USS Nimitz FLIR1 ‘Tic Tac’ UAP:
Navy Pilot Who Filmed the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO Speaks: ‘It Wasn’t Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics’
Official U.S. government video of a 2004 UFO encounter, taken aboard a Navy fighter jet from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.
On November 14, 2004, the USS Nimitz Strike Group was on a training mission in the Pacific Ocean just 100 miles southwest of San Diego. Two Navy pilots were in the air during the training exercise flying their F/A-18 Super Hornet Navy jets—Commander Dave Fravor, a graduate of the TOPGUN Naval Flight School and the F/A-18 Black Aces Squadron Commander on the USS Nimitz, and on his wing was Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich.
The USS Princeton was nearby and had been recently outfitted with an advanced new radar system. Its operators had been tracking highly anomalous objects for days,[1] and now detected “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles” over the horizon, in a V formation, one of which they reported had just descended from “above 80,000 feet” in 0.78 seconds—a speed of not less than 55,000 mph—without creating a sonic boom.[2] U.S. Navy Chief Master-at-Arms, Sean Cahill (now retired), was an eyewitness to the Nimitz Tic Tac UAP event, and saw it from the USS Princeton and says, “I helped coordinate ships’ movements over a period of days with Sr. Chief Kevin Day, down in the Combat Information Center [CIC]. He had been picking up anomalous contacts on the Aegis Radar System that were coming in at sub-orbital altitudes, then going down to 80,000 feet,[3] and then, what was spectacular was that they would immediately translating down to sea-level. Then there were groups of them proceeding in a southerly direction against the wind. This was so strange and worrisome to Kevin that he began a series of diagnostics. He and a radar tech named Kevin Voorhees both rebooted the system numerous times, double-checked everything and triple-checked, and finally Kevin went to our Captain and said, ‘Sir, I’m pretty sure that we have real contacts—these are not ghosts in the system based on the upgrade.’ . . . We have zero craft in our arsenal that can do that. Kevin sent a sortie of F-18s out to where the radar was picking them up—the captain ordered it.”
[1] All told, radar operators with the Princeton spent about two weeks attempting to figure out what the objects were, a process that included having the ship’s radar system shut down and recalibrated to make sure that the mysterious radar returns were not false positives, or “ghost tracks.”
[2] All of the tracking data from the various systems confirm the rapid acceleration and extreme velocity of the UAP.
[3] This is an impossible accomplishment for any known earth-based technology because de-orbiting a craft requires several specific maneuvers and we have non that could just halt re-entry at 80,000 feet, then proceed to sea-level in less than a second.
Pilots Fravor and Dietrich were in their F/A-18 Super Hornet Navy jets, each with a WSO (Weapon Systems Officer—affectionately, Wizzo) in the seat behind them, and were ordered to investigate the craft that had dropped in so fast. The jets were flying close to each other and Fravor and Dietrich both could see water on the surface of the ocean being agitated by something large just under the surface. Around the surface of the roiling water were “tic tac shaped objects, matte white in color, darting around instantaneously like ping pong balls.” Fravor and Dietrich could clearly see that the object in the roiling water was about the size of a Boeing 737 commercial airliner, which is over 100 feet long with a little wider wingspan. They immediately began talking about what it was that might be bubbling up white water like that, because the sophisticated systems on the ships were detecting no vessels or submarines in the water.
As they looked they suddenly saw a smaller object just above the agitated whitewater that they immediately thought looked similar to a giant “white tic tac” candy—like a cylinder with rounded ends. They estimated that the object was around 40 feet long, and it appeared to be about 50 feet above the water. The white object looked like a flying propane tank, and had no wings and no other flight control surfaces. It had no apparent means of propulsion, like a jet engine or propeller, and there were no exhaust plumes around it. It was perfectly round and smooth, with the exception of two small protrusions that stuck out a couple of feet and bent at a right angle, reminding them of small antennae or other sensor instruments. Fravor describes the movement of the object as somewhat erratic, moving in all directions, while remaining in the same relative north-south configuration.[1] Dietrich said it reminded her of dropping a phone in the kitchen, and watching it bounce around “with no predictable trajectory.”
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Starting Information on the display:
- Sensor is in Infrared Mode
- Sensor then switches to TV (Visual) Mode
- Sensor Azimuth is Aimed 4º Right of Aircraft Axis
- Sensor is Aimed 6º Above Aircraft Axis
- Sensor Zoom is at 1.0, Switched to 2.0 (Alternates)
- F/A-18 Calibrated Airspeed (252 KTS) Mach Number (0.55)
- “HOT” Display Designator: Hot Items are White, Cold are Black (Alternates)
- F/A-18 Altitude: 19,950 FT
In the released 1:15 video of the ATFLIR screen, the WSO followed the UAP with precision, alternating the tracking systems and ATFLIR Pod display at times to get the best information about the unidentified object they were tracking. The object being watched and tracked is warmer than the background and is clearly oblong in shape on the display. The WSO gets a good lock on the object, then it breaks the lock, and is quickly recaptured. After a minute and 15 seconds, the object suddenly shot off with rapid acceleration, moving off the left of the screen with high velocity—too high for the sensors to track. Below is a screenshot of the tic tac object as the WSO doubled in on the zoom and switched from Infrared Mode to TV Mode.