The Nimitz Tic Tac UFO

An object Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz say they saw and filmed off Southern California in November 2004. The Department of Defense officially released the video in 2020.

New York Magazine reported in 2019 that the story starts about November 10, 2004, with reports from radar operator Kevin Day of clusters of five to ten slow objects near San Clemente Island, off San Diego. Day said they flew at about 28,000 feet and 120 knots, too high for birds and too slow for normal aircraft, on no set flight path.

Cmdr. David Fravor, commander of a Super Hornet squadron aboard the USS Nimitz, says he saw the object on November 14, 2004, during a flight off Southern California (CBS News). The New York Times, which broke the story in 2017, reported that Fravor and a second pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight, had been flying a training mission over the Pacific, 100 miles from shore, when an officer on the cruiser USS Princeton radioed to ask if they carried weapons. Fravor said, per Wikipedia, that the Princeton had followed odd aircraft on radar for the previous two weeks.

Joe Nickell and James McGaha, in Skeptical Inquirer in 2018, called the case a comedy of errors. They point out that at the merge point, where the Princeton's radar showed jets and target as one, the pilots saw nothing. They ask whether the churning water Fravor saw below came from a crashed aircraft, his first thought, or from a submarine, perhaps one belonging to the Nimitz group itself, as he later suggested.

A Navy video from November 2004 circulated online after an unauthorized release in 2007. On 27 April 2020 the Department of Defense authorized its release along with two videos from January 2015, noting the Navy had already acknowledged all three as Navy recordings.