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

Over a roughly two-week window in November 2004, radar operators aboard the USS Princeton and pilots from the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group tracked anomalous objects — colloquially the 'Tic Tac' — exhibiting flight characteristics outside the documented performance envelope of any known aircraft. The 14 November intercept by Cmdr. David Fravor and the subsequent FLIR1 video by Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood remain the modern reference standard for a multi-sensor military UAP report. The Council assesses the case as Inconclusive: the evidentiary record is exceptionally strong, no proposed mundane explanation accounts for all of the data, and 'no explanation' is not the same as 'non-human technology.'

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 operating roughly 100 nautical miles southwest of San Diego — tracked anomalous targets descending from above 80,000 feet to near sea level in seconds. On 14 November, two F/A-18F Super Hornets from VFA-41 “Black Aces” 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 assessed as exceeding the documented performance envelope of any known aircraft. A follow-on F/A-18F flown by Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood subsequently captured infrared video of a similar object using the aircraft’s ATFLIR pod. That video, later known as FLIR1 (FLIR — forward-looking infrared), was authenticated as genuine U.S. Navy material by the Department of Defense in April 2020.

The Nimitz incident has become, in the seventeen years since the case entered the public record, the modern reference standard for what a credible Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP) report looks like. It is multi-sensor, multi-witness, professionally observed by trained naval aviators, instrumented at the sensor level by combat-grade systems, and documented by official military channels before it became publicly famous. It is also, on a strict evidentiary basis, Inconclusive — and the Council’s reasoning for that verdict matters as much as the verdict itself. (Tic-Tac, as a glossary term, is the colloquial shorthand for the observed object shape; the case is filed under the formal “Nimitz encounter” framing.)

What was reported

The November 2004 events were not a single intercept but a roughly fourteen-day pattern of anomalous radar tracks that culminated in the 14 November visual encounter and the FLIR video captured shortly thereafter.

Mid-November radar pre-history

From approximately 10 November 2004 onward, operators aboard the USS Princeton — equipped with the AN/SPY-1B passive electronically scanned array radar that is the heart of the Aegis combat system — tracked unidentified contacts in the operating area. Operations Specialist First Class Kevin Day has consistently described the contacts as descending from altitudes above 80,000 feet to near sea level over the course of seconds, then loitering in formations Day described as a “racetrack” pattern. The contacts did not respond to standard interrogation challenges. Day has stated that the Princeton’s radar team initially treated the returns as anomalous propagation or sensor faults and ran diagnostic checks before concluding the contacts were real.

Senior Chief Gary Voorhis, an Aegis fire control technician aboard the Princeton, has separately corroborated Day’s account. Voorhis has also stated that data tapes from the period were collected by personnel he identifies as being from an external command and removed from the ship shortly after the events. The chain of custody of those tapes is not publicly documented.

14 November — the intercept

On the morning of 14 November 2004, two F/A-18F Super Hornets from VFA-41, operating from the USS Nimitz, were vectored from a routine training intercept to investigate one of the Princeton’s contacts approximately 60 nautical miles southwest of the carrier. The lead aircraft was flown by Commander Fravor with weapons system officer Lieutenant Commander Slaight. The wing aircraft was flown by Lieutenant Commander James “Dietrich” with her WSO.

On arrival at the contact location, Fravor’s crew first observed a disturbance in the ocean surface roughly the size of a Boeing 737 — variously described as boiling, churning, or as a “cross-shaped” pattern of foam. Above the disturbance, Fravor reported, was a smooth, oblong, white object of roughly 40 feet in length, with no visible wings, control surfaces, exhaust plume, or propulsion signature. Fravor has stated that he attempted to close on the object in a descending intercept; the object appeared to mirror his approach, then accelerated horizontally and disappeared from visual range within seconds. The Princeton subsequently reported the object reacquired by radar at the CAP point — the aircraft’s prearranged combat air patrol coordinate — approximately 60 nautical miles away, in a transit time that, if accurate, corresponds to acceleration figures outside the documented performance envelope of any contemporary aircraft.

14 November (later) — the FLIR1 video

Following Fravor’s return to the Nimitz, a second F/A-18F flown by Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood was launched to attempt to reacquire the contact using the AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared) pod. Underwood acquired an object he assessed as consistent with Fravor’s description and recorded approximately one minute and sixteen seconds of infrared footage. The video, later released to the public under the designation FLIR1, shows an oblong infrared signature at altitude that briefly tracks horizontally before accelerating laterally and exiting frame to the left in a manner that the on-tape narration describes as anomalous.

