The Nimitz tic tac UFO incident
In 2017, the New York Times reported on a secretive UFO research program at the Pentagon. The Pentagon released 3 videos of suspected UFO sightings. Someone asked me to look into these events, to see if there’s any substance to the claims, or how likely it is that these unidentified objects are extraterrestrial.
I started by looking at the Nimitz event, the best documented sighting.
In November 2004, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz was operating off the coast of San Diego on a training mission, in preparation for deployment to the Persian gulf. The carrier was accompanied by a number of other ships.
Radar operators on one ship, the USS Princeton, observed a variety of anomalous radar signals in early November. One account describes those signals as objects descending from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet, hanging out for a few hours, and then going back up to 80,000 feet.
On November 14th, 2004, two F-18 super hornet jets were dispatched to investigate the location of a radar signal, possibly to a point off the coast of Baja California:
The two planes were piloted by David Fravor and Alex Dietrich. Each had a weapons system officer (WSO) in the back seat. Alex Dietrich’s WSO was Jim Slaight. David Fravor’s WSO’s name is not widely reported.
Upon arriving at the rough location of the radar signal (referred to as “merge plot”, the grid point at which radar could not distinguish their location from the target) Fravor and Slaight both looked down and noticed a disturbance in the water, like what you’d sea for waves breaking over an underwater seamount. It was an otherwise clear day, with calm water, so this whitewater patch was readily observable.
Fravor described the disturbance as a large cross shaped patch of whitewater, like a 737 plane submerged slightly underneath the water, with waves breaking over it.
After seeing the water disturbance, Fravor also noticed a white, tic-tac shaped object, approximately 40 feet in length, hovering over the water and moving erratically, alternating left-right and forward-back motions.
Fravor says he flew a circle around the UFO. At the start of the circle, he’s at 6 o’clock and it’s in the center. He says he flew clockwise around the circle, so he would be banking his plane to the right and seeing the tic tac on his right side.
At the beginning, his left side is to the south, so the tic tac would be to his north. In one account, he estimated it was about 50 feet above the water.
The other plane was flying off to Fravor’s left and stayed flying with him in formation.
As Fravor got to about to the 9 o’clock position on the circle, he decided to drop in altitude. The second plane remained at the initial height of about 23,000 feet, to give cover, but also circled the object.
After making it halfway around the circle, to the 12 o’clock position, Fravor says the tic tac object becomes aware of him and begins to climb in altitude and also follow its own clockwise circle, opposite the plane.
After completing slightly more than a full circle, Fravor was at the 8 o’clock position while the tic tac was opposite the circle at 2 o’clock. Fravor says he had dropped to 15,000 feet while the object had climbed to 12,000 feet.
Fravor made a hard turn to cut across the circle, directly at the tic tac. He says he flew within about 1/2 a mile of it. As he got close, he says that it suddenly flew away with incredible speed.
As we pulled nose onto the object at approximately ½ of a mile with the object just left of our nose, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared right in front of our aircraft. Our wingman, roughly 8,000ft above us, also lost visual. We immediately turned to investigate the white water only to find that it was also gone.
In total, Fravor says the encounter lasted about 5 minutes.
Fravor says the planes turned around to investigate the water disturbance but could no longer see anything remaining in the water, so they returned to their previously location.
A radar operator contacted them about a minute later saying that they’d also lost track of the object, but then radar picked up the same object 60 miles east, near where the jets’ next destination (“CAP point” or Combat Air Patrol point).
Fravor inferred that the tic tac had just travelled 60 miles in one minute (a speed of 3,600 miles per hour, or about 5 times the speed of sound).
Fravor had no further contact with the unidentified object, but another pilot, Chad Underwood, flew from the aircraft carrier to try to locate it and obtained a video of some object from his FLIR (forward looking infrared) camera:
Fravor did not take this video, there is no video available from his flight.
He does emphasize that 4 people from his flight all saw the same thing for 5 minutes and all have the same story.
That’s interesting, because many UFO encounters only have one witness, many are too brief to have much detail, and many happen at night.
This one happened in broad daylight, with at least 4 witnesses. It sounds more plausible than most UFO stories.
There’s one small problem, though…
No one else tells the same story
Let’s try to corroborate this story from other witnesses.
