Article by Douglas Charles July 7, 2021 (brobible.com)
• In November 2004, Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood was among the US Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier who were diverted from training exercises off of the coast of San Diego to investigate a ‘tic tac’ UFO that was appearing on radar images from the nearby USS Princeton.
• Documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell filmed an extensive interview with Lieutenant Commander Underwood about his experience for his website ExtrordinaryBeliefs.com which is yet to be released in full. (see 52-second teaser for the UFO website below) A video preview of his conversation with Underwood discussing the tic tac UFO can be seen on Instagram (see here).
• “Once I got the target of interest on my radar I took a lock and that’s when all the kind of funky things started happening,” Underwood tells Corbell. “The erratic nature of the tic tac. The air speed was very telling to me. Then we started seeing what we call jam strobe lines. Strobe lines are vertical lines that show up on your radar that are indications that you are being jammed.”
• Corbell’s interview follows up on the last interview that Underwood gave to New York magazine in December of 2019. Underwood told the New York Intelligencer, “The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic [the ‘tic tac’ UFO] was behaving. And what I mean by ‘erratic’ is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets.”
• “It was just behaving in ways that aren’t physically normal,” Underwood continued. “That’s what caught my eye. Because, aircraft, whether they’re manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. The tic tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible.”
USS Nimitz
Since the eagerly anticipated UFO report released by the Pentagon revealed literally next
Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood
to nothing, disappointing everyone who was hoping for some answers, including many current and former government officials, there are still many questions to be answered.
Chief among them are the questions surrounding the event that triggered much of this increased demand for information: the Tic Tac UFO encounter involving Navy pilot Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood that was witnessed by numerous Navy veterans on the USS Nimitz in 2004.
Jeremy Corbell
While the Pentagon did declassify three of the videos taken by US Navy pilots in April of 2020, the government has provided little to no answers with regard to what was actually filmed.
‘tic tac’ UFO
Now, documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who has been responsible for much of what the public has learned about the United States government’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force investigations of late, spoke with Lieutenant Commander Underwood about his experience.
Corbell shared a preview of his conversation discussing the Tic Tac UFO with Underwood on Twitter.
“Once I got the target of interest on my radar I took a lock and that’s when all the kind of funky things started happening,” Underwood tells Corbell.
52 second teaser for Corbell’s investigative series (‘Extraordinary Beliefs” YouTube)
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Article by Max Gorbachev June 28, 2021 (sputniknews.com)
• The much-anticipated Pentagon UAP Task Force report revealed that US authorities have no explanation for more than 140 UFO sightings, including the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO spotted by US Navy personnel while conducting naval exercises off of the coast of southern California in November of 2004. The UFO research organization ‘To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science’ leaked the Tic Tac UFO video to the NY Times in December 2017, and the Pentagon later confirmed the veracity of the video.
• The Tic Tac UFO was first spotted by the USS Princeton’s radars, before American pilots on the USS Nimitz were told to check on it. But the pilots, including Commander David Fravor, couldn’t keep up with it. They claimed that the object travelled at a speed they had never seen before. “There was no propulsion, there was no wings. It rapidly accelerates and disappears. Weirdest thing I have ever seen in my life”, said Fravor. When Fravor wanted to check the radar tapes of the encounter, the tapes from the USS Princeton were missing. Someone had “taken that page from the logbook”.
• Kevin Day was one of the Navy serviceman who first spotted the Tic Tac UFO on the USS Princeton. “I had tried in vain to get somebody, anybody, to listen to me,” said Day. “Yet, every time I tried to describe what we had witnessed… I was openly laughed at. At the time my concern was purely safety of flight because of objects that I knew to be real and inexplicable were in our training areas.” But for years, Day says he was butt of jokes by higher-ranking officers. Even his then-boss asked him ‘what the fuck he had been smoking’.
• Now retired from the Navy, Day says he has no words to describe the vindication he feels following the release of the Pentagon’s report on UFOs. And Days is demanding a public apology from the Department of Defense and the Navy for the abuse he endured. “I… hold NAVY/DOD directly responsible for what I and others went through as a result of trying to uphold our own duty and simply do the job the American people paid and expected us to do,” Day posted on his Facebook page. “I and others deserve a formal public apology and a redress for the costs I/we paid.”
Kevin Day
The encounter with an eerie tic-tac-shaped object occurred during US naval exercises in
Day (center) with other former Navy personnel who saw the Tic Tac UFO in 2004
2004. However, the world only became aware of it in 2017, when the footage was released by the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, an organisation that conducts research on extraterrestrial life. The Pentagon later confirmed the veracity of the video.
A US serviceman, who first spotted the infamous Tic Tac UFO, has demanded a public apology from the Department of Defence and the Navy following the release of a Pentagon dossier that revealed the US military has no explanation for the sightings of mysterious objects spotted by civilians and servicemen.
Kevin Day wrote that for years he was the butt of jokes by higher-ranking officers, while his then-boss plainly asked him “what the f**k” he had been “smoking”.
image of the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO
“I had tried in vain to get somebody, anybody, to listen to me. Yet, every time I tried to describe what we had witnessed out in SOCAL during TIC TAC, I was openly laughed at. At the time my concern was purely safety of flight because of objects that I knew to be real and inexplicable were in our training areas. I also hold NAVY/DOD directly responsible for what I and others went through as a result of trying to uphold our own duty and simply do the job the American people paid and expected us to do .. I and others deserve a formal public apology and a redress for the costs I/we paid”, he wrote in a post on Facebook.
The former servicemen said he has no words to describe the vindication he feels following the release of the Pentagon’s report on UFOs.
David Fravor
Tic Tac UFO
As mentioned earlier, the encounter with the mysterious tic-tac-shaped object occurred in November of 2004. The eerie UFO was first spotted by the USS Princeton’s radars, before American pilots on the USS Nimitz were told to check on it.
Kevin Day
Yet, all four pilots failed to get close to the object, which they argue travelled at a speed they had never seen before.
“There was no propulsion, there was no wings. It rapidly accelerates and disappears. Weirdest thing I have ever seen in my life”, said pilot David Fravor. Fravor also revealed that after the encounter he wanted to check on radar tapes, but when he tried all the tapes from the USS Princeton were missing.
“I was chatting to someone at the archives and they’ve said someone has taken that page from the logbook”, he said.
The much-anticipated Pentagon dossier on UFOs revealed that US authorities still have no explanation for more than 140 sightings of mysterious objects, including the Tic Tac UFO, spotted by civilians and servicemen.
