The Nimitz Encounter 2004: The Tic Tac UAP Incident

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On November 14, 2004, two U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets from the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, training about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, were diverted to investigate a radar contact tracked for days by the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton. The pilots, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, reported visual contact with a white, oval, wingless object roughly 40 feet long, hovering above churned water, which accelerated away when approached. A second Super Hornet equipped with an infrared targeting pod recorded the object, producing the footage later designated FLIR1. Two decades later, the Nimitz encounter 2004 remains one of the most widely cited and officially acknowledged UAP cases, with the Pentagon confirming the authenticity of the video in 2020 and Fravor testifying under oath before Congress in 2023.

Pacific Ocean, off San Diego CA (31.0, -119.5)

TL;DR: The Nimitz encounter 2004 involved multiple U.S. Navy sensors, four credentialed aviators, and roughly 90 seconds of infrared video (FLIR1) of a wingless, oval-shaped object off the California coast. The Pentagon officially released and confirmed the video in April 2020. Independent skeptical analysis, most prominently by Mick West at Metabunk, argues the FLIR1 footage is consistent with a distant aircraft combined with camera gimbal effects. The case has driven a decade of congressional UAP hearings and legislation. Sources linked below.

Timeline

November 10-14, 2004 Radar operators aboard the USS Princeton, led by Senior Chief Petty Officer Kevin Day, tracked anomalous contacts on the AN/SPY-1 system for roughly two weeks, with objects reportedly descending from 80,000+ feet to sea level in seconds.

November 14, 2004, approximately 3:15 p.m. PST Commander David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, flying F/A-18F Super Hornets from Strike Fighter Squadron 41, were diverted from a training exercise to investigate the Princeton’s radar contact about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. Fravor reported visual contact with a white, Tic Tac-shaped object roughly 40 feet long, hovering above disturbed water.

November 14, 2004, ~3:45 p.m. PST A second flight launched. Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood, equipped with an advanced AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR targeting pod, recorded approximately 90 seconds of infrared video of the object, later released publicly as FLIR1. Underwood coined the “Tic Tac” description from the object’s infrared appearance.

December 16, 2017 The New York Times published “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” and released the FLIR1 and GIMBAL videos, the first wide public release of the Nimitz footage.

April 27, 2020 The U.S. Department of Defense officially declassified and released three Navy UAP videos, including FLIR1, confirming their authenticity and the “unidentified” nature of the objects.

April 2019 The U.S. Navy issued formal guidelines for pilots to report UAP encounters, a policy shift prompted in part by the Nimitz case’s public exposure.

May 16, 2021 CBS “60 Minutes” aired a segment featuring Fravor and Dietrich recounting the encounter on-camera, substantially raising mainstream media attention on the case.

July 26, 2023 Fravor testified under oath at the House Oversight Committee’s hearing “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency”, filing a written statement describing the encounter and its subsequent handling.

March 8, 2024 The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) published its “Historical Record Report, Volume 1”, a broad review of U.S. government UAP involvement. Previous AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick publicly stated the Nimitz case remains classified as “unknown” due to the unavailability of preserved 2004 sensor data.

November 14, 2024 The Pentagon published its FY24 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, the most recent comprehensive government summary of unidentified aerial phenomena data.

The Nimitz Encounter 2004: The Initial Radar Detection

According to the account Fravor later gave to Congress and to reporters, the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting a routine pre-deployment exercise when USS Princeton radar operators reported sustained detections of multiple unidentified objects over the preceding two weeks. The Princeton was equipped with the AN/SPY-1 radar, the most advanced shipborne phased-array system in U.S. service at the time. Senior Chief Petty Officer Kevin Day was the lead operator on the deck during the period and, in later interviews, described objects appearing at high altitude before descending rapidly to the surface.

On November 14, 2004, at roughly 3:15 p.m. local time, the Princeton directed Fravor and Dietrich, already airborne on a training mission, to investigate a contact. Fravor, then commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41) and a Top Gun graduate, broke off his exercise and flew to the reported coordinates. In a 2021 “60 Minutes” interview and later in sworn congressional testimony, Fravor described seeing, after reaching altitude, a disturbance on the ocean surface like “a 737 crashed in the water,” with an elongated white object hovering 50 feet above the churn.

Dietrich, flying wing, independently observed the same object. According to CBS News, Dietrich later told reporters the object had “no intakes, no wings, no rotors.” When Fravor began a descending spiral to intercept, the object reportedly climbed to meet his trajectory, mirrored his turns for several seconds, then accelerated and disappeared. Princeton radar subsequently reported a new track at the Super Hornets’ planned CAP (combat air patrol) rendezvous point roughly 60 miles away, less than a minute later.

The FLIR1 Recording and Radar Jamming Claim

A second wave of two F/A-18F Super Hornets was launched from the Nimitz to locate the object. Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, piloting the lead aircraft and equipped with the AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR infrared targeting pod, reached the area and acquired the object on FLIR. He recorded approximately 90 seconds of footage that would later be designated FLIR1. Underwood coined the nickname “Tic Tac” based on the object’s infrared appearance.

In interviews published by NewsNation and summarized in the Wikipedia entry on Pentagon UFO videos, Underwood has stated that when he attempted to radar-lock the object with his jet’s AN/APG-73 radar, he received jamming signatures. The FLIR footage itself shows an oblong thermal signature that tracks briefly before accelerating beyond the camera’s frame. The FLIR1 file is one of three later released by the Pentagon as representative of Navy UAP encounters; the other two, GIMBAL and GOFAST, were recorded in 2015 in a separate carrier group context.

