USS Nimitz "Tic Tac" Encounter

November 2004. Carrier Strike Group 11, built around the USS Nimitz, was training off Southern California and Baja California before deploying to the Persian Gulf. Aboard the cruiser USS Princeton, Senior Chief Kevin Day was watching strange contacts on his radar. He said it was "like watching snow fall from the sky." According to the Princeton's briefing, as Cmdr. David Fravor later described it, the objects were "coming down from over 80,000 feet, rapidly descending to 20,000 feet, hanging out for hours and then going straight back up."

November 14. About 11 a.m. Fravor, commanding officer of the VFA-41 Black Aces, was airborne with his weapons systems officer, Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight. Lt. Alex Dietrich flew the second jet. The day was "Clear skies, light winds, calm seas, no whitecaps from waves."

Then "we saw some whitewater off our right side." Above it was "a white Tic Tac object," moving "very abruptly over the water like a ping pong ball." No rotors. No wings. Fravor put it at about 40 feet long.

He spiralled down toward it. "So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up." The object turned to align with his jet and climbed. At about half a mile, it "rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared." Slaight said it was as if it had been "shot out of a rifle." Then the controller reported it "at your CAP point roughly 60 miles away in less than a minute." Four aircrew had watched it for roughly five minutes. Fravor believed "it was aware we were there."

Later that day, a second sortie went up. Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood tracked the object with the jet's ATFLIR infrared targeting pod and kept the tape rolling. He never saw it with his own eyes. What stood out to him "was how erratic it was behaving." The clip runs 1 minute 16 seconds. At the very end, the object shoots off the left side of the frame. Underwood is credited with the name "Tic Tac."

Back aboard ship, crews faced "constant ridicule." Gary Voorhis and Patrick "PJ" Hughes later said they were told to hand over Aegis recordings and E-2 hard drives to unidentified personnel. No document confirms it. A 13-page executive report, generally dated to 2009 and linked to the Pentagon's AATIP program, concluded it was "of unknown origin and represented technology not currently in the possession of the U.S. or any other nation."

The video leaked online in 2007. The New York Times published it on December 16, 2017. On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense formally released it. The phenomena, it said, "remain characterized as unidentified." In July 2023, Fravor told his story under oath to the House Oversight Committee.

Mick West of Metabunk argues the video "seems consistent with a distant (>50 miles away) plane flying away from the camera." He attributes the shape to infrared glare and the sudden leap to a zoom change as tracking stopped. Others have floated sensor artifacts, radar spoofing, foreign drones or balloons. West's analysis addresses the video, not what the pilots saw. On the other side, Kevin Knuth and colleagues put one radar descent at about 5,370 g. Dietrich stays careful. As she told 60 Minutes, "if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back."

Two decades on, the case remains unresolved. None of the radar data has been released. The Tic Tac has featured in HISTORY's Unidentified, on 60 Minutes and in The Age of Disclosure.