The other plane was piloted by Alex Anne Dietrich.
Dietrich was interviewed about the incident. She also reports seeing a disturbance in the water, but for her it was a long cylinder. It was maybe the shape of a large plane but she didn’t see the cross pattern.
She saw the tic tac, as well, but only saw it for 10 seconds, definitely not 5 minutes.
When asked which side she saw it on, she said it was on the left side of her plane, and she was banked in a left turn. That’s the opposite of what Fravor said.
She doesn’t recall circling around the tic tac at all, but she suggests that maybe they did a slow 5 minute circle, and she might not have noticed because she was just following Fravor’s plane.
Dietrich spotted the tic tac very low above the water. She starts the clock for her 10 seconds when someone else said to look in the water, and also describes Fravor’s aggressive maneuvering starting around that time.
That’s also inconsistent — he says the circle started when people said to look in the water and the aggressive maneuvering happened later. At the time Fravor turned aggressively, he said it had already moved up to 12,000 feet.
In another account, she described seeing the tic tac 2 seconds after noticing the water disturbance. In that account, the full incident took 10 seconds for both Dietrich and Fravor. Fravor described the object as floating still over the water, but in that account, Dietrich said it was at 1,000 to 3,000 feet altitude, moving at a speed of 300–500 knots in a straight line.
Dietrich guesses the total time was 10 minutes from when the planes were dispatched (vectored) to merge plot to the end of the event.
On the one hand, it’s really hard to reconcile these accounts.
On the other hand, people’s memories aren’t perfect, no one tells exactly the same story. Men and women are known for remembering things differently:
That doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone here is lying, but it does mean we shouldn’t be too confident about which details are true.
First I’ll look at some physics here, and then I’ll try to look for other witnesses.
Estimating the physics of the incident
Let’s try out some of these theories.
Suppose Fravor was circling for 5 minutes while Dietrich didn’t notice, then he cut across the circle in the last 10 seconds when she was paying attention.
Could you circle around an object in a jet, for 5 minutes, without noticing?
I’m not sure, but I think the answer may be yes. It sounds like the planes were flying at about 350 knots (400 mph). To do a circle lasting 5 minutes, the circle would have a radius of 5 miles. The plane would undergo an acceleration of only 0.4 G’s. You would notice that in a car, but that’s very mild compared to what planes are capable of.
An average roller coaster might subject someone to 2 G’s while going through loops and turns. An average person can sustain 5 G’s before passing out, a trained fighter pilot might be able to do 9 G’s. I’ve never flown in an F-18, maybe it’s possible you could fly a full circle at that speed if you weren’t paying attention and just following another plane.
Had the circle been faster, this would be different. A one minute circle would be done at 2 G’s. A ten second circle would require 11 G’s.
What is still suspicious is the timing: Fravor describes starting the circle when the water disturbance was seen, and he says Slaight and him discussed that over the radio. So Dietrich would have to be oblivious to what they were looking at for 5 minutes. And Fravor says he communicated that he was going to descend and that Dietrich confirmed and agreed to stay high, when he’s only 1/4 of the way around the circle. That would be over a minute between when they start talking about something in the water and Fravor says he’s going to descend to check it out.
Fravor says he descended about 5,000 feet while circling. A 5 minute descent while going around the circle is very leisurely, for one of these jets. A commercial airliner can ascend or descend at about 1,500 to 3,000 feet per minute. A fighter aircraft can descend safely at about 10,000 to 20,000 feet per minute. So for Fravor to only lose 5,000 feet in about 4 minutes would be a pretty slow descent, not a quick investigation of the tic tac.
Maybe that’s a reasonable choice for him if he’s just investigating. But let’s also think about the tic tac’s speed. Fravor says that it rose about 12,000 feet from the water. If that also happened over 5 minutes, it’s not moving fast at all — it’s only climbing at 27 miles per hour. No extraterrestrial abilities are required for that.
The only thing that seems physically unlikely here is if the object actually disappeared and then showed up 60 miles away on radar. That would be Mach 5 — not physically impossible but beyond what fighter jets can do.
To infer that it moved that fast, you also need to assume that this was the same object in both places, not that the radar operator didn’t just pick up two different objects 60 miles apart.