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Article by Patrice A. Kelly August 27, 2020 (filmdaily.co)
• Are UFOs real? According to Luis Elizondo, former military intelligence officer and past head of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, “I think we’re at the point now where we’re beyond reasonable doubt that these things exist. We know they’re there – we have some of the greatest technology in the world that has confirmed their existence.”
• Since the term ‘UFO’ describes aerial objects that defy explanation, some believe that they represent technology deployed by a hostile human source. Evaluating the potential threats posed by UFOs should, therefore, involve the collaboration of leaders around the world, said Elizondo, who is now a director of global security and special programs at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a private agency pursuing evidence of UFOs.
• The U.S. government has been collecting reports on UFOs since the 1950s – in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, from 1952 to 1969, and through the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a federal agency that compiled witness accounts of UFO encounters from the 1950s through the 1980s.
• On November 14, 2004, Cmdr. David Fravor (pictured above) and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight were on a routine training mission in their F/A-18F Super Hornets, 100 miles out into the Pacific from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. An operations officer aboard the USS Princeton asked if they were carrying weapons. Commander Fravor replied that they only carried ‘dummy missiles’ as they had not been expecting any hostile exchanges off the coast of San Diego. “Well, we’ve got a real-world vector for you,” the radio operator said.
• For two weeks, the Princeton had been tracking UFOs. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up. The radio operator instructed the pilots to investigate. The two fighter jets headed toward the “merge plot” with objects. When they reached that point, they could see nothing around them. Then Fravor looked down at the ocean. Although the seas were calm, waves were breaking over something that was just below the surface. Whatever it was, it was big enough to cause the sea to churn.
• Hovering fifty feet above the churn was an oval aircraft of some kind, whitish, around forty feet long. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction. Commander Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him, as if the UFO were coming to meet him halfway. Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object. Then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Fravor.
• The operations officer on the Princeton told the jets to rendezvous at a ‘cap point’ sixty miles away. The jets were near the cap point when the Princeton radioed: “Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is (already) at your cap point.” “We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor related. By the time the two fighter jets arrived at the rendezvous point, the object had disappeared.
• The fighter jets returned to the Nimitz, where everyone on the ship had learned of Commander Fravor’s encounter and was making fun of him. Fravor’s superiors did not investigate further and he went on with his career, deploying to the Persian Gulf to provide air support to ground troops during the Iraq war. But recalling that day off of San Deigo, Commander Fravor said, “I have no idea what I saw.” “It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s.” Fravor added, “I want to fly one.”
There’s no question that the world has an ongoing fascination with UFOs. Although reports of sightings are often met with derision– as delusions of people who wear “tin-foil hats” – there is no doubt that many people have seen something unexplained whizzing through the sky. So the question becomes – are UFOs real?
According to Luis Elizondo, former military intelligence officer and past head of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), they just might be.
They do exist . . .
“I think we’re at the point now where we’re beyond reasonable doubt that these things exist,” Elizondo said. “We know they’re there – we have some of the greatest technology in the world that has confirmed their existence.”
Though some label UFOs as alien spacecraft, the term merely describes aerial objects that defy explanation. One possibility is that they represent technology deployed by a hostile human source, so it’s impossible to say for sure that UFOs are harmless, Elizondo said.
Luis Elizondo
Evaluating the potential threats posed by UFOs should, therefore, involve the collaboration of leaders around the world, remarked Elizondo, who left the Pentagon in 2017 and is now a director of global security and special programs at To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a private agency pursuing evidence of UFOs.
UFOs or UAPs
UFOs are also known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs. The U.S. government has been collecting reports of these enigmatic objects since the 1950s in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, from 1952 to 1969, and through the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a federal agency that compiled witness accounts of UFO encounters from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Nimitz sighting
One of the most famous cases of UFO sightings happened to pilots assigned to the USS Nimitz on November 14, 2004, over the Pacific Ocean. Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight were on a routine training mission 100 miles out into the Pacific when the radio in each of their F/A-18F Super Hornets crackled. An operations officer aboard the U.S.S. Princeton, a Navy cruiser, wanted to know if they were carrying weapons.
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Article by Kyle Perisic February 21, 2020 (americanmilitarynews.com)
• On February 10th, host Jim Breslo interviewed Dave Beaty of the Nimitz Encounters documentary series. On Breslo’s The Hidden Truth Show podcast (see full interview below), Dave Beaty told of meeting a new witness to the “Tic Tac” UFO that was seen by Navy aviators with the USS Nimitz carrier group moving in ways that defy known physics, off of the coast of Baja California in November 2004, as first reported by the New York Times in December 2017.
• Beaty tells of a US Navy E-2 Hawkeye surveillance plane technician who, (as stated in the YouTube video description) was flying with a crew in support of the F-18 jets that were sent to intercept the Tic Tac UFO that had appeared on the USS Princeton’s radar. “The technician stated that he could see a Tic Tac from the window of his plane which appeared to be flying at about the same altitude.”
• Beaty said that the Navy tech didn’t want to come forward because he and the rest of his crew members were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement compelling them to stay quiet. “It wasn’t really a volunteer process, it was more a ‘sign this and don’t ever talk about what you saw,’” said Beaty of the technician and crew. “Even going out on a limb and speaking to me was sketchy for him.” Beaty reveals he has also spoken to a second anonymous witness who saw men come aboard the Princeton to take all evidence of the encounter.
• This anonymous E-2 Hawkeye technician joins five other former US Navy personnel who have come forward as witnesses to the “Tic Tac” occurrence. They are Gary Voorhis, Jason Turner, Patrick Hughes, Ryan Weigelt and Kevin Day. Hughes and Voorhis said that mystery individuals only known to their command came aboard and took away all recorded evidence of the Tic Tac UFO videos and radar telemetry. Hughes claimed to have had ‘extra footage’ stored on hard drives beyond the grainy black and white video made available to the public in 2017, but they were ordered to turn it all over.
• Voorhis reported that two guys came aboard by helicopter. A short time later, he was ordered by his command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS radar system, and then wipe all of the remaining tapes in the shop clean, including the blank tapes. The US Navy has officially admitted that the series of UFO videos are real.
• The Navy pilot who first saw the Tic Tac UFO from his F-18 jet in 2004 and who came forward in the 2017 New York Times article, Commander David Fravor, says he has doubts about these sailors’ stories. Still, Fravor described the object as “something not from this world.” Fravor described it as “a white Tic Tac, about the same size as a Hornet, 40 feet long with no wings”.
