This article documents widely-reported accounts and historical records of unexplained phenomena. It does not assert supernatural causation.
On the morning of November 14, 2004, two United States Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets climbed toward a radar contact that should not have existed. What their pilots reported seeing — a white, oblong object roughly the size of a commercial airliner, hovering without wings or exhaust over a patch of agitated sea, then accelerating beyond any known aircraft performance envelope — would remain classified for more than a decade. When it finally became public, it changed the terms of the UFO conversation in America permanently.
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The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting routine pre-deployment training exercises approximately 100 miles southwest of San Diego, off the coast of Baja California, when the events began. But the anomalous contacts had actually been appearing for several days before the intercept. Petty Officer Kevin Day, the senior air intercept controller aboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton — the strike group’s most capable radar platform — later stated in multiple interviews and in a written account that his AN/SPY-1B radar had been tracking a cluster of unidentified objects since approximately November 10, 2004. The objects, he reported, were appearing at extremely high altitudes — around 80,000 feet — and then descending rapidly toward the ocean surface before disappearing from scope.
Day described the contacts as moving in ways inconsistent with any aircraft he had ever tracked: no transponding, no flight plan, and flight profiles that defied standard aerodynamic expectations. He reported his findings up the chain. According to Day’s account, his superiors initially attributed the returns to sensor error. The Princeton had recently undergone a significant radar upgrade, and some personnel believed the system might be generating false contacts.
On November 14, Day coordinated the dispatch of two F/A-18Fs from the VFA-41 “Black Aces” squadron to visually investigate a contact. The lead aircraft was piloted by Commander David Fravor, commanding officer of VFA-41, with Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight flying in the rear seat. A second F/A-18F crewed by an unidentified female pilot and her WSO flew as wingman. The four aviators were not briefed on the prior radar history before the intercept.
What Fravor later described was this: as he descended toward the designated coordinates, he observed white water disturbing the ocean surface below — as though something large was just beneath it. Above that disturbance, hovering at low altitude, was a white, oblong object he estimated at roughly 40 feet long. It had no wings, no tail, no visible means of propulsion, and no exhaust plume. He described its shape repeatedly and consistently as resembling a Tic Tac breath mint — smooth, white, featureless.
Fravor reported that he began a descending spiral toward the object. The object, he said, mirrored his maneuver — appearing to react to his approach. Then, as he closed to what he estimated was about a mile, the object accelerated and vanished. Gone. Not fast like a departing jet. Gone in a way he said he had no frame of reference to describe. Seconds later, the Princeton reported the same contact had reappeared on radar approximately 60 miles away — at the CAP (combat air patrol) point the flight had been assigned before the intercept. It had traveled 60 miles in a matter of seconds.
The Witnesses
Commander David Fravor is the primary witness and has been the most publicly forthcoming. A Princeton graduate and 18-year Navy veteran at the time of the encounter, Fravor has given consistent accounts across dozens of interviews, including to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Congress, and on podcasts reaching millions of listeners. His account has not materially changed since 2004. He has described the experience as “the most bizarre thing I have ever seen in my life” and has stated flatly that the object demonstrated technology that, in his assessment, exceeded anything in the U.S. arsenal or any foreign program he was aware of.
Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight, Fravor’s WSO that day, corroborated Fravor’s account in the original New York Times reporting. Slaight has been less publicly visible than Fravor but has confirmed the core elements of the encounter.
Petty Officer Kevin Day has given detailed accounts of the multi-day radar tracking context. His testimony adds a critical dimension: the object or objects were not a single momentary anomaly but a pattern of contacts extending over several days. Day has said the experience affected him significantly in the years following.
A second intercept was launched after Fravor’s flight returned. Pilots from that sortie captured the now-famous FLIR1 infrared video — a 1 minute and 16 second clip showing a white oblong object tracked by a forward-looking infrared pod. The object is seen hovering, then accelerating and eventually breaking lock. One of those pilots, referred to in early reporting as “GOFAST pilot” and later more specifically as Chad Underwood, confirmed in a 2019 New York magazine interview that he was the WSO who captured the FLIR1 footage. Underwood noted that what struck him most was not the object’s appearance but the fact that it had no heat signature consistent with any known propulsion system.
All primary witnesses were experienced military aviators with significant flight hours. None reported any ambiguity about what they observed during the event itself.
What Investigators Found
The case remained largely inside official channels for over a decade. The breakthrough into public awareness came on December 16, 2017, when the New York Times published a front-page story by reporters Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean under the headline “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” The article simultaneously revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a Pentagon initiative funded from 2007 to 2012 at approximately $22 million annually, and released the FLIR1 video as supporting documentation.
AATIP had been run under the direction of Luis Elizondo, a career intelligence officer, and was funded largely at the direction of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017, citing internal resistance to the program, and subsequently became a public advocate for government transparency on UAP. The Pentagon later issued statements both confirming and partially walking back the scope of AATIP, creating an ongoing dispute about the program’s precise mandate — a dispute that has not been fully resolved.