The other radar accounts from early November described multiple objects, so it’s certainly possible that there were also two objects on the 14th, or it’s just 2 signals from the radar, not one object moving at Mach 5.
Other witnesses: Fravor’s WSO
There was another witness in Fravor’s plane, sitting 6 feet behind him:
The WSO’s account is briefly mentioned in a report on the Nimitz event, although his name is redacted:
Unlike Fravor, who said the tic tac was initially floating and not moving quickly, his WSO thought it was moving quickly, at 500 knots (575 miles per hour).
That’s more similar to Dietrich’s account of rapid straight line motion.
Other witnesses: Jim Slaight
There were 4 people present, we should have 4 accounts.
The WSO in Dietrich’s plane was Jim Slaight. He also reports seeing the water disturbance and the tic tac.
Slaight has not done many interviews, as far as I can tell. He appeared in one Fox news episode on aliens, but it’s a terrible interview with a host who’s not asking the right questions. The host has the wrong video up on the screen at the time. The segment also included a short interview with a woman who says she’d been abducted to the moon by alien grays and a mantis.
So the report is short on detail, but Slaight does say that his initial thought was maybe he was seeing a “submarine which had launched a missile”. I guess that also sounds like rapid motion, not something floating.
Other witnesses: Lieutenant Kurth
A third plane witnessed the water disturbance, shortly beforehand.
This report says he’s flying at 15,000 feet, while the other two F-18's are at 500–5,000 feet (in contrast to Fravor’s account of them being at 20,000 feet). The controller told him to stay above 10,000 feet, to avoid other air traffic.
For Kurth, the disturbance in the water was round:
He did not report seeing the tic tac object.
Kurth has not done an on-the-record interview.
Other witnesses: Radar operator Kevin Day
Kevin day was a radar operator. In one interview he says he sees strange radar contacts off of Catalina island, at 28,000 feet, tracking south at 100 knots. He sees a lot of objects, ping-ponging around in unpredictable ways, and recommends intercepting one.
He says that when Fravor intercepts the tic tac, it dropped from 28,000 feet to the surface of the water in 1 second.
In another interview, Kevin Day says the tic tac did a barrel roll around Fravor, then dropped down to the surface of the ocean, then out of the water and back to 28,000 feet.
Day says that people flew onto the carrier in a helicopter and seized the tapes of the event. Fravor disputes this and says the tapes were never taken and there was no immediate investigation.
Day says he now has nightmares about the world ending, and all of us having an encounter with these objects.
One journalist claims he’s interviewed Fravor, and claims that Fravor said that Kevin Day is just trying to make money off of this.
Day obviously has the most exaggerated account of the events, so you can probably discard his views. But there’s a problem in as much as Day is also the one reporting the weird radar signals, in the first place, so when other people talk about craft coming from 80,000 feet down to 20,000 or 80,000 down to sea level, it’s not clear that there’s any primary witness other than Day, making that claim.
Different sources vary on what the radar signals were
Fravor says that the radar detected objects dropping from 80,000 feet to 20,000, floating for a few hours, and then going back up.
A 2015 account from this author says the radar return objects were always at the same spot in Baja:
On several occasions beginning 10 November, the Fire Control Officer and the extremely experienced Fire Control Senior Chief had detected multiple returns descending from far above the radar’s scan volume–somewhere higher than 80,000 ft. The targets, dubbed Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs), would drop from above 80K to hover roughly 50 feet off the water in a matter of seconds.
Always over the same spot, a Lat/Long about 30NM off the coast of Baja, roughly 70nm southwest of Tijuana. At the time, the SPY-1 was the most sophisticated and powerful tactical radar on the planet. With it, they were able to track these AAVs while they descended, hovered and then zipped away at speeds, turn rates and accelerations faster than any known friendly or threat aircraft. Impossibly fast.
Kevin Day says the signals were seen off of Catalina island, at 28,000 feet and moving slowly south.
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There’s a reddit post from 11 years ago, which is the earliest description I’ve seen of the Nimitz incident. In this case, it’s just a low speed aircraft at 20,000 feet, not something travelling up and down to space or to 80,000 feet:
I was attached to an F18 squadron and worked in a technical capacity, as opposed to working on the flight deck. For 3 days in a row, an Operations Officer noticed an aircraft breaching our restricted airspace. The aircraft was traveling at a low speed at around 20,000 feet. The first 2 days the aircraft was observed, it disappeared from radar after a few minutes before being able to investigate. In preparation for this aircraft, the carriers had f18s ready to scramble.