Underwood has been deliberately restrained in public commentary about the encounter. His on-the-record statements describe what the pod captured, the cueing geometry, and his assessment that the object’s lateral acceleration was not consistent with the performance of any aircraft he had previously tracked. He has explicitly declined to characterise the object’s origin.

Witnesses

Council practice requires distinguishing primary aircrew observation, primary radar-operator observation, and corroborating witnesses on platforms not directly involved in the intercept.

Commander David Fravor (USN, ret.) was the commanding officer of the Black Aces, VFA-41, at the time of the encounter. He was the senior aviator in the formation that conducted the 14 November intercept. His contemporaneous debriefing was conducted aboard the Nimitz; his public testimony — including a sworn statement before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security on 26 July 2023 — has remained consistent across the better part of two decades. Fravor is the single most important first-hand witness in the case.

Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight was Fravor’s weapons system officer and second-seat observer on the 14 November intercept. His account, on the record, is consistent with Fravor’s in all material respects.

Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood captured the FLIR1 video. He has provided technical narrative on the ATFLIR cueing geometry, the lock-on profile, and what the pod’s processor was doing at each point in the recording. He has not made claims beyond the data the pod recorded.

Lieutenant Commander James “Dietrich” flew the second F/A-18F in the formation. Her contemporaneous observation corroborates Fravor’s visual encounter with the object above the ocean disturbance.

Operations Specialist First Class Kevin Day was the lead Aegis radar operator aboard the USS Princeton during the engagement window. His account of the contacts’ altitude profile, descent rate, and racetrack-pattern loitering is the principal radar-side first-hand testimony. He has publicly stated, with consistency, the operating parameters of the AN/SPY-1B during the period and what the system’s returns indicated.

Senior Chief Gary Voorhis was the Aegis fire control technician aboard the Princeton responsible for the radar system. His corroboration of Day’s account, and his separate statement regarding the post-event collection of data tapes, is on the record.

Beyond these named first-person witnesses, additional Princeton crew, Nimitz aviators, and members of the surrounding strike group have given accounts consistent with the contemporaneous radar log. The cumulative weight of corroborating testimony from personnel aboard multiple platforms — Princeton, Nimitz, and supporting ships — is unusual for any UAP case and is one of the principal evidentiary features of the Nimitz record.

Sensor systems

The Nimitz encounter is, by the standards of the historical UAP record, an unusually instrumented event. The relevant sensor systems were:

• AN/SPY-1B — the Aegis combat system’s phased-array S-band radar aboard the USS Princeton. SPY-1B is a long-range air-search radar capable of simultaneous track of hundreds of targets with substantial altitude discrimination. The Princeton’s SPY-1B was, at the time, considered the most capable maritime air-surveillance radar in the United States Navy.
• AN/APG-73 — the X-band fire-control radar carried by the F/A-18F Super Hornet. The APG-73 provides target acquisition and track for air-to-air engagement. Fravor’s contemporaneous report does not include a sustained APG-73 lock on the object; the object reportedly broke any attempted lock.
• AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR — the Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared pod carried by the F/A-18F. ATFLIR provides electro-optical and infrared targeting, with two-axis gimbal stabilisation, infrared cueing, and automatic target tracking. The FLIR1 video was captured by Underwood’s ATFLIR.

The combination of independent radar systems aboard the Princeton, the APG-73 cueing aboard the F/A-18F, and the ATFLIR infrared capture by Underwood means the 14 November engagement is corroborated across at least three independent sensor modalities on multiple platforms. The Council treats this multi-platform, multi-modal corroboration as the most evidentially significant single feature of the case.

Official response

The official trajectory of the Nimitz encounter is one of the most documented in the modern UAP record. It can be reconstructed in seven steps.

2004–2007 (dormant). Contemporaneous incident reports were filed within the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group. The Princeton’s data tapes were collected by external personnel, per Voorhis’s account. The incident did not become public.

2007–2017 (AATIP era). The Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) — a small, congressionally-directed and DIA-housed program reportedly led from 2007 by Luis Elizondo — included examination of the Nimitz materials as part of its broader review of anomalous aerospace incidents. AATIP’s specific products related to the Nimitz case have not been fully released.

16 December 2017 (the NYT story). The New York Times published “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money,’” reported by Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean, and Ralph Blumenthal. The article disclosed the existence of AATIP, named Elizondo, and was published alongside two of the three Navy videos — FLIR1 (the Nimitz video) and Gimbal — that had to that point circulated informally. The NYT story is the canonical entry of the case into the U.S. public record.