• Fravor recounts that the UFO was “… hanging close to the water.” “As I get closer, as my nose is starting to pull back up, it accelerates and it’s gone…. [f]aster than I’d ever seen anything in my life. ”
• On an October 5th Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Commander Fravor also told of an incident that occurred to a sailor who was diving in the ocean to inspect a torpedo. The diver is only a few feet below the surface working on the torpedo when he suddenly sees a “dark mass” emerging from below him in the ocean depths. He starts screaming through the intercom system for the crew to reverse wench and pull him up. As he is being pulled up, the torpedo is suddenly sucked down into the depths. Fravor quotes the witness saying, “The torpedo ‘didn’t sink,’ it ‘literally looked like it got sucked down’.”
There is possibly a third aircraft to have witnessed one of the most infamous UFO sightings in recent history, according to a person familiar with the matter.
image from “Tic Tac” UFO video David Fravor
As part of his Nimitz Encounters documentary, Dave Beaty told Jim Breslo on The Hidden Truth Show on Feb. 10, that he interviewed witnesses of the UFO that were “ordered to stay quiet” and signed non-disclosure type agreements immediately after the incident occurred on Nov. 14, 2004, off the coast of San Diego.
“The gentlemen I spoke to, I checked his background and he did fly in the [surveillance plane E-2 Hawkeye],” Beaty said.
The Hawkeye would be the third aircraft to have been in the area to witness the event, with the other two being the F/8-18E Super Hornets, one of which Commander David Fravor piloted, as the Daily Star reported.
Gary Voorhis
Fravor brought the incident to the public’s attention in 2017 in a New York Times report that detailed his experience in the encounter.
Since Fravor’s report, others have come forward as witnesses of the incident on that day.
Patrick Hughes
Beaty said that the individual he interviewed didn’t want to come forward because he signed a document that compelled him to stay quiet.
“Even going out on a limb and speaking to me was sketchy for him,” Beaty explained. “It wasn’t really a volunteer process, it was more a ‘sign this and don’t ever talk about what you saw.’”
In what is possibly the most credible UFO sighting in human history, five other former sailors have also come forward as witnesses to the “Tic Tac” occurrence.
These five witnesses, Gary Voorhis, Jason Turner, Patrick Hughes, Ryan Weigelt and Kevin Day, say more evidence beyond the publicly available footage was destroyed by unknown officials.
The only footage available is a grainy black and white video that shows the “Tic Tac” shaped object moving in a way that defies known physics.
As Commander Fravor put it, the strange object he saw was “something not from this world.”
1:18:41 minute Feb 10th interview with Navy tech Dave Beaty (‘Hidden Truth Show’ YouTube)
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Article by Micah Hanks January 26, 2020 (mysteriousuniverse.org)
• The ‘FLIR 1’ UFO video taken by Navy aviators assigned to the USS Nimitz carrier group which captured an ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’, now commonly known as the ‘tic tac’ UFO, is one of the most widely-discussed UAP instances of the modern era. In November 2004, these objects were tracked on radar over the course of several weeks. Former Petty Officer 3rd Class Fire Controlman Gary Voorhis reported seeing the UFOs through binoculars from the top deck of the USS Princeton in the carrier group.
• Voorhis and former Lead Petty Officer, Ryan Weigelt, who watched the ‘tic tac’ UFO on the AN/SPY-1 Bravo radar aboard the USS Princeton, described the “otherworldly maneuverability” of the objects. The UAP could go “up, left, down, forward…at any speed it wanted to go.” “[I]t would move sharp to the right, sharp to the left, up, down, any particular direction it wanted to go. It had no rudders, no props, no jet plume. You couldn’t tell which side was the front and which side was the back, except that you’d just assume that which way is going forward is front. But you can’t even assume that, because it would just move sideways.”
• Voorhis and Weigelt noted another eerie characteristic of the ‘tic tac’ UFOs. When Navy pilot Commander David Fravor and the Navy jet accompanying him were alerted via radio that the object had reappeared, they were given a “cap point” location to reach. Fravor told the New York Times, “We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point.” Somehow, the UFO was aware of the designated cap point location and got there first. Could the operators of the ‘tic tac’ UFO have had foreknowledge or other access to this information? Was it able to decode the Navy’s highly encrypted communications?
• Various accounts of these UFOs indicate that they possess capabilities far beyond anything that the US military has, or any other military for that matter. While these UFOs have not made any overt offensive actions against Navy jets, it is a concern that these mysterious objects have such highly advanced performance abilities. Just how much information does the US military have on these UFOs? What steps is the military taking to identify and learn more about these UFOs? We don’t know.
“Up, left, down, forward… any way it wanted to go, at any speed it wanted to go. Which was hard for your brain to kinda wrap around at first.”
This was how Gary Voorhis, former Petty Officer 3rd Class Fire Controlman aboard the USS Princeton, described the behavior of an unidentified flying object that was tracked and observed across multiple systems during a 2004 Naval incident off the coast of California. The events described here, commonly known today as the USS Nimitz UFO incident, have become one of the most widely-discussed instances involving unexplained aerial phenomena of the modern era.
Ryan Weigelt Gary Voorhis
A number of key factors have contributed to the attention this incident has gained, which include the involvement of multiple witnesses, and more fundamentally, that it had been a military encounter with obvious national defense implications. Also contributing to the interest it has received had been footage obtained with the help of the Raytheon ATFLIR targeting pod systems employed by the Navy, as well as observations by radar operators and other technicians in the Navy’s Strike Carrier Group-11. All of these sources provided information about the operational capabilities of the craft, which has since been popularly likened to a bus-sized, flying “tic-tac”.
Gary Voorhis and Ryan Weigelt, both of whom served with the Carrier Group-11 at the time of the incident, related a number of unique details to me during a recent interview I conducted with them about the incident. Voorhis, as described earlier, had been a Petty Officer 3rd Class Fire Controlman aboard the USS Princeton, and was one of the system technicians for the Cooperative Engagement Capability and AEGIS Combat systems, which included the AN/SPY-1 Bravo radar. Weigelt, a former Leading Petty Officer, had been the power plant specialist of the SH-60B Seahawk helicopter at the same time.
One of the key elements that both men shared with me in our interview had been their recollection of seeing the now-famous intercept attempt led by Commander David Fravor, a former commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (and, notably, the officer to first compare the object or aircraft’s shape to a “tic-tac”). Fravor was accompanied at the time of the intercept by his weapon systems officer and two other pilots.
