The Nimitz "Tic Tac" is an unidentified object that U.S. Navy aviators from the USS Nimitz carrier strike group reported seeing off the coast of Southern California on 14 November 2004: a white, featureless oblong roughly 40 feet long that, by the pilots' account, hovered over a patch of disturbed water, mirrored a fighter jet's movements and then sped away. Later that day another crew recorded it on an infrared targeting camera, producing the clip now known as FLIR1. The object has never been publicly identified.
The case matters because it moved UFOs from late-night radio into the Pentagon briefing room. It has trained military witnesses, a ship's radar track, an official video and a paper trail through the New York Times, the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and Congress. It is also a case where the line between what is documented and what is testimony has to be drawn carefully.
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What happened on 14 November 2004
On 14 November 2004 the Nimitz carrier strike group, then designated Carrier Strike Group 11 and including the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton (CG-59), was running training exercises in the Pacific off Southern California and northern Baja California. According to the aviators' accounts, the Princeton's radar operators had been tracking unusual returns for roughly two weeks: contacts that appeared at very high altitude, around 80,000 feet, dropped rapidly and then held position far lower, around 20,000 feet.
That afternoon the Princeton directed a pair of F/A-18F Super Hornets toward one of these contacts. Commander David Fravor, a squadron commanding officer flying from the Nimitz, led the flight; Alex Dietrich piloted the second jet. Each two-seat aircraft also carried a weapons systems officer in the back seat, which made four aircrew in total.
When they arrived, the aviators say, they saw a patch of churning white water on the ocean surface, and above it a white, oval object about 40 feet long with no wings, no visible exhaust and no markings. Fravor descended in a circle to get a closer look. In his telling, the object rose to meet him, matching his turn, and as he cut across the circle toward it, it accelerated away and vanished from sight. The four witnesses have described observing it for around five minutes.
Who saw the Tic Tac, and who filmed it
Four people saw the object with their own eyes: Fravor, Dietrich and the two weapons systems officers. Fravor has since given many interviews and congressional testimony; Dietrich spoke publicly years later, describing what she saw without claiming to know what it was.
The video came from a separate sortie. After the first flight returned, a second wave launched with an aircraft carrying the ATFLIR infrared targeting pod. Chad Underwood, the aviator credited with the recording, captured the object on that sensor, and it was Underwood who coined the nickname "Tic Tac" for the white, oblong shape on the screen. Underwood has said he did not see the object with his own eyes; he tracked it on his instruments. That detail matters later, because the video and the visual sighting are two different pieces of evidence from two different flights.
What the FLIR1 video actually shows
FLIR1 is a short black-and-white infrared clip from the targeting pod, showing a small, elongated object that the camera tracks for a little over a minute before it slips out of the frame to the left. It does not show the ocean disturbance, the mirroring manoeuvre or the sudden acceleration Fravor described.
This is the single most important point for anyone trying to weigh the case. The video is real, and the Navy has confirmed it is real. But on its own it shows a distant, tracked object, not the manoeuvres that make the case extraordinary. Those come from the eyewitness accounts and from the radar data, and the radar data from the Princeton has never been publicly released. A copy of the FLIR1 clip itself, according to reporting by Wired, had been circulating on a UFO forum since at least 2007, a decade before it became famous.
How the story became public in 2017
The encounter reached a mass audience on 16 December 2017, when the New York Times published a story by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean revealing a little-known Pentagon effort called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The program ran from 2007 to 2012 on about $22 million in funding over five years, and much of that money went to a contractor, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, which carried out research and investigations.
Alongside the article, the FLIR1 video and a second clip, later called Gimbal, were published, and a third clip, GoFast, followed. Gimbal and GoFast were recorded by Navy aircrew off the East Coast in 2014–2015, a decade after the Nimitz encounter, and are often confused with it. Only FLIR1 belongs to the Tic Tac case.
The 2017 story proved nothing about the object's origin. It did establish that the Department of Defense had funded a program to look at reports like this one.
What the Navy and the Pentagon have confirmed
In September 2019, the Navy publicly confirmed that the three circulating videos were genuine Navy footage and that they showed what it called "unidentified aerial phenomena". The wording was careful: unidentified means unidentified, not alien. On 27 April 2020 the Department of Defense formally released the three videos, saying the aim was to clear up any public misconception about whether the footage in circulation was real.
On 25 June 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published its Preliminary Assessment on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It examined 144 reports from U.S. government sources covering November 2004 to March 2021, the start date neatly matching the Nimitz encounter. Of those 144, the assessment identified just one with high confidence, as a large, deflating balloon. The rest it could not explain with the data available, and it stressed that limited, inconsistent data was the main obstacle.
In July 2022 the Department of Defense set up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to take over the work of earlier task forces. AARO's first historical report, released in March 2024, said it had found no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting represented extraterrestrial technology. The full history of those reviews, and what each hearing claimed and proved, is set out in the UAP hearings explainer.
The 2023 congressional hearing
On 26 July 2023 the House Oversight Committee's Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held a hearing titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency". The three witnesses were retired Commander David Fravor; Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot and executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace; and David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who had worked on the government's UAP task force.