The old reddit post does describe the ocean disturbance and the tic tac:
According to the pilots and confirmed by a friend in intel, when they encountered the aircraft it had disappeared from sight. However, there was a large disruption in the ocean below and it was assumed that the aircraft crashed. So, the strike group circled the area and inspected the scene. OK, crazy part now, an object that was described by multiple pilots and a friend in intel as resembled a very large “tic-tac”.
Sounds like the ultimate troll job, I know. So, the “tic-tac” oval object lifted from the water. Out of fear or impulse (I have no idea) our pilots decided to engage the object. After lifting from the water and sitting briefly, the object flew at a speed that none of the pilots had ever encountered. It was just gone.
And the reddit post describes the tapes being seized:
That night in the berthing I asked a very close friend in intel if he could confirm the legitimacy of the film. Without speaking, he gestured that it was correct. So, my skepticism began to fade and that next day a group of individuals were “cod’ed” onto the carrier and they retrieved all the tapes. I can confirm they cod’ed onto the ship, but the seizure of tapes came from people that work in those shops.
Lex Fridman described it as objects flying around at 28,000 feet at slow speed. He’s not a primary witness, of course, but Fravor did not object to that description.
In the executive summary of the incident, it’s just the USS Princeton finding an object at 15,000 to 20,000 feet. A radar plane (an E-2 hawkeye) tried to confirm the sighting, and couldn’t detect anything, at first. When given coordinates by the Princeton, the plane searched further and detected something faint , but thought it was at low altitude, maybe even the radar return from a wave.
When Fravor reached the scene, he says he found an object flying near the surface of the water, not something at 20,000 feet or above.
It’s hard to say which of these observations are trustworthy, or whether every plane is even looking at the same object.
The one point to be most skeptical about is the sudden changes in height that Kevin Day talks about. It’s extremely unlikely that an object could drop from 80,000 feet to sea level in 2 seconds:
But it seems like most sources aren’t saying that happened. Fravor isn’t claiming that. At certain times Kevin Day says that, and many people who repeat the story just claim “it dropped from space to sea level”.
Other witnesses: Chad Underwood
Chad Underwood was on a subsequent flight that went out, found an object on radar, and then acquired a forward looking infrared (FLIR) video of that object. He never had visual contact with it, beyond the FLIR video.
In an interview, Underwood says that he’s the guy who came up with the Tic-tac name. He was actually inspired by a scene from the movie Airplane, where a person described a plane as looking like a big Tylenol pill. He didn’t want to say Tylenol so he said Tic-tac instead.
It sounds almost like he came up with the term as a joke and then everyone else went with the description. It’s not quite as clear if everyone independently came up with the same description.
Underwood also got a radar tape of the event, but he says it can’t be released because radar tapes are always classified (America’s adversaries could use the tape to learn how to exploit F-18 radar).
Underwood claims that there were signs his radar was being jammed. Fravor has repeated Underwood’s claim in several interviews, emphasizing that “radar jamming is an act of war”. In the summary report, though, it’s claimed that there were no signs of radar jamming.
Analyzing the FLIR camera footage
What about the footage that Chad Underwood recorded?
Here’s a different Navy UFO video from 2015, where pilots locked onto an object that appeared to be moving fast across the ocean surface:
But this is actually a trick of perspective. You can do a bit of trigonometry with the information in the video — we know how high the plane is, the range to the object, how fast the camera is moving, and so on.
Combining this information, we can tell that the object isn’t moving fast right over the surface of the water. It’s floating at 13,000 feet and moving about 40 miles per hour:
Before NASA did this analysis, skeptic Mick West analyzed the footage and determined the same thing.
Can we determine anything similar from the Nimitz FLIR video?
Chad Underwood described the object as level in altitude or slightly below.
But the read-out from the camera seems to indicate that it’s looking 5–6 degrees upwards:
We can’t use trigonometry to calculate the object’s height, because the range to the object is unknown.
In theory, this could be a UFO or balloon that’s fairly close and somewhat higher than the plane. It could also be something like a passenger jet at that’s more distant.
