The official U.S. Navy FLIR1 (ATFLIR) infrared video of the "Tic-Tac" UAP encounter, November 14, 2004. Recorded by Lt. Chad Underwood using the AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR pod. Officially declassified and released by the DoD, April 2020. Public domain — work of the U.S. federal government.
In November 2004, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (CSG-11) was conducting routine pre-deployment training exercises approximately 100 miles southwest of San Diego, California. The group included the nuclear-powered carrier USS Nimitz, the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton (CG-59), and several destroyers and support vessels, along with Carrier Air Wing Eleven (CVW-11) operating multiple F/A-18 Hornet squadrons including the VFA-41 "Black Aces."
Beginning approximately two weeks before the November 14 visual encounter, the Princeton's powerful AN/SPY-1 phased-array radar system began tracking anomalous objects operating in the area. The objects appeared on radar at altitudes of approximately 80,000 feet — at or near the ceiling for most aircraft — and were observed to descend to sea-skimming altitude almost instantaneously, hover for brief periods, and then accelerate away or simply vanish from radar. The Princeton's senior radar operator, Petty Officer Kevin Day, later stated that these tracks occurred daily for the entire two-week period and that he had not reported all of them because he assumed they were radar artefacts. The sustained nature of the preliminary radar contacts is a frequently overlooked element of the Nimitz case.
On November 14, 2004, at approximately 2:00 pm local time, the Princeton vectored two F/A-18F Super Hornets from VFA-41 to investigate an unknown contact. The aircraft were commanded by Commander David Fravor (call sign "Maverick") and his wingman Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight. Fravor was the commanding officer of VFA-41 — an extremely experienced naval aviator with over 3,000 flight hours and previous combat experience over Iraq.
Descending to approximately 20,000 feet over the designated coordinates, Fravor observed a disturbance on the ocean surface — a churning area of white water approximately 50–100 metres in diameter, as if something large were agitating the water from below. Above this disturbance he observed a white, elongated object approximately 40 feet in length, shaped like a Tic-Tac breath mint: smooth, oblong, with no visible wings, control surfaces, or propulsion system. The object was oscillating erratically above the water disturbance.
Fravor descended in a spiral to investigate. The object appeared to become aware of his aircraft and mirrored his descent — tracking him. As Fravor moved to cut off the object's flight path, it accelerated instantaneously to a direction and speed that rendered pursuit impossible, departing from the area entirely in a matter of seconds. The entire encounter lasted approximately five minutes. Fravor subsequently described it as "something I've never seen in my life" and stated unequivocally that it was beyond any human aerospace technology he was aware of.
Shortly after the Fravor-Slaight encounter, a second F/A-18F from VFA-41 was vectored to the coordinates. This aircraft, piloted by Lieutenant Chad Underwood (weapons systems officer: an unidentified pilot whose identity has been publicly discussed), was equipped with the AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pod — the most advanced airborne infrared tracking system in the U.S. Navy inventory at the time. Underwood succeeded in acquiring and tracking the object on the ATFLIR system, producing the now-famous infrared video footage known as the "Tic Tac" video.
The ATFLIR footage shows a white, oblong object tracked against a grey sky. The object moves, the camera loses lock and reacquires it, and at the end of the clip the object accelerates off-frame. The footage was circulated within the Navy and became part of internal analyses within the AATIP programme. In publicly analysing the footage, AATIP staff and outside analysts noted that the camera's lock behavior indicated the object was performing manoeuvres at a high rate of speed — whether the apparent rapid movement in the frame reflects actual object motion or gimbal rotation of the ATFLIR pod became a significant debate after the footage's public release.
Underwood has given multiple media interviews confirming the object was genuine, unknown, and unlike any aircraft he had encountered. He has described the object as performing instantaneous direction changes that would be physically impossible for any conventional aircraft without destroying its structure, and noted that the ATFLIR's tracking behaviour indicated a real object with unusual performance characteristics rather than a sensor artefact.
The Nimitz encounter involved multiple independent witnesses across different platforms and roles:
The convergence of independent observations from multiple trained military personnel across different platforms — visual, infrared, and radar — makes the Nimitz case among the most multi-modally documented UAP encounters on record.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a classified U.S. Department of Defense programme funded from 2007 to at least 2012 under a $22 million budget secured by Senator Harry Reid, investigated UAP reports including the Nimitz encounter. The programme was administered by the Defense Intelligence Agency and contracted research to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). AATIP produced numerous technical reports on UAP-related topics including advanced propulsion concepts, metamaterials, and exotic energy sources.
Luis Elizondo, a career intelligence officer who directed AATIP from approximately 2010 to 2017, resigned from the Department of Defense in October 2017 citing bureaucratic obstruction of UAP investigation. He subsequently joined Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and became a leading public voice for government UAP disclosure. Elizondo has stated that AATIP's assessment of the Nimitz footage and related data concluded that the objects demonstrated performance characteristics — including extreme acceleration, instantaneous direction changes, transmedium operation (moving between air and water), and hypersonic flight without sonic boom — far beyond any known human aerospace capability.
The DoD officially released the Tic Tac video, along with two other AATIP videos (GIMBAL and GOFAST), in April 2020, confirming their authenticity and that they had been recorded by U.S. Navy personnel. The Pentagon's acknowledgement that the footage depicted "unidentified aerial phenomena" and was unexplained was a historic institutional statement.
Based on radar tracks, pilot testimony, and ATFLIR data, analysts associated with AATIP attributed the following performance characteristics to the Nimitz object:
The Nimitz case featured prominently in the 2022 and 2023 Congressional UAP hearings before the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, at which current and former intelligence officials testified under oath about UAP programmes and retrieved materials. David Fravor himself testified at Congressional briefings. The hearings produced the historic public testimony of David Grusch, a former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency officer and UAP task force representative, who alleged the existence of classified programmes involving retrieved non-human craft.
The Wilson-Davis Memo — a document purportedly describing a 2002 conversation between Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson and physicist Eric Davis, in which Wilson described learning of a classified reverse-engineering programme for retrieved non-human materials — circulated among researchers from around 2019. While the document's authenticity is disputed, it has been cited in Congressional settings and by Grusch as consistent with his own claims. The Nimitz encounter sits at the nexus of these broader disclosures as the most publicly documented and officially acknowledged recent U.S. military UAP encounter.
This page presents documented research and reported phenomena. No claims about validity or mechanism are made by this archive.