The FLIR1 video was one of three videos released with the Times article. The other two — labeled GIMBAL and GOFAST — documented separate UAP encounters involving Navy aircraft. All three were officially confirmed as authentic U.S. Navy footage by Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough in September 2019. On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense took the further step of officially declassifying all three videos, releasing them through official channels with a statement confirming they depicted “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The statement noted the release was intended to “clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real.”
In June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary assessment on UAP — the first such unclassified government report in decades. The report, formally titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” addressed 144 UAP reports from U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021. It concluded that most reports “probably do represent physical objects” and acknowledged that in 143 of 144 cases, no explanation could be confirmed. The Nimitz case is widely understood to be among those assessed, though the report does not name specific incidents by operational detail.
The Naval Air Systems Command and the broader Intelligence Community have not released any formal classified findings on the Nimitz encounter specifically, at least not publicly. The USS Princeton‘s SPY-1 radar data and ship logs from November 10–14, 2004 have not been made available in full to the public. A separate NAVAIR safety report referenced in some accounts has also not been publicly released.
Possible Explanations
Conventional explanations have been proposed and examined with varying degrees of rigor. The most persistent skeptical analysis comes from Mick West, a science writer and founder of Metabunk.org, who has argued in detail that the FLIR1 video does not show an object performing extraordinary maneuvers but rather a distant aircraft whose apparent motion is largely attributable to the camera’s gimbal rotation and changing zoom — hence the nickname “Gimbal” for one of the videos. West produced video analyses arguing that what appears to be rapid acceleration in the footage is consistent with the pod’s field of view shifting, not the object moving. West has been more cautious about the visual sighting reported by Fravor, acknowledging that pilot testimony is harder to explain through instrumentation artifact alone.
Atmospheric phenomena — temperature inversions creating false radar returns — have been raised as a partial explanation for the multi-day radar contacts tracked by Kevin Day. Some radar engineers have noted that the Princeton‘s recently upgraded SPY-1B system could, in theory, have required recalibration that might produce anomalous track data. This was, notably, the initial assessment offered aboard the ship before the visual intercept occurred.
Foreign advanced technology — specifically classified Chinese or Russian hypersonic or drone programs — has been mentioned in congressional testimony as a category of concern, though no specific identification has been made and no evidence linking the Nimitz object to any foreign program has been publicly presented. Advanced U.S. classified programs are also routinely cited as a possible explanation, though Fravor has noted that such programs typically carry identification mechanisms to prevent exactly the kind of confusion the encounter created.
No official body has concluded what the object was.
Why It Still Matters
The Nimitz encounter occupies a specific and durable position in the UAP conversation because of the convergence of its evidence types. It is not a single witness account or a blurry photograph. It involves corroborating radar data from a sophisticated naval platform, multiple trained observer visual confirmations, and infrared video footage authenticated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Those three streams do not resolve into a clean single explanation — conventional or otherwise. That combination is rare in the historical record of UFO/UAP reports.
The 2017 Times story, by any reasonable measure, broke the modern UAP disclosure era open. The reporting by Cooper, Blumenthal, and Kean prompted congressional interest that led directly to the 2021 ODNI report, the reestablishment of formal UAP investigation offices within the Pentagon, and — crucially — the passage of the UAP Disclosure Act provisions embedded in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 and 2024.
As of 2025, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), established by Congress in 2022, has become the primary institutional home for UAP investigation within the Department of Defense. AARO’s first director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, presented findings to Congress in 2023 that were broadly skeptical of exotic explanations for most reported UAPs, attributing the majority to misidentified conventional objects, sensor artifacts, or foreign surveillance platforms. Kirkpatrick resigned in late 2023. His successor and the office’s current posture have continued to be subjects of congressional scrutiny.
In congressional hearings held in July 2023 — among the most-watched UAP hearings in U.S. history — former intelligence official David Grusch testified under oath that the U.S. government possesses recovered non-human craft and biological material. Grusch’s testimony is separate from the Nimitz case factually, but both exist within the same active legislative and investigative context. The Nimitz encounter, two decades after it occurred, remains one of the foundational documented cases driving that conversation.
What Fravor and his crew saw on November 14, 2004 has never been officially identified. The object in the FLIR1 video has never been officially identified. The multi-day radar contacts tracked by Kevin Day have never been officially explained. In a field where cases routinely dissolve under scrutiny, that sustained ambiguity — maintained across 20 years, multiple investigations, and a formal Pentagon declassification — is itself a matter of record.
Further reading: books on the Tic Tac UFO encounter on Amazon.
Related case files
- The 2023 Congressional UAP Hearings: What David Grusch Said Under Oath
- AATIP: The Pentagon’s $22 Million UFO Program
- AARO Explained: The Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office
- The 1986 JAL 1628 Incident: A Cargo Pilot’s UFO Encounter Over Alaska
- The Cash-Landrum Incident: A UFO Encounter That Caused Real Injuries