What happened
In November 2004 the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was training off southern California when, according to Navy aviators, radar operators on the cruiser USS Princeton had been tracking unusual contacts for days that dropped from very high altitude toward the sea. On 14 November, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich were directed to one of them. Fravor said he saw a white, wingless, oval object about 40 feet long hovering above a patch of churning water. As he spiralled down toward it, he said, it rose to meet him and then shot away and disappeared; four aircrew watched for about five minutes. Later that day Lt Cdr Chad Underwood, flying with an advanced infrared targeting pod, filmed a small object on his FLIR and coined the nickname 'Tic Tac'. The footage, known as FLIR1, leaked online in 2007, was published by The New York Times in December 2017, and was formally released by the Department of Defense in April 2020.
The original account
The Department of Defense has authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, which have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017. ... DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as "unidentified."
US Department of Defense statement on the release of historical Navy videos, 27 April 2020 (US government work, public domain)
The official explanation
No official explanation has been given; the DoD lists the phenomenon as unidentified. Skeptics, notably Mick West, argue the FLIR1 video alone shows only a distant object, possibly an aircraft, whose apparent motion comes from the camera's tracking and zoom, and that eyewitness estimates of size and speed over open ocean are unreliable. Others have suggested radar artefacts, spoofing by electronic warfare, or drones. Journalism professor Keith Kloor criticised early coverage as thinly sourced.
The anomalous case
This case combines multiple trained naval aviators, ship-based radar and an infrared video officially confirmed by the Pentagon. Fravor, a former squadron commander, says the object had no wings, exhaust or visible propulsion, mirrored his aircraft, then accelerated out of sight. Dietrich has publicly corroborated seeing it. Under oath before the House Oversight Committee in July 2023, Fravor said the Princeton's radar had seen objects descend 80,000 feet in under a second and that the technology was far superior to anything the US had. Other Princeton and Nimitz crew have said the AEGIS system tracked similar contacts for about a week. The DoD's 2020 statement that the phenomena remain unidentified, after a formal review, keeps the question open: something on the radar and on the FLIR was never named, whether foreign, classified or genuinely unknown.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- FLIR.mp4 (FLIR1 video, NAVAIR FOIA Reading Room) video, navair.navy.mil
- Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos (27 April 2020) official, defense.gov
- NAVAIR FOIA document library official, navair.navy.mil
Sources
- Pentagon UFO videos Wikipedia
- NAVAIR FOIA Reading Room document library (page 2, FLIR.mp4) Naval Air Systems Command
- Navy Officially Releases Infamous UFO Videos The War Zone
- Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos (reposted) Christopher Mellon
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.