Tic Tac UFO (Nimitz incident)

This article is about the specific craft of the 2004 encounter. For the general shape-class, see

Tic Tac UFO

.

The Nimitz Tic Tac is the specific instance of the Tic Tac UFO shape-class — a white, featureless, oblong unidentified aerial vehicle approximately 40 feet (12 m) long — reported by Commander David Fravor, Alex Dietrich, and their weapons systems officers of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 during the 2004 Nimitz UAP incident on November 14, 2004, approximately 60 miles off the coast between San Diego and Ensenada, Mexico. Observed visually and on radar, the craft executed radical, high-speed maneuvers with no visible propulsion, no wings, no rotors, and no exhaust plume, and was separately recorded hovering and then accelerating out of frame on the FLIR1 infrared targeting-pod video. The encounter is the shape-class's best-attested single instance, combining simultaneous testimony from four aircrew, radar tracking from two independent sensors, and the FLIR1 infrared recording — a combination the AATIP director Luis Elizondo has called one of the program's "gold standard" cases. Its origin remains disputed among Corbell's reading of a non-human or black-project field-propulsion craft, Greer's identification of it as a Lockheed Martin successor to the TR-3B, and the investigator West's argument that the object was a balloon subject to a parallax illusion — a reading Fravor has rejected as requiring the coordinated failure of four aircrew and two radar systems.

The 2004 encounter

Main article:

2004 Nimitz UAP incident

For roughly two weeks before the intercept, the USS Princeton's SPY-1 radar had tracked objects of a similar profile descending from above 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and hovering for hours, a pattern never passed to the carrier air wing before Fravor and Dietrich were vectored to investigate. Fravor descended toward the object as it hovered above a patch of disturbed white water; it reoriented to mirror his approach, then accelerated and vanished in under a second, reappearing on the Princeton's radar some 60 miles away roughly 30–40 seconds later — an implied velocity of about 5,400 miles per hour, with no radar track of the transit. A second F/A-18F crew launched afterward captured the object jamming their radar before switching to the passive FLIR1 infrared track. The incident went uninvestigated for years — no crew debriefed, no tapes collected — until Elizondo contacted Fravor in 2009 as part of an AATIP retrospective; the original AATIP analysis of the case was written by one of the program's founding members and placed under a full FOIA exemption. The New York Times first reported the case in December 2017 alongside AATIP and the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science; the United States Department of Defense authenticated the FLIR1 footage in April 2020; and Fravor testified before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in July 2023, calling for congressional oversight of any government program handling non-human craft.

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, its longitudinal axis realigning "rapidly" to point toward Fravor's jet and mirror his climb
• Capable of instantaneous acceleration and departure with no sonic boom

The object hovered directly above a cross-shaped patch of churning white water — roughly the size of a Boeing 737 — in an otherwise glassy, whitecap-free ocean, and the disturbance vanished at the same moment the craft did. The oblong, capsule-like shape places the craft within its own reported morphology, distinct from the triangular and spherical (orb) craft described in other encounters. 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."

Radar signature and the FLIR1 recording

Alerted to the encounter, the second sortie's AN/APG-73 radar acquired the object but was immediately and actively jammed — an act Fravor notes "is technically an act of war" — forcing the system into jam-extrapolation mode. Its ATFLIR targeting pod then produced a passive FLIR track, yielding the 92-second infrared clip the Pentagon designated FLIR1 and which is now generally known as the Tic Tac video: it shows the object hovering with no exhaust plume in either infrared or optical (TV) mode before accelerating off-screen with no detectable propulsion signature. Fravor has stated that the released footage is a direct digital feed from the pod's own display, printed to Hi8 tape and re-digitized for release — a digital-to-analog-to-digital chain accounting for any apparent quality loss across copies — and that the publicly circulated clip, at roughly one minute thirty seconds, is the complete original recording rather than a shortened excerpt. The corresponding radar tape, which recorded the jamming and a formation of other contacts alongside the Tic Tac, was never officially released.

Princeton radar operator Kevin Day tracked contacts matching the Tic Tac profile for approximately two weeks, descending from above 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and hovering three to four hours before ascending in a pattern that repeated daily — visible to radar only when no aircraft were airborne, making November 14 the first occasion Princeton could task fighters against a live contact.

Provenance and identity

The object's origin is disputed among the people who have examined the case. Corbell reads the craft as consistent with a field-based, non-reactive exotic propulsion — comparable to what Bob Lazar has described for the alleged Sport Model disc 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. Greer instead holds that the Nimitz object is a Lockheed Martin Skunk Works platform and "the successor to the TR-3B"; if the 2004 sighting and the mid-century sightings Corbell cites 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.

West has argued that the object was a balloon released near a submerged vessel, 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. Fravor has rejected the reading 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." If West is correct, the balloon-and-submarine reading requires no fabrication on anyone's part — only a shared perceptual error by four aircrew and two independent sensor operators; if Corbell or Greer is correct, the object was a real craft, human-built or otherwise, and the errors run the other way, in whatever official channel logged the case as unidentified rather than as a known program or a misperceived balloon.

Recurrence in the Tic Tac UFO class

Fravor has 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 Navy crews reported off the U.S. East Coast a decade later — "ours was a tic tac. These are not" — while identifying the smaller object filmed during that same 2014–2015 deployment, subsequently known as the "Go Fast" object, as sharing his craft's silhouette: "that's called the Go Fast? That looks like a tic tac." Ryan Graves, then an F/A-18 pilot flying that same 2014–2015 deployment aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt, likewise described some of the objects his squadron tracked — at radar velocities of 1.1 to 2 Mach — as "elongated spheres, kind of more tic tac shape." The same silhouette recurs across independently reported instances catalogued under the Tic Tac UFO class, including an alleged 1989 Kazakhstan crash retrieval and a 1965–1967 sighting near Area 51.

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