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Article by Matthew Phelan December 19, 2019 (nymag.com)
• In 2017, the New York Times released a 2004 Navy jet video of a UFO over the Pacific Ocean off of the coast of San Diego as the USS Nimitz carrier group was performing military exercises. Now, the pilot of the F/A-18 Super Hornet who took the infamous video, and who first described it as a “Tic Tac” UFO, Chad Underwood, has come forward for the first time in an interview with New York Magazine’s ‘Intelligencer’.
• Here is the account by Underwood: On November 10, 2004, radar operator Kevin Day reported seeing odd, slow-moving objects flying in groups of five to ten off of San Clemente Island, west of the San Diego coast. At 28,000 feet and traveling 138 miles per hour, they were too high to be birds. The objects would zoom from 60,000 feet to hovering 50 feet above the ocean without producing a sonic boom. Radar operators with the USS Princeton spent two weeks trying to figure out what the objects were.
• Underwood’s commanding officer, David Fravor, eventually made visual confirmation of one of the objects midair during a flight-training exercise. An hour later, Fravor returned and informed Underwood of the mysterious UFO out there. On a second flight to the object’s coordinates, Underwood made his infrared recording of the ‘FLIR1’, aka “Tic Tac UFO – a 40-foot-long, white, oblong shaped craft without exhaust or conventional propulsion, even as it made a surprising dart leftward at the end of the video.
• A former fighter pilot who served on the Nimitz in 2004, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalled an exhilarating group screening of the FLIR1 video inside the Nimitz’s intelligence center. “There weren’t really a lot of skeptics in that room,” the former pilot said. “We all wanted to fly it.”
• Marine Hornet squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel “Cheeks” Kurth, was one of the pilots who witnessed the Tic Tac UFO, but has remained silent about the incident. He did, however, take a job as a program manager at Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Space Studies in Las Vegas, whose owner Robert Bigelow has been a well-known funder of UFO and paranormal research for decades.
• Underwood says he is glad that Dave Fravor told the story on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “That day, Dave Fravor was landing at the same time I was getting my gear on, and we crossed paths just after he’d seen (the UFO).” Underwood told Fravor that the Princeton’s radar was “picking up a specific object that they wanted us to hunt.” Once in the air, “all of a sudden, I got this blip on my radar. …It looked like a ‘Tic Tac’ out there in the sky.”
• “It was inside of 20 miles. You’re not going to see it with your own eyes until probably 10 miles, and then you’re not going to be able to visually track it until you’re probably inside of 5 miles, which is where Dave Fravor saw it.” At that point Underwood was tracking it on the FLIR radar, and making sure that the videotape was on.
• “The thing that stood out to me the most,” said Underwood, “was how erratic it was behaving . …[I]ts changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before… in ways that aren’t physically normal. … They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible.” “The video shows a source of heat, but the normal signatures of an exhaust plume were not there. There was no sign of propulsion.”
• “[T]his was not a weather balloon — because a balloon, it just ascends and floats from low to high altitude; it doesn’t behave erratically. I mean, it’s just a damn balloon. So that was out of the question.” “It wasn’t — to the best of my knowledge — a cruise missile or any other kind of test aircraft that we possibly may have not known about, just because of the way it was behaving.”
• Once he landed back on the carrier, Underwood saw one of his buddies from a sister squadron and they put the video tapes into the playback machine in the intelligence center. “Those little video cuts— that you see of my FLIR recording — were taken there at the intelligence center,” said Underwood.
• “[P]robably within about 20 minutes or so, I spoke to someone that I assume was from NORAD. I described it exactly as I just told you. I didn’t get debriefed.” Normally “we would get debriefed on it, …and, basically, ‘This is what you saw. Don’t talk about it.’ That never happened, which leads me to think that it was not a government project.” “I’ve got top-secret clearance with a ton of special-project clearances.” But “if it was a government project, I did not (have a) need to know.”
• “I’ve never said that this is what I think it was or speculate as to what I think it was. That’s not my job. But I saw something. And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.” “It’s funny, seeing your boss’s name and face on the news.” “[E]verything that Dave has put out there in the interviews is absolutely, 100 percent, exactly what happened on that day. And we’re still good friends to this day.”
• “I’ll let the nerds… do the math on what it was likely to be. I just happened to be the person that brought back the video.”
In the 15 years since Chad Underwood recorded a bizarre and erratic UFO — now called “the Tic Tac,” a name Underwood himself came up with — from the infrared camera on the left wing of his F/A-18 Super Hornet, he’s become a flight instructor, a civilian employee in the aerospace industry, and a father. But he has not yet spoken publicly about what he saw that day, even now, two years after his video made the front page of the New York Times. As he explained before speaking with Intelligencer, Underwood has mostly wanted to avoid having his name “attached to the ‘little green men’ crazies that are out there.”
Chad Underwood
The story of the Tic Tac begins around November 10, 2004, when radar operator Kevin Day first reported seeing odd and slow-moving objects flying in groups of five to ten off of San Clemente Island, west of the San Diego coast. At an elevation of 28,000 feet, moving at a speed of approximately 120 knots (about 138 miles per hour), the clusters were too high to be birds, too slow to be conventional aircraft, and were not traveling on any established flight path, at least according to Day.
In a military report made public by KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, Day would later observe that the objects “exhibited ballistic-missile characteristics” as they zoomed from 60,000 feet to 50 feet above the Pacific Ocean, alarmingly without producing sonic booms. All told, radar operators with the Princeton spent about two weeks attempting to figure out what the objects were, a process that included having the ship’s radar system shut down and recalibrated to make sure that the mysterious radar returns were not not false positives, or “ghost tracks.”
Eventually, David Fravor, commanding officer of the Black Aces, made visual confirmation of one of the objects midair during a flight-training exercise. An hour later, Underwood made his infrared recording on a second flight. “That day,” Underwood recalls, “Dave Fravor was like, ‘Hey, dude. BOLO.’ Like, be on the lookout for just something weird. I can’t remember the exact terms that he used. I didn’t really think much about it at the time. But once I was able to acquire it on the radar and on the FLIR [forward-looking infrared camera], that’s kind of where things — I wouldn’t say ‘went sideways’ — but things were just different.”