Fravor repeated his account of the Tic Tac under oath, including his description of the object's acceleration and the Princeton's report that it reappeared far away at the aircraft's planned rendezvous point within moments. That testimony is sworn and on the record. It is still testimony: no radar logs, additional video or other sensor data from the 2004 event were presented at the hearing, and none has been released since.
What skeptics say
Skeptics do not generally accuse the pilots of lying. Their case is narrower, and it rests on the gap between the witness accounts and the hard data that has been made public.
Mick West, a science writer and former video-game programmer who has analysed all three Navy videos in detail, argues that the objects in them may be ordinary aircraft or balloons seen at a distance and distorted by infrared glare, and that apparent motion in this kind of footage can come from the camera's own tracking, zoom and the jet's movement rather than from the object. Applied to FLIR1, the argument is that the clip is consistent with a distant conventional object, and that nothing in the footage itself demonstrates impossible speed or acceleration.
Skeptics also point to the time lag: the story was first told in detail thirteen years after it happened, and memory of a few minutes of high-stress flying is not instrument data. The radar returns that started the episode remain unreleased, so independent analysts cannot check what the Princeton recorded.
Supporters reply that four trained aviators saw the same thing at close range, that the radar tracks preceded the sighting, and that the skeptical explanations address the video but not the visual encounter. The fair summary: the encounter is well attested, the video is authentic, and the object remains unidentified.
What is documented and what is testimony
Documented: the date and the strike group; the existence of AATIP from 2007 to 2012 and its roughly $22 million budget; the Navy's 2019 confirmation that the videos are genuine and show unidentified aerial phenomena; the Pentagon's formal release on 27 April 2020; the ODNI's June 2021 assessment of 144 reports with one explained; AARO's creation in 2022; and the 26 July 2023 hearing.
Testimony: the 40-foot size, the disturbed water, the mirroring climb, the sudden acceleration, the reappearance at the rendezvous point and the two weeks of anomalous radar tracks. These come from the aviators and have been repeated consistently, including under oath, but the supporting sensor data has not been made public.
The same split runs through Roswell and the Rendlesham Forest incident and the question of how much weight witness accounts can carry when the official record is thin.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson treats the Navy videos and the pilots' testimony as evidence that non-human craft are real. In his video "Did The Pentagon Really See UFOs Caught On Camera?" he takes up the Pentagon footage directly, and his wider teaching on the subject frames it as one strand of a disclosure process that is still unfolding.
His reading rests on a distinction he draws between the two terms. As explained in his teaching on UAPs vs UFOs and the Disclosure Project testimony, Carson uses UFO for genuine non-human craft and treats UAP as a broader government label that lumps those craft together with balloons, drones and classified human aircraft. On that view, an official finding that an object is "unidentified" is not the end of the story but a sign that the category is doing two jobs at once. He also argues that some sightings are advanced human-built craft from black-budget programs, which is why he does not treat every unexplained object as alien.
The same framework shapes his take on the 2023 shoot-downs of unidentified objects. Hold his interpretation next to the record above: the Navy confirms the footage is genuine and the object is unidentified, the official reviews to date report no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology, and the strongest parts of the Tic Tac story still depend on eyewitness accounts.
Watch, read and go deeper
Billy's breakdown of the Pentagon footage, "Did The Pentagon Really See UFOs Caught On Camera?", is embedded above. For the wider history of government UFO investigations, watch Richard Dolan's UFO Chronicles on 4BK TV, and listen to the podcast rant on UFOs, UAPs and aliens. For the ancient side of the visitation question, the Anunnaki topic hub collects Billy's work on the Sumerian texts and the ancient-astronaut debate.
Frequently asked questions
What was the Nimitz Tic Tac?
The Nimitz Tic Tac is an unidentified white, oblong object that U.S. Navy aviators from the USS Nimitz carrier strike group reported seeing off Southern California on 14 November 2004. The pilots described it as about 40 feet long, without wings or visible propulsion. It has never been publicly identified.
Is the FLIR1 video real?
Yes. The Navy confirmed in September 2019 that FLIR1, along with the Gimbal and GoFast clips, is genuine Navy footage showing what it called unidentified aerial phenomena, and the Department of Defense formally released all three on 27 April 2020. Confirming the video is authentic is not the same as identifying what it shows.
Who named it the Tic Tac?
The nickname came from Chad Underwood, the aviator credited with recording the FLIR1 infrared video later on 14 November 2004. He used it to describe the white, oblong, featureless shape on his targeting screen.
Has the government explained the Nimitz encounter?
No official explanation of the Nimitz encounter has been published. The ODNI's June 2021 assessment explained only one of 144 reports, a balloon, and AARO's March 2024 historical report said it found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology in UAP sightings. The USS Princeton's radar data from the event has not been released.
Does the video show the object's extreme manoeuvres?
No. FLIR1 shows a distant object tracked by an infrared camera for a little over a minute. The hovering over disturbed water, the mirroring climb and the sudden acceleration come from the pilots' eyewitness accounts on an earlier flight, not from the footage.
Sources and further reading
- 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.
- U.S. Department of Defense, statement on the release of historical Navy videos, 27 April 2020.
- Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 25 June 2021.
- House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency", hearing and written testimony, 26 July 2023.
- All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume 1, March 2024.
- Mick West, Escaping the Rabbit Hole (2018), and his published analyses of the FLIR1, Gimbal and GoFast videos.