We could use trigonometry to calculate the distance, if we guess the height. The FLIR video seems to say that Underwood’s plane is at 20,000 feet. Suppose it was an object at 40,000 feet. Assuming it’s being seen upwards at an angle of 5 degrees, that would be about 43 miles away.
In the nimitz event report, it says that Underwood’s initial radar contact was “30–40 nautical miles away”. 40 nautical miles is 46 miles. That all lines up nicely as an explanation.
Another thing to notice is that the angle is not changing, it stays at 5–6 degrees up. If this were a balloon or a UFO floating in position, the angle should change as Underwood’s jet flies and gets closer. Either the object is dropping in altitude, or it’s moving away at a similar speed (like a plane flying in the same direction as Underwood).
What does a distant plane look like on FLIR?
Here’s another example, from Chile, where helicopters pilots thought they saw a UFO on FLIR:
In that case, it turned out to just be a very distant plane.
What about the movement, in the Nimitz FLIR video? At the end of the video, the FLIR loses its lock and the object suddenly moves to the left.
Underwood states that his plane did not suddenly move left. But the video does have a tracking angle in it, it starts out at 4 degrees right and moves towards 8 degrees left, at the end:
The camera is panning from right to left the whole time, so the object must have been moving to the left, the whole time. Then the camera stops tracking at the end. It’s unclear to me if the object did move left somewhat or if the camera just stopped panning and it continued its previous drift.
In either case, the object’s movement is exaggerated because the camera zooms in, around the same time the tracking stops.
What exactly was filmed in this video is not known. Underwood describes this as an anomalous recording, unlike things he has usually seen. I haven’t watched enough FLIR videos to comment on how normal or abnormal this is, but I’m not seeing any proof here of something moving in an impossible or unreasonable way.
Is Fravor the kind of guy who would make up a UFO story? Or embellish one for attention?
I’m not sure. After listening to several interviews with him, I only remember two parts that stand out, in this regard.
On the Lex Fridman show, he describes himself as being the class clown, in high school.
On Joe Rogan, Fravor describes how he used to like to fly over campers at night, with his planes’ lights off, and then fake a UFO sighting by turning on the afterburners quickly while turning the plane up into the sky.
I’ve compared Fravor’s story to other accounts, but I haven’t studied Fravor’s story over time, to see if he gives the same details.
What actually happened?
Fravor says it’s an alien space craft.
Maybe.
I can’t prove it’s not aliens.
But there are some more benign explanations that have been proposed.
First off, it could just be some kind of balloon and Fravor got confused by the height. Remember the “GOFAST” video, where pilots thought it was an object right above the water moving at a high speed, but it was actually an object floating much higher at a slow speed.
Mick West tried moving a balloon over his pool, as a test to see if viewers can determine the height and motion:
In Fravor’s case, it could have been a balloon floating higher than the water than he thinks. When he circles around it, he gets confused by the relative motion and thinks it’s also circling around him. When he flies towards it, he’s actually much closer to it than he thinks, so it looks like it’s moving quickly, but that’s just fast relative motion because he’s flying 400 mph and it’s closer than he thinks.
It’s plausible, but since there’s no footage, it’s impossible to go back and say.
Fravor was asked about this explanation on Lex Fridman. Fravor’s answer was interesting because he admitted that perception can be fooled, but that a plane’s instruments help you correct for that. In this case, though, he wouldn’t be getting any help from the plane’s instruments, they didn’t have the tic tac on radar. So he’d only be using his own eyes to guess the height and size of the object.
Otherwise, he said he has a lot of experience flying, knows the size of other planes, and can’t be fooled. But, of course, knowing the size of typical planes may not help with a novel object of an unknown size.
The other 3 pilots all gave different answers for the object’s speed, so at least 1 person did get fooled.
I don’t have any experience in flying an F-18. I’ll probably look out the window on my next plane flight and try to gauge the size of some things I can see, try to get a guess for what a water disturbance or a 40 foot balloon would look like.
On a recent hike I found myself at a cliff, 1,000 feet above a lake. I was thinking about the Nimitz incident, so I watched for a few minutes to get a feel for what I could see. Someone was playing catch with their dog, throwing a ball into the water for the dog to swim out and catch. I could not see the ball, but I could see the splash it made when thrown into the still water.