The footage appears to depict what Fravor had identified as a 40-foot-long, white, oblong shape (hence “Tic Tac”), hovering somewhere between 15,000 and 24,000 feet in midair and exhibiting no notable exhaust from conventional propulsion sources, even as it makes a surprising dart leftward in the video’s final moments. Of the three UFO incidents captured by U.S. Navy airmen via infrared gun-camera pods, Underwood’s footage remains unique for its lack of cross talk between the pilots — a fact that has led to some speculation about its authenticity. But “there wasn’t anything on it that was protected,” Underwood’s retired former commanding officer Dave Fravor told Intelligencer. The missing audio, he says, “just didn’t make the copy that was taken from the storage drive.”
A former fighter pilot who served on the Nimitz in 2004, who spoke to Intelligencer on condition of anonymity, recalled an exhilarating group screening of the FLIR1 video inside the Nimitz’s Carrier Vehicle Intelligence Center (CVIC): “Debriefs were usually pro forma in the CVIC, but this one in particular was so odd,” the former pilot said. “There weren’t really a lot of skeptics in that room.” Years later, Fravor told ABC News that he didn’t know what the Tic Tac was, but that “it was really impressive, really fast, and I would like to fly it.” In the CVIC that day, the anonymous pilot told Intelligencer, “We all had that. We all wanted to fly it.”
Of the many people to have spotted or recorded the objects, a handful, like Fravor or Princeton’s (retired) Chief Master-at-Arms Sean Cahill, who reported seeing what appeared to be another grouping of the objects from the missile cruiser’s deck, have spoken to journalists or documentarians. Others have not: Lieutenant Colonel “Cheeks” Kurth, a Marine Hornet squadron commanding officer who was also asked to intercept the Tic Tac, still has not done an on-the-record interview. (Three years after the sighting, however, Kurth did take a job as a program manager at Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Space Studies in Las Vegas, whose owner Robert Bigelow has been a well-known private funder of UFO and paranormal research for decades. It was during this same period that Bigelow became a military contractor working on the Pentagon’s once-secret UFO investigation program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.)
Underwood now joins Fravor, Cahill, and others, in speaking about his experience with the Tic Tac. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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Article by Tim McMillan November 12, 2019 (popularmechanics.com)
• Popular Mechanics magazine and website recently assembled five former sailors who served with the USS Nimitz carrier group and witnessed first hand the Navy’s November 2004 encounter with ‘tic tac’-shaped UFOs, one hundred miles off of the coast of San Diego. Gary Voorhis, Jason Turner, P.J. Hughes, Ryan Weigelt, and Kevin Day were all featured in the documentary film The Nimitz Encounters.
• In November 2004, Gary Voorhis was a Petty Officer 3rd Class on the USS Princeton guided missile cruiser on a routine training exercise. Voorhis was a six year veteran having served two combat tours. They were getting the “kinks out” of the ship’s new Spy-1 Bravo radar system. Voorhis was told by radar techs that they were getting “ghost tracks” and “clutter” on the radars. As a system technician, Voorhis was concerned about a possible malfunction. The air control systems were re-calibrated. But the ghost tracks were only clearer. Said Voorhis, “Sometimes they’d be at an altitude of 80,000 or 60,000 feet. Other times they’d be around 30,000 feet… Their radar cross sections didn’t match any known aircraft. …No squawk, no “IFF” (Identification Friend or Foe).”
• Kevin Day was the Princeton’s Combat Information Center Operations Specialist Senior Chief. It was his job to protect the airspace around the strike group. Day noticed strange radar tracks near San Clemente Island. But they were appearing in “groups of five to ten at a time and they were pretty closely spaced to each other,” said Day. “[They] were 28,000 feet going a hundred knots tracking south.” Ryan Weigelt remembers Senior Chief Day’s name being called over the comms.
• In the meantime, Voorhis was watching the highly precise radar returns. He would plot the UAP’s position, run up to the bridge, grab a pair of heavily magnified binoculars, and could faintly see the UAPs hovering there in broad daylight. [T]hen all of a sudden,” says Voorhis, “in an instant, they’d dart off to another direction and stop again.” “At night, they’d give off a kind of a phosphorus glow and were a little easier to see than in the day.”
• By November 14th, the strange returns had been continuously showing up for close to a week. With an air defense exercise scheduled for that morning, Day convinced his commanding officer to let him direct aircraft to attempt an intercept of these anomalous radar returns. Squadron Commander David Fravor was sent to engage with what Fravor would later describe as “an elongated egg or a ‘Tic Tac’ shaped” flying object, 46 feet long.
• Voorhis, Day, and the rest of the Princeton listened to the live comm chatter, as the UAPs effortlessly evaded the two fighter jets by demonstrating “an advanced acceleration, aerodynamic, and propulsion capability.” Outmaneuvered, Fravor and his wingman returned to the USS Nimitz. Another F/A-18 was sent to the intercept point. Lieutenant Chad Underwood would record the infamous “tic tac” video which would be released by ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science’ and the New York Times in December 2017.
• While delivering supplies to the ship’s Signal Exploitation Space, former Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason Turner happened to see a video display of the tic tac object which was not part of the brief video released to the public. (see FLIR1 video below) Said Turner, “This thing was going berserk… It made a maneuver, like they were chasing it straight on,… then this thing stopped turning, just gone. In an instant. The video you see now, that’s just a small snippet in the beginning of the whole video. But this thing, it was so much more than what you see in this video.” Weigelt and Voorhis confirmed that the video they watched was far longer – 10 minutes – and clearer than the released version.
• Petty Officer Patrick “PJ” Hughes job on the Nimitz carrier was to secure inside a safe the hard drive data recorders from the airborne early-warning aircraft, the E-2 Hawkeye, which contains the plane’s operational software and recorded data that the aircrew sees during flight. He was unaware that the Hawkeye had encountered the tic tac UFOs. Hughes was visited by his commanding officer and two unknown individuals who ordered him to give them the data recordings for the AEGIS system, and then they left. He was told that the ship’s advanced Combat Engagement Center along with the optical drives with all the radio communications had been wiped clean. Voorhis remarked, “They even told me to erase everything that’s in the shop—even the blank tapes.”
• Weigel reports that the two unknown individuals wearing generic flight suits also visited the USS Princeton, went to the Admirals Quarters and posted a guard at the door. Pilot David Fravor has acknowledged that his squadron’s video tapes of the “Tic Tac” intercept had mysteriously vanished. But he never saw any ‘unidentified’ personnel removing data recorders and conducting an investigation, and he himself was never interviewed. Fravor calls all of that “bullshit”.
