SAN DIEGO, June 14 — The figure that matters from the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter is zero: zero visible wings, zero exhaust, and zero conventional explanation for the Tic-Tac-shaped object that U.S. Navy pilots tracked off the coast of Southern California. The bottom line is that what Commander David Fravor and his fellow aviators saw that November day remains officially unexplained, even after the Pentagon released and authenticated the video evidence.
The encounter unfolded when the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was conducting operations. Fravor, a commander in the Navy, reported the object performing rapid maneuvers. The object was tracked on radar by the cruiser USS Princeton, which had detected it earlier.
That radar data gave the pilots a precise location to investigate. By the numbers, the incident has a clear chain of custody for its evidence.
The forward-looking infrared, or FLIR, video captured the object’s movements. That footage became public in 2017. Three years later, in April 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense officially released and authenticated three Navy videos, including the one from the Nimitz encounter.
The Pentagon did not offer an identification for the object. The encounter was examined under the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, a Pentagon program that studied unexplained aerial phenomena.
The Nimitz case is the most frequently cited example. Fravor has described the object as Tic-Tac-shaped, with no visible means of propulsion. It did not have wings, did not emit exhaust, and it moved in ways that defied the physics of any aircraft in the U.S. inventory. The pilots observed it from their F/A-18 Super Hornets, which were vectored to intercept by the Princeton’s radar operators.
The authentication of the videos by the Defense Department in 2020 marked a turning point. For years, the footage had circulated online, but the official release gave it institutional credibility.
The Pentagon stated at the time that it was releasing the videos to clear up any misconceptions about whether the footage was real or whether there was more to the story. What to watch next: The Nimitz incident remains the benchmark case for the Pentagon’s ongoing investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena. No official explanation for the 2004 object has been released, and none is expected in the near term.