The 2017 New York Times Story and 2020 Pentagon Release

For more than a decade, the incident remained known primarily within naval aviation circles and classified briefings. On December 16, 2017, The New York Times published a front-page article by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean revealing the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an undisclosed Pentagon UAP study funded with $22 million between 2007 and 2012 under Senator Harry Reid’s direction. The same article released the FLIR1 and GIMBAL videos to the public for the first time, prompting widespread mainstream coverage.

The Pentagon initially declined to formally address the videos’ status. That position shifted on April 27, 2020, when the Department of Defense declassified and officially released three Navy UAP videos and confirmed their authenticity. As reported by NBC News, the Navy described the objects as “unidentified aerial phenomena” and stated that the videos were released in part to address misinformation about their origin.

In April 2019, anticipating continued pilot encounters, the Navy introduced formal internal guidelines allowing aviators to report unidentified objects through an official chain. The policy shift reflected a quiet institutional acknowledgment that pilots were seeing things their existing reporting structures could not handle.

Congressional Testimony and the AARO Record

On July 26, 2023, David Fravor appeared before the House Oversight Committee’s National Security Subcommittee to testify under oath about the Nimitz encounter. The full hearing transcript records his account of the 2004 event and the subsequent absence of any formal Navy investigation at the time. Fravor testified alongside former intelligence officer David Grusch and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves.

The Nimitz case also features in AARO’s public record. According to DefenseScoop, AARO’s 2024 public briefings addressed the FLIR-family videos and proposed alternative explanations for some of them. AARO has acknowledged that the Nimitz case specifically remains classified as “unknown” because the preserved sensor data from November 2004 is incomplete. Previous AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick, cited in the UFOUAP case summary, attributed this to data retention limits in the early-2000s Navy systems rather than evidence of extraterrestrial origin.

The case’s influence on UAP policy has been substantial. The Nimitz encounter is cited in the Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, in the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act provisions establishing AARO, and in every subsequent public congressional UAP hearing. In the latest hearing, on November 13, 2024, Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet referenced the Nimitz case in his written testimony as one of the cases that drove his personal interest in the phenomenon.

The Witness Corroboration Structure

What distinguishes the Nimitz case from many UAP reports is the overlap of independent observations. Two pilots visually acquired the object (Fravor, Dietrich). Ship-based radar tracked it (Princeton AN/SPY-1, operated by Kevin Day and his team). A separate aircraft’s airborne radar and IR sensor tracked it (Underwood’s AN/APG-73 and AN/ASQ-228). Multiple officers in the Princeton’s Combat Information Center witnessed the radar display. And the object was detected, per Fravor’s testimony, at the Super Hornets’ pre-planned CAP point roughly a minute later, too far to be reached by any known conventional aircraft in that time.

This multi-sensor, multi-witness structure is the core reason the case continues to be cited as a baseline in both the proponent and skeptical UAP literatures. When analysts propose prosaic explanations, those explanations must account simultaneously for ship radar, airborne radar, visual observation, infrared recording, and reported radar jamming. No single conventional target class, to date, cleanly accounts for all five.

Commander David Fravor gives a detailed first-person account of the 2004 encounter on The Joe Rogan Experience (episode 1361), October 2019, joined by filmmaker Jeremy Corbell.

Opposing Perspectives

The Skeptical Technical Analysis (Mick West, Metabunk)

Mick West, a retired software engineer and lead contributor at the analysis forum Metabunk, has published extensive technical analysis of the FLIR1 footage arguing for a prosaic explanation. Summarized in the Vice “Skeptic’s Guide to the Pentagon’s UFO Videos”, West’s core claim is that the object visible in FLIR1 is most likely a distant conventional aircraft seen through the ATFLIR pod’s infrared sensor, appearing as a white oval because the engine’s infrared glare saturates the sensor.

West argues that the apparent “zoom-off” at the end of the video, often cited as evidence of extreme acceleration, is an artifact of two simultaneous camera events: the gimbal reaches the limit of its mechanical travel and can no longer track, and the operator switches the FLIR from narrow to 2× zoom. To demonstrate this interpretation, West built Sitrec, an open-source web tool for three-dimensional reconstruction of UAP encounters, which models the FLIR1 geometry against a hypothetical distant plane. West’s conclusion, which he has stated repeatedly in interviews and in his book “Escaping the Rabbit Hole,” is that while the Nimitz pilots genuinely observed something unusual, the specific video evidence published as FLIR1 does not, on his analysis, demonstrate extraordinary performance.

West’s analysis does not dispute Fravor’s visual account of the hovering object, which was observed before Underwood’s FLIR recording. The skeptical position specifically addresses the video’s evidentiary weight, not the underlying encounter.

The AARO Position on Data Limitations

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which is statutorily responsible for UAP investigation, has not declared the Nimitz case resolved, but also has not endorsed an extraordinary-origin interpretation. In public communications summarized by NewsNation, AARO states that the case remains officially “unknown” because the 2004-era sensor data archives are incomplete. Previous AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick has publicly framed this as a data retention issue, not evidence of a cover-up.

AARO’s broader methodological posture, articulated in the March 8, 2024 Historical Record Report and in current director Jon Kosloski’s November 19, 2024 Senate testimony, is that resolved UAP cases overwhelmingly turn out to be balloons, unmanned aerial systems, optical effects, or sensor artifacts. The unresolved cases, including Nimitz, are unresolved for data-availability reasons in AARO’s framing, not because they represent clearly exotic phenomena. This stance leaves the Nimitz case in a specific category: officially unidentified, officially under-documented, and not officially attributed to any conventional or exotic source.

A detailed technical analysis of Commander Fravor’s Joe Rogan interview, reviewing the claims against the published sensor evidence and alternative explanations.

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