On November 14, 2004, a Top Gun graduate named Commander David Fravor flying off the coast of San Diego encountered a smooth white 40-foot object shaped like a Tic Tac candy that hovered above a churning patch of ocean — and when he tried to close on it, the object mirrored his flight path and accelerated beyond visual range in seconds

The most credible UFO encounter in modern American military history happened to a man who was, by every measurable standard, the last person in the United States Navy who should have been seeing things that were not there. Fravor was a Top Gun graduate, the commanding officer of one of the Navy’s elite strike fighter squadrons, on a routine pre-deployment training rotation that would, within months, send the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group to the Persian Gulf. He was flying a brand-new F/A-18F Super Hornet — the most capable strike fighter in the Navy’s operational inventory — equipped with the Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared sensor pod and the radar systems that represented the state of the art in early-21st-century military aviation. His wingman, Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, was a rookie pilot but flew the second F/A-18F in formation with him. Each F/A-18F carried a Weapons Systems Officer in the back seat — Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight behind Fravor, and a second WSO behind Dietrich. Four trained military aviators in two of the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world were present at the scene that day. All four subsequently provided consistent accounts of what happened next.

According to Fravor’s sworn statement to the House Oversight Committee dated 26 July 2023, the radar contact had been described by the USS Princeton’s air controller as “real-world” — a Navy aviator’s distinction from training contacts — and was originally reported at approximately 28,000 feet. The two F/A-18Fs climbed; the contact had disappeared. The Princeton’s controller then redirected them downward, indicating something had appeared near the surface directly below their position. As they descended, they observed what Fravor would describe as “a disturbance in the water” — an area of churning whitewater approximately the size of a 737 commercial airliner, with no visible cause. Above the disturbance, hovering at approximately 50 feet above the ocean surface, was the white Tic Tac-shaped object.

The intercept that did not happen

As Fravor descended toward the object, its behaviour changed. As detailed in a History.com reconstruction of the Nimitz Tic-Tac encounter, the object initially remained stationary above the disturbance while Fravor descended in a counter-clockwise spiral toward it. Then, as he approached approximately 12,000 feet — well within visual range, close enough that the 40-foot Tic Tac shape was clearly resolvable — the object began to mirror Fravor’s descent. It ascended as he descended. It tracked his angular position. It demonstrated, in essential respects, the aerial maneuvering of an aircraft that was aware of his presence. The two trajectories converged. Fravor pulled his nose onto the object at approximately half a mile of separation, intending to close to visual identification range. The object’s response was, by Fravor’s own characterisation, beyond the operational envelope of any aircraft he had ever encountered. It accelerated, crossed his nose, and disappeared from visual range within what Fravor estimated as less than a second.

The acceleration capability the maneuver implied was not consistent with any known propulsion system. A separate radar lock by the USS Princeton’s AN/SPY-1, several minutes later, indicated the object had appeared at the pre-briefed Combat Air Patrol coordinates approximately 60 miles south-west of Fravor’s position — meaning the object had transited 60 miles in less than 60 seconds, implying a minimum velocity of approximately 3,600 miles per hour, with no sonic boom, no heat signature, and no detectable electromagnetic emissions. The CAP coordinates had been classified information briefed only to the pilots and the Princeton’s tactical control team. The object’s apparent ability to know where the rendezvous point was — and to arrive there ahead of Fravor’s approach — was, in his subsequent characterisation, the single most disturbing aspect of the encounter.

The video and the silence that followed

The encounter’s primary documentary artifact — the FLIR1 video that has, since its 2017 declassification, become one of the more-discussed pieces of recorded video evidence in the modern history of aerial-phenomena reporting — was not actually captured by Fravor. As reported by CBS News’ coverage of the Nimitz incident and Fravor and Dietrich’s congressional testimony, the FLIR1 video was recorded approximately 90 minutes later by Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood — a separate F/A-18F pilot launched from the Nimitz to relocate the object. Underwood’s ATFLIR pod locked onto the Tic Tac at approximately 25,000 feet, captured roughly 76 seconds of thermal-imaging video showing the object as a bright white oblong, and recorded the moment at which the object — apparently sensing the radar lock — accelerated abruptly off-screen at velocities the targeting pod could not track. The video was formally released by the Pentagon in April 2020.

The institutional response to the encounter, per an 8 News Now investigative reconstruction of the Tic Tac incident’s 20-year aftermath, was substantially non-existent. The four aviators conducted a routine post-flight debrief, provided written statements that disappeared into Navy administrative channels, and were effectively instructed to refrain from discussing the encounter outside the squadron. Hard drives containing the FLIR video and associated radar data were collected by unidentified personnel and removed from the Nimitz. No formal investigation was initiated. The incident was, by the Navy’s treatment of it across the subsequent 13 years, effectively non-existent. The 2017 New York Times article that first revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and released the FLIR1 video has, since, produced one of the more sustained periods of bipartisan United States congressional interest in unidentified aerial phenomena since the 1960s. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, established by the Department of Defense in 2022, continues to investigate the Tic Tac incident and several hundred other documented cases. The Pentagon’s official position, 21 years after Fravor’s intercept, remains that the object has not been identified. The pilots’ position, as restated under oath in 2023, remains that whatever they saw that day was — by Fravor’s own words — “far superior to anything that we had at the time, have today, or are looking to develop in the next 10-plus years.”