The Nimitz “Tic Tac” Encounter

In November 2004 the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was training off the coast of southern California. According to later accounts from crew members, radar operators aboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton had been tracking unusual contacts for several days. The contacts were said to appear at very high altitude and descend rapidly.

On 14 November, two F/A-18F Super Hornets on a training flight were sent to intercept one of the contacts. The lead pilot was Commander David Fravor, commanding officer of the VFA-41 squadron, and the second jet was flown by Alex Dietrich, later a lieutenant commander. Both crews reported seeing a disturbance on the ocean surface, with a white object about the size of a fighter jet moving erratically above it. It was oblong and had no visible wings, exhaust or markings.

Fravor said he descended toward the object, which seemed to mirror his movements before accelerating away faster than he could follow. According to the crews, Princeton’s radar then picked up a contact at their planned meeting point many miles away. Later that day, another crew flying from the carrier recorded an infrared video of an object using the jet’s targeting pod. That clip later became known as FLIR1.

The case rests on the testimony of four aircrew in two jets, the accounts of radar operators, and the FLIR1 video. Fravor and Dietrich have both spoken publicly and on the record, Fravor in media interviews and in sworn testimony to the U.S. House Oversight Committee in July 2023. Dietrich has generally been more cautious about drawing conclusions.

The FLIR1 video lasts about a minute and a half. It shows a small, featureless object that the pod tracks before the object moves quickly out of frame. The video contains no altitude, range or speed data that clearly shows extraordinary performance. The complete radar data from Princeton and the carrier has never been publicly released, and some crew members have said that recordings were collected by unidentified personnel soon after the event. That claim has not been officially confirmed.

The video first reached the public in December 2017, when The New York Times reported on the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. In April 2020 the Department of Defense officially released FLIR1 along with two other Navy videos, known as Gimbal and GoFast. The Department said it was doing so to clear up any public confusion over whether the footage was real.

The U.S. government has not publicly offered an explanation for the Nimitz encounter. When the Department of Defense released the videos in 2020, it said the aerial phenomena they show remain characterised as unidentified. It did not claim they were anything extraordinary.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2021 preliminary assessment on unidentified aerial phenomena did not discuss individual incidents in public. It noted that a small number of reports appeared to show unusual flight characteristics, which could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing or observer misperception and needed further analysis. No later public report from AARO has resolved the case.

Sceptical analysts, including writer Mick West, have argued that the FLIR1 object is consistent with a distant aircraft seen out of focus, and that its apparent sudden movement in the video is caused by the camera switching zoom levels or losing its lock. This analysis addresses only the video, which was recorded separately from Fravor’s sighting. It does not explain what the crews say they saw.

Other suggested explanations include a classified U.S. drone or test programme, foreign technology, radar spoofing or errors during a system upgrade, and misjudgement of size and distance over a featureless ocean. Each has critics: the pilots were experienced, and the object’s reported performance exceeds known aircraft. Some commentators suggest non-human technology. The strongest form of that claim relies on data that has not been released.