FLIR1

FLIR1 (also known as the Tic Tac video) is a declassified infrared gun-camera recording made by an F-A-18 F Super Hornet during the 2004 Nimitz UAP incident, showing an unidentified aerial vehicle of approximately 40 feet in length maneuvering over the Pacific Ocean approximately 100 miles southwest of San Diego on November 14, 2004 — one of three UAP videos officially confirmed and released by the Department of Defense in April 2020, and the video most directly associated with the visual encounter reported by David Fravor.

Background: the Nimitz incident

The 2004 Nimitz UAP incident began with anomalous radar contacts detected by the USS Princeton (CG-59) — the carrier group's escort cruiser — on the AN/SPY-1B phased-array radar system. The Princeton's radar operators tracked multiple objects descending from above 80,000 feet to approximately 20,000 feet in under a second — a deceleration that implied either extraordinary engineering or a fundamental misunderstanding of the objects' nature. The objects then hovered at 20,000 feet before dropping to just above sea level and hovering again. Commander David Fravor and three other F/A-18F pilots from VFA-41 were tasked with a visual intercept on November 14, 2004, about 60 miles off the coast on a line between San Diego and Ensenada, Mexico, according to Fravor. Fravor reported observing a white, oblong object approximately 40 feet in length — resembling a Tic Tac candy — hovering over a disturbed patch of ocean, with no visible wings, rotors, or exhaust. When Fravor descended toward it, the object accelerated away and disappeared.

The ATFLIR system

FLIR1 was recorded by the AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared) pod — a targeting and navigation system fitted to the left cheek station of the F/A-18F Super Hornet. Fravor explained the system: "It's called the ATFLIR — it's an advanced targeting forward-looking infrared. It sits on the left side of the airplane... It's got a laser in it. It's got an IR marker in it. It's a very capable system that syncs up to the Hornet."

The video was not recorded by Fravor's aircraft — his jet was not carrying the ATFLIR pod at the time of the visual encounter. FLIR1 was recorded by a second F/A-18F crew (Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood as the weapons systems officer) that arrived at the scene after Fravor's visual intercept, tasked with attempting to achieve a sensor lock on the object. The ATFLIR successfully locked onto the object, as indicated by the "passive track" brackets visible in the video, before the lock broke when the object accelerated out of the pod's field of view.

Fravor's flight made two runs over the contact point without detecting the object on radar or any other sensor, returned to the carrier and landed; a second U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet crew, which Fravor says was due to fly a tanker mission but carried a targeting pod, was preparing to launch. Underwood picked up a radar return on the object, and when he attempted to lock it the radar indicated that it was being jammed, which Fravor describes as technically an act of war under the Rules of Engagement. Underwood then slaved the ATFLIR pod to the same bearing and took a passive infrared track, which produced the footage.

Content

The FLIR1 video is 1 minute and 16 seconds in duration and was recorded by the AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR pod on a Super Hornet that arrived at the scene after Fravor's visual intercept. The video shows the object, displayed as a light-colored shape against a dark infrared background, moving in a controlled fashion. A locked targeting indicator tracks the object for several seconds before the lock breaks and the object accelerates out of frame. The object shows no visible exhaust plume, rotors, or aerodynamic control surfaces. The video includes audio of the flight crew discussing what they are observing — including expressions of surprise and confusion — and visible on-screen symbology identifying the tracking mode and pod orientation. In infrared the object appears as a bright white oblong shape against the darker sky, hovering near the center of the frame with no heat signature consistent with turbine or rocket propulsion, and near the end of the clip it accelerates leftward and leaves the frame so rapidly that the pod's track lock, which normally keeps a target centered, cannot follow it.

Fravor has said that his own flight had already landed before the recording crew launched, so the video is an independent crew's observation of the same object or a similar one.

The image of the object rotates within the pod's field of view as the aircraft maneuvers — a visual artifact that led some early skeptical analyses to attribute the apparent motion to pod gimbal rotation rather than object motion. Analysis by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) concluded that the object's motion was real and not an artifact of the tracking system's behavior, and that the velocity and acceleration depicted were inconsistent with any known aircraft or atmospheric phenomenon.

Release history

The video circulated informally among Navy personnel after the incident: Fravor received an email from the weapons systems officer who had flown in his back seat around 2008 or early 2009, pointing to the footage on a web forum, and it then spread to YouTube and UFO research communities.

The FLIR1 video was first published by The New York Times on December 16, 2017, alongside the original AATIP story. It was released simultaneously by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), the media organization co-founded by Luis Elizondo and Tom DeLonge. Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for intelligence, says that after nobody in the Defense Department would take up the matter he approached The New York Times and his former colleagues on Capitol Hill with the information, including the three unclassified videos, which became the Times's report on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The video circulated widely but remained technically unofficial until the Pentagon's April 27, 2020 formal confirmation, which Fravor describes as a Pentagon release placing the video in the public domain.

