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IncidentUSS Nimitz Tic Tac Incident (14 November 2004)

aka USS Nimitz Tic Tac Incident (14 November 2004)

F/A-18F pilots from VFA-41 'Black Aces' off the USS Nimitz visually confirmed and intercepted a white, 40-foot, wingless oblong object that had been tracked by the USS Princeton's AN/SPY-1 radar for two weeks dropping from 80,000 feet to sea level in less than a second.

under-corroborated Reclassified from phenomenologically-open to under-corroborated on a 2026 adversarial re-audit. The exotic-performance core rests on professional but post-hoc, internally contradictory testimony given 13+ years later; the one public instrument (the FLIR1 video) is from a second flight with no visual and is substantially explained (zoom + tracking artifacts), and the raw radar logs are unreleased and, per AARO, unpreserved - impressive testimony with thin released hard data. (The video specifically reads as a disputed-optical-artifact nested inside.) 'Open' would assert a verified instrumented anomaly; the honest position is documentary thinness and decade-later (or unreleased) hard data, so the case is held under-corroborated - genuinely unresolved, but not instrumented-and-confirmed.
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status history (2)
2026-06-09 · unannotated → phenomenologically-open — annotated before the 2026-06-09 sweep; history begins at seeding
2026-06-14 · phenomenologically-open → under-corroborated — adversarial re-audit of the strongest open instrumented cases — The exotic-performance core rests on professional but post-hoc, internally contradictory testimony given 13+ years later; the one public ins
▸ Deep dive — full timeline, named personnel, sensors, theory-by-theory analysis, and the conventional explanations weighed against the open questions →
Frame from the FLIR1 footage captured by an F/A-18 from USS Nimitz strike group, 14 November 2004.
Frame from the FLIR1 footage captured by an F/A-18 from USS Nimitz strike group, 14 November 2004. Wikipedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0 · JMK · 2018
USS Nimitz (CVN-68), the carrier whose strike group encountered the 'Tic Tac' off southern California.
USS Nimitz (CVN-68), the carrier whose strike group encountered the 'Tic Tac' off southern California. Wikipedia Commons · Public domain · United States Navy · 2009

Between 10 and 16 November 2004, the USS Princeton, an Aegis-class cruiser deployed with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group off Baja California, repeatedly tracked targets descending from approximately 80,000 feet to sea level in less than one second, then hovering at 20,000 feet. On 14 November 2004, Senior Chief Operations Specialist Kevin Day vectored two F/A-18F Super Hornets from VFA-41 ‘Black Aces’ to intercept. The lead aircraft was flown by Cmdr. David Fravor (CO of VFA-41) and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight; the wing aircraft was flown by Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich and Lt. Cmdr. Mike Day. At the intercept point Fravor and Slaight visually observed a white object, approximately 40 feet long, shaped like a Tic Tac, hovering over a churned patch of ocean. The FLIR1 video, captured by a follow-up sortie’s AN/AAS-46 targeting pod, was officially declassified by the U.S. Navy in April 2020.

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