Could you see a much larger water disturbance from 20,000 feet, on a calm day? Yes, I think so. It might be hard to gauge the exact size. I could see kayaks and paddleboarders in the lake, and make out their shapes. But I wouldn’t really know the size except for the fact that I could guess what those objects were. Maybe an experienced pilot would know better.
There was a highway in the distance from my viewpoint, maybe 3 miles away. If Fravor is doing a 5 minute circle around the tic tac, at 20,000 feet, he’s seeing it from 6 miles away.
From 3 miles, I could clearly see the size and shape of semi-trucks on the highway. I could see that cars on the highway were moving, but couldn’t make out a car as anything other than a moving dot. A semi trailer is about 50 feet long. So, if it were a 40 foot tic-tac, 6 miles away, I think you would just barely be able to see that and maybe discern shape and rotation.
I’m not sure how easily you could distinguish the height, if it was floating, or whether it was a 20 foot tic-tac floating at 10,000 feet vs 40 feet right near the water.
In any case, Mick West’s balloon/parallax theory doesn’t explain what the water disturbance was.
It’s kind of weird to associate the disturbance and the tic tac, in general — unless the tic tac was very low on the water, then the two should move relative to each other very quickly, they wouldn’t be right next to each other for more than a fraction of a second.
Is there some benign explanation that explains both?
Could it be some kind of balloon launched from a submarine?
Maybe. Ships definitely launch balloons. Do submarines?
Could it be some kind of advanced human craft?
Maybe.
Another blogger points out an unmanned aircraft that Boeing was testing in November 2004. They did a coordinated flight test 2 days before the Nimitz incident. Seems kinda tic tac shaped. It would look weird because there are no windows and no pilot. It’s 27 feet long.
Could the water disturbance be unrelated to whatever is flying?
Sure, maybe. In Monterey Bay, you can get a whitewater disturbance from whales, sea lions, sometimes dolphins. You’ll often get birds flying around the surface as well (though I’m not sure you could see a bird from 20,000 feet, and you wouldn’t mistake it for a 40 foot craft). I don’t know what the wildlife off Baja or San Diego is like in November, they should have migrating whales but maybe not the same kind of feeding frenzies seen in Monterey.
Could the Nimitz story be embellished, conflating observations of several different things, with some details even completely made up?
Absolutely!
Some people lie intentionally to mislead. Others lie in a more benign way, like you tell your UFO story repeatedly over the years and the details just get more exaggerated and entertaining each time and you enjoy the status you get from telling it.
Other people lie in a socially compliant way. Like, if 3 of your copilots all say they saw a UFO, you might say you saw something suspicious as well.
There is at least some money to be made in promoting UFO stories. Lieutenant Kurth happens to now work for Robert Bigelow, a UFO and paranormal enthusiast who owned the Skinwalker Ranch. Fravor seems to be accusing some others (like Kevin Day) of lying for profit. Fravor’s own connections and motives are less clear.
Other people use stories for unrelated gain. Entertaining stories can be used for distraction. In a 2017 Fox News clip on UFO’s, Tucker Carlson ends with “this is a really big story, which seems more important than Vladimir Putin”.
I don’t know which person’s account is the most trustworthy here. There are more than 4 to choose from, so you can’t arbitrarily pick Fravor’s as the best account. I’d be inclined to believe Dietrich the most, as she doesn’t seem interested in promoting it and she isn’t motivated to care. I trust Kevin Day the least. And I don’t know how to react to Fravor.
In any case, I would put several of these theories for the Nimitz event as higher probability than “it was an alien spaceship”.
I suppose that it all depends on the bigger picture.
If tic tac UFO sightings were common, repeatable, and had better photographic evidence than this, you’d conclude that tic tac UFO’s are a thing that exists and this was just another sighting. You wouldn’t doubt this anymore than if someone said they’d seen a bird or a plane.
On the other hand, if your priors say that UFO’s are unlikely to be aliens, and most UFO sightings turn out to be observation errors and hoaxes, you’d expect that the Nimitz incident would more likely end up in one of those latter bins, and less likely end up as proof of aliens. It doesn’t look like the kind of compelling evidence that would change anyone’s mind, if they already think that alien visitors are unlikely.
