USS Nimitz "Tic Tac" UFO Incident

Origin Story

On November 10, 2004, radar operators aboard the cruiser USS Princeton, part of the USS Nimitz carrier strike group training off the Southern California coast, began tracking objects descending from roughly 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in seconds. Four days later, on November 14, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich were vectored toward a radar contact and visually encountered a smooth, white, roughly 40-foot object with no wings, exhaust, or visible means of propulsion, hovering above disturbed whitewater on the ocean surface.

Evidence & Claims

Fravor described the object mirroring his jet's flight path before accelerating away "like nothing I've ever seen" and vanishing in under a second; the Princeton's radar reacquired a contact more than 60 miles away moments later. A second aircraft captured the object on a forward-looking infrared camera (the so-called "FLIR1" footage), which the Department of Defense officially declassified and released between 2017 and 2020, confirming its authenticity as real military sensor data rather than a hoax. The case became public via a 2017 New York Times report tying it to a Pentagon program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

Skeptical Explanations

The Pentagon's own subsequent UAP task forces have not offered a confirmed identification, and the case remains officially unresolved. Part of what distinguishes it from most UFO reports is that the object was tracked on multiple independent sensors (radar, infrared, and direct visual) by trained military observers rather than a single witness. Proposed mundane explanations include classified drone technology, domestic or foreign, and sensor or optical artifacts, though no public account has yet matched the combination of speed, maneuverability, and lack of visible propulsion described by the pilots.