USS Nimitz — "Tic Tac" encounter, 14 November 2004

Multiple radar contacts and visual confirmation by F/A-18 pilots from the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group of an oblong, white object — colloquially the 'Tic Tac' — exhibiting flight characteristics outside the known performance envelope of any contemporary aircraft.

Over a roughly two-week window in November 2004, radar operators aboard the USS Princeton, an Aegis cruiser attached to the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, tracked anomalous targets descending from above 80,000 feet to near sea level in seconds. On 14 November, two F/A-18F Super Hornets were vectored to intercept. The lead aircrew, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight, reported visual contact with a smooth, oblong, white object approximately 40 feet long, hovering above a disturbance in the ocean surface, then accelerating away at a rate they estimated as exceeding any known aircraft.

What is on the record

• Radar tracks from the USS Princeton, recorded over multiple days.
• FLIR1 video captured by a follow-on F/A-18F (Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood) shortly after the Fravor encounter.
• First-hand testimony from at least four naval aviators, including Commander Fravor’s 2023 sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
• DoD authentication of the FLIR video as authentic Navy material in April 2020.
• Inclusion in the 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment as one of 144 reports the U.S. Intelligence Community had no determinative explanation for.

Mundane explanations considered

1. Sensor artifact. Multiple sensors — radar, infrared, human visual — across multiple platforms make a coordinated artifact unlikely.
2. Foreign aircraft / advanced UAS. No known platform in 2004 (or since) is publicly documented as capable of the reported transitions from 80,000 feet to sea level in seconds.
3. Atmospheric or oceanographic phenomenon. Does not explain coordinated radar returns and visual identification by trained observers.

Open questions

• The full radar data tape from USS Princeton has not been made public.
• The “racetrack” pattern of returns described by operator Kevin Day remains unaccounted for in any official explanation.
• The status of additional FLIR captures from the same period is unclear.

The Council’s verdict

Inconclusive. The evidentiary record is unusually strong for a UAP case: multi-sensor, multi-witness, with sworn congressional testimony and DoD authentication of physical media. No mundane explanation accounts for all the data. We do not, however, treat “no explanation” as equivalent to “non-human technology.” The evidence requires further declassification — particularly the full Princeton radar data — before any verdict beyond “Inconclusive” can be defended.

This case is the modern reference standard for what a credible UAP report looks like: official, sensor-rich, professionally observed, and documented before it became famous.