18 September 2019 (Navy confirmation). Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher confirmed to Politico that the three videos circulating publicly — FLIR1, Gimbal, and GoFast — were genuine U.S. Navy footage that had not been authorised for public release. Gradisher’s statement is the first formal Navy acknowledgement that the FLIR1 video is authentic Navy material.

27 April 2020 (DoD formal release). The Department of Defense issued a formal public statement releasing the three videos. The DoD statement explicitly characterised the objects shown as “unidentified.”

25 June 2021 (ODNI Preliminary Assessment). The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) submitted its Preliminary Assessment on UAP to Congress. The assessment reviewed 144 UAP reports collected by the U.S. Intelligence Community between 2004 and 2021 and characterised 143 of them — including the Nimitz encounter by implication, though not by name in the unclassified text — as remaining without a determinative explanation.

2022–present (AARO inheritance). Responsibility for U.S. government UAP analysis transferred to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022. AARO’s Historical Record Report Volume I, released in March 2024, addressed the 2004 Nimitz events directly. The report characterised the case as one for which AARO’s archival review had not produced a positive identification, but also did not endorse the more expansive interpretive claims that have circulated in the popular literature. AARO’s FY2025 report extended this posture: continued analysis, no positive identification, no upgrade.

Congressional engagement with the case has continued in parallel. Cmdr. Fravor’s 26 July 2023 testimony before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security was the first sworn first-person testimony from a primary Nimitz witness in a televised hearing.

Mundane explanations considered

The evidentiary strength of the Nimitz case requires that every plausible non-anomalous explanation be considered on its merits. The Council considers four.

1. Weather balloon or atmospheric phenomenon

A weather balloon or other passive atmospheric body is the lowest-effort mundane explanation and the one most often raised in non-specialist commentary. It is also the weakest. A weather balloon does not produce the descent profile Day described (above 80,000 feet to near sea level in seconds), does not generate the radar signature the SPY-1B logged, does not accelerate laterally in the manner Fravor and Slaight described, and does not match the infrared signature Underwood captured. The Council does not credit this explanation.

2. Classified U.S. asset under test

A more substantive hypothesis is that the object was a U.S. test program — a classified next-generation aerial system being trialed within a Navy operating area. This hypothesis has internal coherence: it would explain why senior personnel collected the data tapes; it would explain the absence of an official Navy acknowledgement before 2019; and it would not require any non-conventional physics, only secrecy.

The hypothesis nevertheless fails on at least three grounds. First, no U.S. program from the 2004 period has been declassified that matches the reported performance envelope, and twenty years of declassification cycles have substantially reduced the probability that such a program existed and remains undisclosed. Second, the conduct of the test in a Navy operating area, in a way that triggered live carrier-strike-group air defence procedures, would constitute a serious operational error of the kind not consistent with how black programs are run. Third, the AARO Historical Record Report’s review of the period did not surface evidence consistent with this explanation. The Council notes the hypothesis as the most plausible mundane explanation and assesses it as not supported by the documentary record.

3. Parallax, sensor artifact, or pod-internal effect

The skeptical analyst Mick West, writing on Metabunk, has produced the most technically substantive non-anomalous analysis of the case. West’s principal arguments address the FLIR1 video specifically. He has argued that some of the apparent motion in FLIR1 — particularly the sudden lateral acceleration at the end of the clip — is consistent with the ATFLIR pod’s gimbal limits being reached and the field of view rotating, rather than the object accelerating relative to the aircraft.

West has earned, by the consistency and technical depth of his published analysis, a substantive engagement rather than dismissal. The Council credits the following from his analysis: the FLIR1 video alone is not decisive evidence of anomalous propulsion; parallax effects and gimbal artifacts can produce apparent motion that is not the motion of the underlying object; and the video should be interpreted in the context of the pod’s known behaviour, not in isolation.

The Council also notes the limits of the parallax/artifact framework as a complete explanation of the case. The FLIR1 video is one of multiple sensor records. The SPY-1B radar tracks aboard the Princeton are independent of the ATFLIR pod and not subject to its gimbal limits. Fravor and Slaight’s visual observation is independent of both. The disturbance in the ocean surface beneath the object is independent of all three. A parallax/artifact explanation that accounts for the FLIR1 video does not, by itself, account for the radar log or the visual encounter.

