverage, saying the most likely ordinary explanations got only cursory attention while the reporting leaned into a mysterious framing.
What the Pentagon and Congress have said
Did the Pentagon confirm UFOs? In a narrow sense, yes. It confirmed that the videos are real Navy recordings and that it could not identify what they show. As of 2020 the Department of Defense described the Nimitz and Roosevelt objects as “unidentified.” That is a statement about what is missing from the record, not a finding of alien craft.
The Navy confirmed in February 2020 that its intelligence officials had briefed members of Congress. It also updated how pilots formally report unexplained aerial observations, describing the change as guidance on reporting suspected intrusions into its airspace.
On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary UAP report built mostly on Navy reports from the previous two decades. It drew no conclusion about what the objects were and said there was not enough data. It found that most reports probably involved physical objects, since many were detected by more than one sensor, and grouped possible explanations into five categories:
- Airborne clutter
- Natural atmospheric phenomena
- US government or industry development programs
- Foreign adversary systems
- “Other”
Of the cases it reviewed, only one was attributed to a specific explanation: a weather balloon. The report also flagged UAP as a possible collision hazard for US aircraft and, if foreign, a security concern.
A report released in January 2023 said the office tracking UAP had collected more than 500 reports going back to 2004. Military officials said most cases have innocuous origins, while others remain unexplained. On July 26, 2023, Fravor testified before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee alongside former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who had reported UAP encounters during training off the East Coast, and David Grusch, a former Air Force and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency intelligence officer. Fravor repeated that, in his opinion, the technology he faced was “far superior” to anything the US had.
What remains unexplained about the Tic Tac UFO
Two decades later, the core questions are still open:
- What the object was. No official body has publicly identified it.
- What the radar actually showed. The most extreme performance claims rest on descriptions of radar data rather than published tracks.
- What was in the water. The pilots’ account of churning whitewater below the object has never been explained in the public record.
- Whether the 60-mile contact was the same object. This link drives the speed estimates but has not been confirmed.
- How the visual and sensor evidence fit together. Each ordinary explanation handles some pieces well and others poorly.
A few common mistakes make the case hard to read clearly. One is treating the grainy FLIR clip as if it shows the close encounter, when it was filmed on a later flight. Another is treating the speed figures as measurements. A third is assuming that “unidentified” means “extraterrestrial,” or that “unexplained” means “debunked.” The record supports none of these shortcuts.
The Tic Tac UFO case endures because it is unusually strong by the standards of UFO reports: credentialed witnesses, multiple sensors, footage acknowledged by the Pentagon and testimony before Congress. Set beside earlier landmark cases such as the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, it shows how much the evidence behind famous encounters can differ. Whatever crossed the Nimitz group’s path in 2004, it pushed the subject into the mainstream in a way few sightings ever have.
For more cases like this one, browse the journal’s UFO and UAP coverage or the full archive of articles. Long-form conversations about the unexplained are collected in the Troubled Minds Vault.
Questions and answers
What actually was the Tic Tac UFO?
Nobody has publicly identified it. The Tic Tac UFO is the name for a white, oval, wingless object that Navy aviators from the USS Nimitz group reported off Southern California on November 14, 2004. As of 2020 the Department of Defense called it unidentified. Proposed explanations include sensor errors, electronic spoofing, drones, foreign or secret technology, and something genuinely unknown. No official finding has settled which one, if any, is right.
How fast was the Tic Tac UFO?
No measured speed has been published. Pilot David Fravor testified that radar operators described contacts dropping 80,000 feet in less than a second, and said a contact turned up about 60 miles away less than a minute after the object vanished. If that was the same object, it would have been moving faster than 3,600 mph. Both figures come from testimony and radar interpretation, though, not from released tracking data.
Did the Pentagon confirm UFOs?
The Pentagon confirmed that the Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt videos are authentic Navy recordings and formally released them in April 2020. It described the objects as unidentified. That means the military could not say what they were. It does not mean they were alien craft. The 2021 intelligence report on UAP also drew no conclusion and said most cases lacked enough data for a specific explanation.
What is the most credible UFO sighting in history?
There is no agreed answer, but the 2004 Nimitz encounter is often named. The witnesses were trained military aviators, four people saw the object at once, ship and aircraft sensors reportedly tracked contacts, and an infrared video exists that the Pentagon has acknowledged. Skeptics reply that credible witnesses can still misjudge what they see over open ocean, and that the public record of the raw sensor data is incomplete.
Who named it the Tic Tac?
Weapons systems officer Chad Underwood, who flew on a later sortie that day and recorded the infrared video, came up with the name. He said it was partly inspired by a joke in the 1980 comedy Airplane!. Underwood never saw the object with his own eyes. He was concentrating on tracking it with the targeting camera so the intelligence staff would have something to study.
Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.
