Tic Tac UAP

This article is about the craft observed during the 2004 Nimitz encounter. For the broader incident, see

2004 Nimitz UAP incident

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The Tic Tac UAP (also Tic Tac UFO) is the informal name for an unidentified aerial vehicle encountered by pilots of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group on November 14, 2004, approximately 60 miles off the coast between San Diego and Ensenada, Mexico. The craft — a white, featureless, oblong object approximately 40 feet long — was observed visually and on radar by trained Navy aviators executing radical maneuvers with no visible propulsion, no wings, no rotors, and no exhaust plume. The incident is formally referred to as the 2004 Nimitz UAP incident and constitutes one of the most extensively documented UAP encounters in U.S. military history.

Radar background

For approximately two weeks prior to November 14, 2004, the USS Princeton — the Aegis cruiser accompanying the strike group — had been tracking anomalous aerial objects on its SPY-1 radar system. Princeton's operations specialists reported that up to a dozen objects would descend from above 80,000 feet to approximately 20,000 feet, remain stationary for three to four hours, then return to altitude. The contacts were also visible to the ship's E-2 Hawkeye airborne early-warning aircraft and on USS Nimitz's own radar. None of this tracking was communicated to the carrier air wing prior to the November 14 tasking.

Fravor later described this omission as extraordinary: "So, they observe these things, and they never bothered telling any of you guys?" Rogan asked. Fravor confirmed: "That's correct."

At 80,000 feet, Fravor noted in congressional testimony, the ceiling is effectively the boundary of space.

The visual encounter

On the morning of November 14, Commander David Fravor — commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41), the "Black Aces" — and his wingman Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich were conducting a scheduled 2-vs-2 air-to-air training exercise with USS Princeton as the controlling vessel. The exercise was cancelled mid-sortie and Fravor's two F/A-18F Super Hornet crews were issued a real-world intercept vector with no information about what they were being sent to investigate.

Arriving at the intercept coordinates at approximately 20,000 feet, all four crew members observed a disturbance in the sea surface: an area of churning white water, roughly the size of a Boeing 737 and cross-shaped, in an otherwise calm, glassy ocean with no waves or whitecaps. Just above this disturbance hovered a white, oblong craft — "a small white Tic Tac," in Fravor's words — moving abruptly north–south and east–west "like a ping pong ball," with no inertia and no rotor wash.

Fravor descended to intercept while Dietrich maintained altitude as high cover. As Fravor descended through approximately 18,000 feet, the object "rapidly" realigned its longitudinal axis to point toward his aircraft and began climbing — directly mirroring his approach vector. In Fravor's assessment, "it's like it's aware of us."

After circling approximately 270 degrees at a descent, Fravor dropped his nose aggressively to cut across the circle and intercept the ascending craft at close range. At approximately half a mile of closure, with the Tic Tac crossing his nose, the object "just goes 'poof' and it's gone" — vanishing instantaneously in under one second. Dietrich's crew, 8,000 feet above, also lost visual contact simultaneously. The sea surface disturbance had also vanished when Fravor circled back to check.

Seconds later, the Princeton controller reported the object had reappeared at the combat air patrol holding point — approximately 60 miles away — in roughly 30 to 40 seconds: an implied velocity of approximately 5,400 miles per hour, with no radar track of the transit.

FLIR1 video

After Fravor and Dietrich recovered aboard Nimitz, a second sortie — a crew aboard an F/A-18F carrying an ATFLIR targeting pod — launched with knowledge of the encounter. The back-seater, identified only as "Chad," was determined to locate the object. The aircraft's AN/APG-73 radar acquired a contact but was immediately and actively jammed — an act Fravor notes "is technically an act of war" — causing the system to enter jam-extrapolation mode.

Chad switched to a passive FLIR track, capturing the object on infrared video. The resulting 92-second clip — designated FLIR1 by the Pentagon and later commonly called the Tic Tac video — shows a white object sitting motionless relative to the tracking frame, with no exhaust plume in either infrared or optical (TV) modes. The object ultimately accelerates off-screen with no detectable propulsion signature. Fravor notes that the radar tape — which showed the object actively jamming and a formation of other contacts — was never officially released.