• The enlisted witnesses were disappointed to hear Fravor suggest some of their accounts are inaccurate. They all stand by their experiences, and also support Fravor’s account. Paco Chierici, a former F-14 pilot and the person credited with first sharing the news of the Nimitz UAP encounter in a 2015 Fighter Sweep article, had this to say: “The combination of those aviators, the Princeton Aegis Radar operators, and the E-2 crew convinced me beyond a doubt of the veracity of the story.” “I know those people and how that world works. There is no way it could have been fabricated or misinterpreted.”
• Popular Mechanics was able to locate a previously unknown witness who was with the Nimitz carrier group in 2004, but asked to remain anonymous. He says he was an Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton. Says this witness, “What really made this incident alarming was when a Blackhawk helicopter landed on our ship and took all our information from the top secret rooms.” “We were all pretty shocked and it was an unspoken rule not to talk about it because we had secret clearances and didn’t want to jeopardize our careers.”
• Since none of the witnesses or pilots involved say they were ever interviewed at the time, it appears the most significant concern for the ‘two unknown individuals’ who showed up after the incident was the ship’s electronic data. Nick Cook, the former aviation editor for Jane’s Defense Weekly, says there are a number of reasons why personnel might have boarded ships and seized electronic data. “It could mean it was sensitive information.” But in Cook’s opinion it is unlikely this was some sort of classified test or exercise. Says Cook, “It would be so against the norm of my experience with how the black world conducts testing.” Cook also says that it’s possible, but not likely, that the “Tic Tac” was some type of classified drone. “I searched for 10 years, and never found any compelling evidence that the type of technology exists.” “In the balance of probabilities, I don’t think it’s ‘ours’.”
• This is a portion of the Executive Summary filed on the Nimitz encounter.
The five men share an easy rapport with each other, playfully ribbing one another while also communicating a deep sense of mutual respect. It’s clear they all share the bond of having once served in the armed forces. Yet for Gary Voorhis, Jason Turner, P.J. Hughes, Ryan Weigelt, and Kevin Day—assembled together (right) in a private group chat by Popular Mechanics—something much bigger ties them together beyond simply serving in the U.S. Navy.
These men also share a connection of being witnesses to one of the most compelling UFO cases in modern history: the Nimitz UFO Encounters, an event that the Navy recently confirmed indeed involved “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Largely overshadowed by a grainy black-and-white video, and a former Topgun fighter pilot eyewitness, these veterans offer new and intriguing details on what occurred with the Navy’s Strike Carrier Group-11 as it sailed roughly 100 miles off the Southern California coast in 2004—details that a former career intelligence agent who investigated the Nimitz Encounter while at the Pentagon can neither confirm, deny, or even discuss with Popular Mechanics.
Ultimately, these five men—the “other” Nimitz witnesses—could be key to understanding an event that a leading aviation defense expert says “likely wasn’t ours.”
So whose was it?
image of “tic tac” ufo
THE INTERCEPT
Stationed on the USS Princeton, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, as the Nimitz carrier group went underway in early November 2004 for a routine training exercise, this would be the last time former Petty Officer 3rd Class Gary Voorhis would set sail aboard a Navy vessel.
Having already done almost six years in the Navy, including two combat tours, Voorhis was ready to transition to life outside the world of passionless grey metal hulls and vast leavening seas.
“The group was going to be deploying in a few months and there was a bunch of new systems, like the Spy-1 Bravo radar,” Voorhis tells Popular Mechanics. “It was really about getting all the kinks out.”
While chatting with some of the Princeton’s radar techs, Voorhis says he heard they were getting “ghost tracks” and “clutter” on the radars. For Voorhis, the Princeton’s only system technician for the state-of-the-art Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) and AEGIS Combat System, news of these systems possibly malfunctioning was especially concerning.
Fearing the ship’s brand new AN/SPY-1B passive radar system was malfunctioning, Voorhis says the air control systems were taken down and recalibrated in an effort to clear out—what’s assumed to be false radar returns.
“Once we finished all the recalibration and brought it back up, the tracks were actually sharper and clearer,” Voorhis says. “Sometimes they’d be at an altitude of 80,000 or 60,000 feet. Other times they’d be around 30,000 feet, going like 100 knots. Their radar cross sections didn’t match any known aircraft; they were 100 percent red. No squawk, no IFF (Identification Friend or Foe).”
Sitting in the Princeton’s Combat Information Center (CIC), Operations Specialist Senior Chief Kevin Day was tasked with the critical role of protecting the airspace around the strike group. “My job was to man the radars and ID everything that flew in the skies,” Day said in the documentary film The Nimitz Encounters.
On or around November 10, 2004, roughly 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, Day began noticing strange radar tracks near the area of San Clemente Island. “The reason why I say they’re weird [is] because they were appearing in groups of five to 10 at a time and they were pretty closely spaced to each other. And there were 28,000 feet going a hundred knots tracking south,” Day said in the documentary.
In another YouTube clip, Ryan Weigelt, the former Leading Petty Officer and power plant specialist for the SH-60B “Seahawk” helicopter, recalled the tone aboard the missile cruise at the time.
“Senior Chief Day, his name, was being called over the comms, no bullshit, every two minutes.” Weigelt said. “I recall hearing something, like a big, real-world scenario was going on, but I just didn’t really understand.”
While Day and the Princeton’s air traffic controllers continued to monitor the strange radar returns, Voorhis says he began to take the opportunity to use the ship’s advanced tracking systems to catch a glimpse of whatever these objects were.
“When they’d show up on radar,” Voorhis says, “I’d get the relative bearing and then run up to the bridge and look through a pair of heavily magnified binoculars in the direction the returns were coming from.” Describing what he saw during the daytime, Voorhis says the objects were too far off to make out any distinguishing features, however, he could clearly see something moving erratically in the distance.
“I couldn’t make out details, but they’d just be hovering there, then all of a sudden, in an instant, they’d dart off to another direction and stop again,” Voorhis says. “At night, they’d give off a kind of a phosphorus glow and were a little easier to see than in the day.”
2:45 minute “FLIR1” video of “Tic Tac” UFO off of San Diego in 2004 (‘To The Stars Academy’ YouTube)
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Article by Simon Green October 25, 2019 (dailystar.co.uk)
• Jason Turner (pictured above) was a Petty Officer on the USS Princeton in the USS Nimitz carrier group when fighter jets from Nimitz encountered a ‘tic tac’ UFO off the coast of San Diego in 2004. Cockpit footage of the encounter was released in 2017. Despite being grainy, the video has gone on to become one of the most widely-cited clips that conspiracy theorists use to prove the existence of UFOs. (see 2:45 minute video below) Turner says that he has seen a much clearer, unreleased version of the ‘tic tac’ UFO video which shows the craft having legs protruding from it.
