Tic Tac UFO

A Tic Tac UFO (also called a Tic Tac UAP) is a recurring shape-class of reported UAP: a smooth, featureless, white craft shaped like an oblong capsule, typically estimated at around 40 feet (12 m) long, with no visible wings, control surfaces, intake, or exhaust plume, and said to manoeuvre far beyond the performance of any known aircraft. The class takes its name and its defining silhouette from the 2004 Nimitz UAP incident, where Commander David Fravor described the object he intercepted off San Diego as "this white tic tac looking object"; that object, treated separately as the Nimitz craft, is the best-attested single instance of the class.

The same silhouette has since been described independently across a much longer span than the 2004 encounter alone — by other Navy pilots off the U.S. East Coast a decade later, by a Pentagon UAP-program insider citing an alleged 1989 crash retrieval, and by a former Air Force observer describing craft he says he watched in the mid-1960s. If a single design underlies these accounts, a class of exotic craft has been operating in essentially the same form for sixty years or more; whether it does, or whether independent witnesses have simply converged on the same everyday comparison for an oblong shape, is unresolved.

Origin accounts diverge sharply on what the shape actually is. Jeremy Corbell reads Fravor's account as consistent with a field-based, non-reactive propulsion comparable to what Bob Lazar has described for the craft at S-4, and dates reports of tic-tac-shaped objects transiting between air and water to "at least" World War II — a reading under which the design, whoever first built it, long predates any known human program. Steven Greer instead holds that the "tic tac" observed in modern military encounters is a Lockheed Martin Skunk Works platform and "the successor to the TR-3B"; if the modern and mid-century sightings really share one design, that reading requires either that the earlier accounts describe an unrelated shape, or that the Lockheed platform is itself a reproduction of a decades-older non-human original. Where a specific sighting is disputed, the objection attaches to that instance's own circumstances rather than to the shape-class as such: the investigator Mick West has argued the 2004 object was a balloon released near a submerged submarine, its apparent mirroring of Fravor's flight path a parallax illusion produced by the balloon being much closer, and so much smaller, than its motion suggested, a reading Fravor has rejected as requiring the near-simultaneous failure of four separate witnesses and two radar systems: "Occam's razor is the events happened exactly like we're being told."

Recurrence across independent accounts

Fravor has himself treated the tic-tac silhouette as a recognisable, recurring type rather than a one-off, distinguishing it explicitly from the cube-inside-a-sphere objects other crews reported off the East Coast a decade later — "ours was a tic tac. These are not" — while identifying a smaller object filmed during the same deployment as sharing the shape: "that's called the Go Fast? That looks like a tic tac." Ryan Graves, recounting the USS Theodore Roosevelt deployment that produced the Gimbal video and Go Fast video, likewise described some of the objects his squadron tracked as "elongated spheres, kind of more tic tac shape." Luis Elizondo, writing from his access inside AATIP, has stated plainly that "Tic Tac-shaped UAP are not new. They are very possibly old technology," citing an alleged 1989 crash retrieval of "a large Tic Tac" in Kazakhstan, Soviet Union, from which four nonhuman bodies were reportedly recovered. Decades earlier still, the former Air Force weather observer Charles Hall described the egg-shaped scout craft of the Tall Whites he says he watched at Indian Springs, adjacent to Area 51, between 1965 and 1967, as looking "fuzzy white, like a Tic Tac" once the craft's force fields engaged.

Accounts of the class also disagree on scale. Elizondo, comparing the 2004 object to the 2015 "Go Fast" object, wrote that the second craft "also resembled a Tic Tac, at least in the sense that it was rounded, smooth, and egg-shaped," but was "no more than about 18 feet long" against the "more than 40 feet long" Nimitz object. Whether the two represent one design at different scales, or two distinct designs that merely share a silhouette, is not resolved by either witness.

Reported instances

The table below lists instances independently attested outside the class's own defining case; a row's inclusion reflects only that a named source described the object as tic-tac- or capsule-shaped, not that the instances are confirmed to be the same craft.

Open questions

References

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[5 Ungrounded]

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