Object description

The craft was described consistently by all four crew members as:

• White and oblong, resembling a pharmaceutical Tic Tac candy, approximately 40 feet in length
• No visible wings, control surfaces, rotors, rotor wash, or exhaust plume
• Capable of abrupt lateral movement in all four cardinal directions with no observable inertia
• Apparently aware of, and reactive to, the approaching aircraft
• Capable of instantaneous acceleration and departure with no sonic boom

Fravor ruled out all conventional explanations — helicopter, balloon, drone, optical illusion — on the basis of observed performance: "This is not an airplane, this is not a weather balloon, this is not a blip."

Non-investigation

Despite involving four trained military aviators, radar data from an Aegis cruiser, and infrared footage, the incident was never formally investigated. No crew members underwent debriefing; the footage tapes were not collected; and within days the event had become an informal "great story" among squadron personnel. The incident remained classified and publicly unknown until 2009, when Luis Elizondo of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) contacted Fravor as part of a retrospective investigation.

Public disclosure

In December 2017, The New York Times published a front-page investigation by Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Helene Cooper featuring Fravor's testimony and the FLIR1 video, alongside reporting on the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and AATIP. The publication simultaneously broke the stories of all three Navy videos: FLIR1 (the Tic Tac), the Gimbal video, and the Go Fast video. Pentagon spokesperson confirmation of the footage's authenticity followed in April 2020.

On July 26, 2023, Fravor testified before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability at an open hearing on UAP — the first such hearing in U.S. history — alongside David Grusch and Ryan Graves. His testimony was the only account at the hearing based on direct, first-hand visual observation by a credentialed military pilot. Fravor called for congressional oversight of any government programs related to non-human craft: "relative to government programs, even unacknowledged waived programs have some level of oversight by the appropriate committee members in the House and Senate."

FLIR1 video provenance

The FLIR1 footage — derived from the ATFLIR targeting pod recording — was captured on Hi8 tape directly from the pod's digital display feed, not filmed through a camera lens. Fravor clarified that the recording is a digital-to-analog-to-digital chain: the pod outputs a digital signal that is printed to Hi8 tape and then re-digitized for release, accounting for any apparent quality loss across successive copies. The publicly released clip runs approximately 1 minute 30 seconds and represents the complete original recording — not a shortened excerpt, as sometimes claimed.

Deployment context

The objects appearing in the radar track preceding the visual encounter were not a one-time anomaly. Princeton radar operator Kevin Day tracked contacts matching the Tic Tac profile for approximately two weeks, with the objects descending from above 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and hovering for three to four hours before ascending — a pattern that repeated daily. Fravor confirmed this schedule meant the objects were only visible to radar when no aircraft were airborne, making the November 14 sortie the first occasion Princeton could task fighters to intercept a live contact.

Propulsion speculation

Given the absence of any observable propulsion mechanism, researchers in the UAP disclosure community have speculated that the Tic Tac's propulsion system warps or bends spacetime locally rather than expelling reaction mass. This is consistent with the mechanism described by Bob Lazar for the Sport Model disc at S-4 — in which Element 115 produces antimatter that drives three gravity amplifiers, creating a distortion in spacetime that the craft "falls" into rather than being pushed through. Physicist Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Eagleworks laboratory has proposed related mechanisms involving warp field metrics that could produce the observed performance without violating known physics, if exotic matter with negative energy density is available.

AATIP report and FOIA exemption

An internal AATIP report on the incident was written by one of the program's original thirteen members and placed under FOIA exemption — meaning it was never retrievable through ordinary public records requests. Fravor confirmed he was shown the classified DOD memo documenting this FOIA exemption status personally by Luis Elizondo.

East Coast continuation

The Tic Tac UAP class of encounters — white oblong craft with no visible propulsion — continued to be observed by US Navy squadrons through 2014–2015, during the East Coast deployment of Carrier Air Wing 1 (CVW-1) aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt. Ryan Graves, then an F/A-18 pilot with VFA-11, reported radar contacts at velocities of 1.1 to 2 Mach, objects matching the description of elongated spheres or "tic tac shape" flying alongside the carrier strike group 300 miles east of the ship, and at least one near-miss in which a dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere passed between two F/A-18s at the entrance to their working area. The Gimbal and Go Fast videos were recorded during this same deployment, within minutes of each other.

See also

• UAP Task Force
• 2004 Nimitz UAP incident
• Orb (UFO)
• Metallic orb
• Black triangle (UFO)
• Foo fighters
• Phoenix Lights
• Belgian UFO wave

References