• “The quality [of the unreleased video] was very clear,” Turner told Dave Beaty of The Nimitz Encounters YouTube channel. “What the [fuzzy and grainy] video you see now is just a small snippet. You’re seeing small turns left and right but this thing is so much more than what you see in this video.” “It was always really clear but what you see now is, hardly identifiable.” (see 15:09 minute video of Beaty’s interview with Jason Turner below)
• Turner goes on to describe the UFO: “The shape of it [was odd] as it had some protruding objects at the bottom of it. I couldn’t tell if they were curled back or straight down because I was a good five or ten feet from the feed.” “But there were definitely legs on it. It was oblong, like a tic-tac.”
• Turner says that he had “never seen anything like it”. “[I]f there are things that are far superior to us and our capabilities… It puts everybody at risk – our military, our people, our homeland.” Several other witnesses of the UFO have come out since the initial revelations in 2017.
• [Editor’s Note] See also this previous ExoArticle “Secretive Officials ‘Boarded US Navy Ship and Took Equipment'” (October 23, 2019) wherein Lead Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt on the USS Princeton revealed that soon after the mysterious tic tac UFO was spotted by the Navy fighter jets, a group of US Air Force personnel landed on his ship to retrieve secret information from grounded helicopters.
Also, see “Navy pilot who chased USS Nimitz UFO says there are tapes of encounter ‘missing'” (Daily Star, Nov 6, 2019) wherein Navy pilot Commander David Fravor, who saw the ‘tic tac’ UFO, told the ‘Fighter Pilot Podcast’ that after the pilots’ encounter with the ‘tic tac’ UFO, “We copied the (radar) tapes and wrapped them up… They were put in a safe on the Princeton.” Now, “All the radar tapes from the Princeton are missing and they can’t find (them).” ”Also, someone at the ‘archives’ told Fravor “someone has taken that page from the logbook.”
A US Navy officer who witnessed the USS Nimitz UFO encounter has revealed the object had mysterious legs protruding from it, in a clearer video not released to the public.
Jason Turner was a Petty Officer on the USS Princeton when fighter jets from nearby ship USS Nimitz encountered a strange object off the coast of San Diego, California, US, in 2004.
Footage of the incident was released in 2017 and showed how the tic-tac-shaped “craft” was able to pull off otherworldly manoeuvres.
Despite being grainy, the video has gone on to become one of the most widely-cited clips that conspiracy theorists use to prove the existence of UFOs.
But Jason has now said there is an even clearer video out there which shows the craft in a whole new light.
“What the video you see now is just a small snippet,” he told Dave Beaty of The Nimitz Encounters.
“You’re seeing small turns left and right but this thing is so much more than what you see in this video.
15:09 minute video of Jason Turner re: the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO incident (The Nimitz Encounters YouTube)
2:45 minute Navy video of ‘Tic Tac’ UFO taken November 2004 (‘To The Stars Academy’ YouTube)
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• A team of venture capitalists, university professors, and military veterans are launching a non-profit project to track UFOs (or the new term UAP – Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) off the coast of California. Based in Oregon, UAP eXpeditions will provide “the public service of field testing new UAP related technologies.”
• Along with some of the Silicon Valley UFO Hunters, UAP eXpeditions will pioneer the ability to predict, find, observe, and document UAP for study and analysis. Says Kevin Day, the group’s founder and CEO, the company will use “classical observation techniques, by trained observers and scientists, while using the latest experimental technologies—in the right places and the right times.”
• Day is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer and radar operator who served on the USS Princeton during the 2004 “Nimitz Tic Tac UFO Incident”. He has also appeared on the History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation and Discovery Channel’s Contact.
• Day recalls tracking the infamous “Tic Tac” UFOs for several days around Catalina Island off the coast of California using the USS Princeton’s advanced radar system. Now, he believes that these objects continue to operate along the same trajectory and “migrate” from Catalina Island (off of LA) south along the California coast to Guadalupe Island (off of the Baja Peninsula of Mexico).
• Day believes that his experience tracking these unidentified objects has given him special abilities such as “advanced cognition”.
• UAP eXpeditions intends to put state-of-the-art cameras, experimental monitoring devices, and other high tech gear into the field and attempt to track unknown aerial objects off the coast of California. This way, the company can “offer technology developers a way to test their new tech at no direct cost to them.”
• Leading the UAP eXpeditions’ team of scientists is Dr. Kevin Knuth, a former scientist with NASA’s Ames Research Center, now an associate professor of physics at the University of Albany specializing in machine learning and the study of exoplanets. Knuth says, “[T]he goal of the expedition is to give us some ground truth. We aim to try to observe these objects directly, and record them using multiple imaging modalities.”
• First, the team “will obtain current satellite imagery of the area and determine whether these anomalous objects can be observed. We will monitor these satellite images both manually and using machine learning and build up a database of detections, classifications, and any observed patterns of activity,” says Knuth. Second, in about a year the team will anchor a large boat off the coast of California loaded with various cameras and sensors to detect and record anomalous aerial activity. If the satellite imagery identifies a cluster of unknown objects, the team will go hunting for UFOs.
• “We plan to have high-quality drones in the air with imaging capabilities. We are looking into IR imaging, as well as detectors for x-ray, gamma-ray and custom-built neutron detectors (which are designed to look for dark matter),” says Knuth. “The key to ensuring consistency is reproducibility and this requires additional study.”
• It is, admittedly, a bit of a wild goose chase and will cost a boatload of cash. While Day’s team is working on grant proposals and potential crowd funding, they know that the vast majority of funding will have to be private. Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and MIT technologist Rizwan Virk and the Toronto-based CEO of the quantum computing company, ReactiveQ, Deep Prasad have both signed on to help with securing investment for the project.
• Other individuals on the team include Luis Elizondo, former Pentagon staffer who quit his job to hunt UFOs with Tom DeLonge; Sean Cahill, the former Chief Master-at-Arms who served aboard the USS Princeton during the 2004 Nimitz Incident; and optical physicist and UFO researcher Bruce Macabee.
• Knuth states, “The failure to study these (UFO) phenomena scientifically has resulted in a state of ignorance, which is unacceptable.”