Elizondo — who served as director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) at the Pentagon from 2007 to 2017 — stated that releasing the videos was the culmination of his internal effort to bring the UAP issue to official attention. After resigning from the DoD in frustration, he joined TTSA specifically to use the media platform for a controlled release of the video evidence. The timing of the TTSA release was coordinated with the New York Times investigation led by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean.

Scientific analysis

The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies published a 270-page analysis of the Nimitz incident — including the FLIR1 footage — in 2019, examining the radar data, pilot testimony, and video evidence. The analysis concluded that the object exhibited flight characteristics including instantaneous acceleration, transmedium operation (air and water), and sustained flight without detectable propulsion or aerodynamic lift surfaces — characteristics consistent with the "Five Observables" framework developed by Hal Puthoff and colleagues for categorizing UAP performance. The Five Observables are: (1) instantaneous acceleration; (2) hypersonic velocity without thermal signature; (3) low observability; (4) transmedium travel; (5) positive lift without aerodynamic structures.

The video was also analyzed by Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who cited FLIR1 as one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for UAP reality — not because of the video alone, but because of the convergence of multiple sensor systems (radar, electro-optical/infrared, and visual) all capturing the same object simultaneously.

Hal Puthoff, physicist and AATIP scientific adviser, holds that the Nimitz, Gimbal and Go Fast videos made public in 2017 show craft that "have interfered with military exercises" and that "it's really out there now at this point that there's a reality here." Puthoff says that the program's investigators interviewed the Nimitz pilots, whose descriptions of the object dropping from 80,000 feet to just above the water and then taking off and making a right-angle turn at Mach 3 he places beyond current engineering, in the field of what he terms spacetime metric engineering.

Post-confirmation significance

The DoD's April 2020 confirmation transformed FLIR1, Gimbal, and GoFast from leaked curiosities into official government-confirmed anomalous incidents. The confirmation was followed in June 2021 by the release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's preliminary UAP assessment — a nine-page report that acknowledged 144 UAP reports from U.S. government sensors and stated that only one could be confidently identified. The FLIR1 incident figured prominently in subsequent Congressional hearings, including the July 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing at which David Grusch, Ryan Graves, and Fravor testified — the first such hearing with witnesses under oath since the 1960s. Legislation mandating UAP reporting within the intelligence community and the creation of the UAP Task Force followed the release of the videos.[citation needed] Jeremy Corbell says that there are new Navy protocols because of Fravor coming forward, and that there have been closed-door congressional and Senate briefings in which Fravor has taken part.

The FLIR1 video's comparison to the "Tic Tac" candy form is now widely cited as a descriptor across UAP literature. American Alchemy podcast host Jesse Michels noted in his coverage of the 1996 Varginha incident that witnesses described the craft they observed as resembling a "tic tac, similar to the famous Nimitz incident in 2004 from Commander David Fravor" — illustrating how FLIR1 has become the reference form for a class of oblong, smooth-hulled UAP.

Chad Underwood and the recording crew

The FLIR1 recording was made by Chad Underwood, the weapons systems officer in the second F/A-18F that launched after Fravor's visual intercept. Fravor stated the sequence in detail: his own four-person flight had no video capability — "there is no video from our event. It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing. And then when we came back and told it, when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when Chad got the video of it. And we're like, that's it. That's exactly, that's it."

Fravor also stated that a classified government investigation report on the incident was eventually compiled — approximately five years after the event — and was later obtained by George Knapp via Harry Reid: "The report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp and they were good enough to redact it."

Object description in ATFLIR video

The second crew's ATFLIR recording captured the object at near co-altitude, allowing the pod to resolve structural details Fravor had not observed visually during his lower-altitude intercept. Fravor described what Underwood's pod imagery revealed: "You can see the bottom of it. It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a Cessna there's little antennas hanging out of the bottom kind of like that. There was two little things out of the bottom. There was nothing on the top. There was no plume, no IR, no visible propulsion, even heat signature."

Fravor also noted that the classified radar display data — showing the object's effect on the Princeton's systems while being tracked — was not included in the public release: "the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the radar display, which that really raises the classification level, especially to see what the radar does when it's being jammed."

Princeton radar contacts

The USS Princeton's AN/SPY-1B phased-array radar had been tracking anomalous contacts beginning November 10, 2004 — four days before Fravor's intercept — when objects were observed operating at approximately 28,000 feet along the California coast. Lex Fridman summarized Fravor's testimony: "they started noticing on November 10 that there are a few objects flying around at 28,000 ft... on the coast of California and they kept detecting these objects for just about a week." Fravor described the Princeton's AN/SPY-1B as "an incredible SPY-1 system, phased array, four panels, so it looks in quadrants."

Infrared signature management

Ryan Graves, who flew off the East Coast during the 2014–2015 deployment that produced the Gimbal video, says that his squadron was able to detect the objects with infrared during that deployment, while more recent reports from law enforcement and from the pilots who responded to the incidents over Langley indicate that objects of the same class could not be picked up or locked on infrared at all; he describes this as a form of signature management. In Graves's assessment, "to have zero ability to detect or lock onto these objects is not a technology I'm familiar with."

Open questions

References

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