The Nimitz 'Tic Tac' encounter

In early November 2004, the cruiser USS Princeton, operating with the Nimitz carrier group off Baja California with the new SPY-1 radar suite, repeatedly tracked objects descending from above 80,000 feet to the sea surface in seconds. On 14 November, two F/A-18F crews — Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight, with Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich and her weapons officer in the second aircraft — were diverted from training to intercept. All four described a white, wingless, tic-tac-shaped object some 40 feet long, maneuvering erratically above a churned patch of ocean; as Fravor descended toward it, it mirrored him, then accelerated out of sight in under a second. The Princeton reacquired it moments later at the flight's CAP point, sixty miles away.

A second launch that afternoon captured the FLIR1 infrared video — the object slipping off sensor lock to the left at the clip's end. The footage circulated informally for years, surfaced publicly in 2017 alongside the New York Times' disclosure of the Pentagon's AATIP program, and on 27 April 2020 the Department of Defense formally released it, stating the aerial phenomena in the videos 'remain characterized as unidentified.' Crew members have since testified to Congress; Fravor called it the most advanced technology he had seen in eighteen years of flying.

Skeptical analyses argue sensor artifacts, parallax, and inter-witness contamination; the radar data that would settle the performance question has never been released, and participants report the Princeton's recordings were collected shortly after the events. AARO carries the incident within its unresolved set. It is the modern record's anchor case: multiple trained witnesses, multiple sensor systems, an official video, and an official unknown.