USS Nimitz Tic Tac

The encounter

On November 14, 2004, the USS Princeton's AN/SPY-1B radar tracks multiple unknown objects descending from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in seconds off the coast of southern California. Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich are scrambled from the USS Nimitz to intercept one of the objects approximately 100 miles southwest of San Diego. Fravor visually observes a white, oblong, smooth-surfaced object hovering above an area of churning water. As he descends toward it, the object mirrors his maneuver before accelerating away at impossible speed, leaving no visible exhaust or propulsion signature.

The FLIR1 recording

Later that day, a second sortie led by Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood records the now-famous FLIR1 video using the ATFLIR pod of his F/A-18F Super Hornet, capturing the Tic Tac object's infrared signature. The footage is leaked in 2007, formally published by The New York Times in December 2017, and officially released by the Department of Defense in April 2020. It remains the primary sensor evidence of the Nimitz incident and the first piece of UAP footage the U.S. government has acknowledged as authentic.

Why it matters

Nimitz sits at credibility 9.8 not because the object's nature is understood, but because the evidence stack is unusually deep: AN/SPY-1B radar tracking, ATFLIR infrared, multiple visual witnesses with security clearances, ship-wide engagement involving two Navy aviation units, and — after 16 years — formal acknowledgment by the Department of Defense. The case is the foundation of the modern UAP disclosure era. Every congressional hearing, every Pentagon program, every PURSUE release descends in some way from this November day off San Diego.

The honest limit

What the evidence does not establish is what the object was. Sensor-witness convergence is unusually strong, but multiple competing explanations — classified U.S. platform, foreign adversary tech, sensor artifact under unusual atmospheric conditions, or genuinely unidentified — remain on the table. None of the four currently account for every observation. That is why Nimitz endures as the case the field cannot dismiss and cannot resolve.