The Council’s position: parallax/artifact effects materially constrain how much can be inferred from the FLIR1 video alone, and the case should not be argued from the video in isolation. This is precisely why the Council has not upgraded the verdict to “Confirmed.”

4. Foreign-adversarial system

A foreign adversary’s classified aerial asset — a hypothesis sometimes advanced in policy circles — would, like the U.S. classified-asset hypothesis, explain the data without requiring any non-conventional physics. It runs into the same envelope problem: no documented adversary system from the 2004 period, or since, matches the reported performance characteristics. It also runs into a geopolitical problem: a foreign system operating in proximity to a U.S. carrier strike group would constitute a serious provocation and would not be a one-off, but the SPY-1B tracks were confined to this two-week window. The Council does not credit this explanation as principal but notes that AARO is required by statute to continue evaluating it.

Open questions

After two decades of public attention, the genuinely unresolved questions are narrower than they were in 2017 but remain material.

• The full unredacted radar log from the USS Princeton, covering the entire 10–16 November 2004 engagement window, is not in the public record.
• The chain of custody of the data tapes collected by external personnel from the Princeton after the events has not been documented in any release.
• The full inventory of FLIR captures from VFA-41 and supporting squadrons during the engagement window is not publicly known; FLIR1 is one capture, not necessarily the only one.
• The AATIP-era analytical products on the Nimitz materials — produced between approximately 2007 and 2017 — have not been released.
• AARO’s classified annex products on the case, if any, have not been declassified.

The Council’s verdict

Inconclusive.

The Nimitz encounter has one of the strongest evidentiary records of any UAP case in the modern era. The case is multi-sensor (AN/SPY-1B radar, AN/APG-73 fire-control radar, AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR pod), multi-witness (Fravor, Slaight, Dietrich, Underwood, Day, Voorhis, and many others), multi-platform (Princeton, Nimitz, and supporting ships), and documented at the official level by Navy authentication of the FLIR1 video, DoD formal release of the imagery, ODNI inclusion in the Preliminary Assessment, and AARO archival review.

That record is exceptional. It is not, on the Council’s reading, sufficient to support an upgrade to “Confirmed.”

The Council’s threshold for a Confirmed verdict on any UAP case is positive identification of non-conventional origin — not “no mundane explanation accounts for all the data,” and not “the witness was credible.” Those are conditions for taking a case seriously, not for closing it. The Nimitz record meets the first condition definitively. It does not meet the second.

The parallax and gimbal-artifact framework articulated by Mick West materially constrains the inferences that can be drawn from the FLIR1 video alone. The SPY-1B radar log, while strong, has not been released in full. The classified-asset hypothesis — U.S. or foreign — fails on present evidence but cannot be formally falsified absent further declassification. The Council does not treat the absence of a mundane explanation as equivalent to the presence of an anomalous one.

The Council also explicitly declines to downgrade to “Debunked.” No proposed mundane explanation, including the strongest skeptical analysis available, accounts for the full multi-sensor, multi-platform record. The case is not a sensor artifact. The case is not a weather balloon. The case is not, on present evidence, a known U.S. or adversary aerial system. What the case is, on the Council’s reading, is the strongest publicly available UAP record in the modern instrumented era, and the case for which the gap between what was recorded and what is provable as to origin is the most consequential in the entire U.S. military record.

A future release of the unredacted USS Princeton radar log, the AATIP-era analytical products, AARO’s classified annex on the case, or comparable archival material from the 2004 engagement window would meaningfully change this assessment. Absent such releases — and the Nimitz record is closely paralleled in this respect by the USS Roosevelt encounters of 2014–2015 and the broader Navy UAP file — the Council maintains the verdict that the documentary record actually supports.

Inconclusive. Not by default. By discipline.

Sources

1. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 25 June 2021.
2. U.S. Department of Defense, “Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos,” 27 April 2020.
3. Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” The New York Times, 16 December 2017.
4. Joseph Gradisher (U.S. Navy spokesman), formal confirmation of FLIR1 / Gimbal / GoFast video authenticity, reported by Bryan Bender, Politico, 18 September 2019.
5. Cmdr. David Fravor (USN, ret.), sworn testimony, House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, 26 July 2023.
6. All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (DoD), Historical Record Report Volume I, March 2024.
7. Mick West, “Tic Tac UFO Executive Report” thread and related published analysis, Metabunk.
8. The Debrief / secondary publication of TTSA’s original FLIR1 release with Nimitz pilot narrative.
9. U.S. Senate transcripts of the 2023 Armed Services Committee inquiry on UAP.