With this summer’s revelation that the US Navy considers UFOs and “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs) to be real, a team of venture capitalists, university professors, and military veterans are launching a project to track UFOs off the coast of California.
Kevin Day
UAP eXpeditions is a non-profit group based in Oregon that will “field a top-notch group of uber-experienced professionals providing the public service of field testing new UAP related technologies.” With some of the Silicon Valley UFO Hunters, UAP eXpeditions will pioneer the ability to predict, find, observe, and document UAP for study and analysis. They will use “classical observation techniques, by trained observers and scientists, while using the latest experimental technologies—in the right places and the right times,” Kevin Day, the group’s founder and CEO, wrote in a Facebook post viewed by Motherboard.
Dr. Kevin Knuth
Day, who has appeared on the History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation and Discovery Channel’s Contact, is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer and radar operator. Day served in the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group on the USS Princeton during the 2004 infamous “Nimitz UFO Incident” which was reported by The New York Times in December of 2017.
He recalls tracking the infamous “Tic Tac” UFOs for several days around Catalina Island off the coast of California using the USS Princeton’s advanced radar system. Now, he believes that these objects continue to operate along the same trajectory and “migrate” from Catalina Island south along the California coast.
The company’s white paper is pretty wild. It asks, “Do fleets of UAP ‘migrate’ from Catalina Island to Guadalupe Island with a certain frequency? And if so, how well do whale songs correlate, if at all, to UAP appearances?” It’s unclear how whale songs are relevant here, but let’s move along.
Day, who believes that his experience tracking these objects has led to some curious special abilities, such as “advanced cognition” told Motherboard that the organization is hoping to “offer technology developers a way to test their new tech at no direct cost to them.” Using state of the art cameras and other experimental monitoring devices, the idea is to put this high tech gear into the field and attempt to track unknown aerial objects off the coast of California.
Leading the team of scientists is Dr. Kevin Knuth, a former scientist with NASA’s Ames Research Center, now an associate professor of physics at the University of Albany. Knuth specializes in machine learning and the study of exoplanets.
While the organization and the project is still in its infancy, Knuth told Motherboard that “the goal of the expedition is to give us some ground truth. We aim to try to observe these objects directly, and record them using multiple imaging modalities.”
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Article by Simon Green October 23, 2019 (dailystar.co.uk)
• US Navy jet cockpit video of a ‘tic tac’ UFO off of San Diego in 2004, and released by the New York Times in 2017, has become one of the most talked-about UFO sightings in history. In an interview with The Nimitz Encounters podcast (see entire 36:09 minute video below), Lead Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt who was in charge of the helicopters on the USS Princeton (pictured above), part of the Nimitz carrier battle group, reveals that soon after the mysterious tic tac UFO was spotted by the fighter jets, a group of US Air Force personnel landed on his ship to retrieve secret information.
• The Air Force personnel “weren’t assigned” to the carrier. When they arrived, they went straight to the Admiral’s Quarter and stationed a guard outside. They then retrieved “something” from the Princeton’s helicopters which grounded the helicopters. Weigelt says he couldn’t say “whatever box it was” that the Air Force personnel took away. But they logged it out and were directed by a higher authority to take it. “[W]e couldn’t fly our aircraft until we got them back… (because) [t]here was no way we could safely fly our aircraft in a battle group.”
• Weigelt said that the Air Force personnel then left the ship by a rigid-hulled inflatable boat, and forced the USS Princeton to harbor at a marina, something that was unheard of. Said Weigelt, “I’ve done a lot of cruises in my time in the military and never once did we pull in during a work-up to a harbor for any reason whatsoever.” “I’ve never even seen a ship anchor in the mouth of the harbor.”
• When the podcast’s host, Dave Beattie, suggested that the Air Force personnel may have removed more video footage of the UFOs, Weigelt agreed. “There’s no doubt in my mind that these guys were looking for data on the UFOs.”
A US Navy veteran who was on board the USS Princeton when a UFO was spotted by fighter pilots has revealed a group of mysterious officials boarded the cruiser soon after to retrieve secret information.
Footage of the moment an F/A-18 Super Hornet spotted the unknown object hurtling through the skies in 2004 became one of the most talked-about UFO sightings of all time, after it was released by the New York Times in 2017.
It led to the Pentagon admitting to having a top-secret programme devoted to looking at the existence of extraterrestrial objects.
The incident – which showed a tic-tac shaped UFO performing manoeuvres never seen before – took place off the coast of San Diego.
While the pilots had taken off from the USS Nimitz, they were part of a larger battle group which featured the USS Princeton.
Lead Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt was in charge of looking after the helicopters on board the Princeton at the time of the incident.
In an interview with The Nimitz Encounters, he revealed that soon after the mysterious aircraft was spotted by the fighter jets, a group of United States Air Force personnel landed on his ship.
Ryan explained that this group “weren’t assigned” to the carrier and, as soon as they arrived, they went straight to the Admiral’s Quarter and stationed a guard outside.
They then retrieved “something” from the Princeton’s helicopters which meant they could not fly.
36:09 minute interview with Ryan Weigelt (‘The Nimitz Encounters’ YouTube)
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Article by Mark Von Rennenkampff October 13, 2019 (thehill.com)
• UFO “sightings” may have been relegated to tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists until the extraordinary and as-yet unexplained account of retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor and his colleagues of an incident that occurred off the coast of Southern California in 2004.
• CDR Fravor was flying a routine training mission along with another two-seat F/A-18F Super Hornet on a calm, clear November day when they were instructed to divert on a “real-world vector.” Apparently, the USS Princeton, has spent weeks tracking numerous radar contacts moving in ways that defy explanation. The USS Princeton’s radar had again picked up these contacts and the Super Hornets were tasked with taking a closer look.
• Arriving at the coordinates, Fravor was “weirded out” by an object – with no visible propulsion system or wings – that accelerated, decelerated and, ultimately, disappeared from view at extreme speed. The Princeton radar reacquired the object 30 seconds later – 60 miles away. Therefore, this object must have traveled at roughly six times the top speed of Fravor’s Super Hornet. Later that day, a follow-up flight managed to capture the “Tic Tac”-shaped object on video. (see ‘Tic Tac UFO’ video below) No fewer than seven naval aviators as well as surface warfare officers witnessed this event, which was also corroborated by radar, infrared and optical data.
• Eleven years later, in 2014-2015, a series of similar events occurred off the U.S. East Coast with Naval aircrews reporting objects conducting extreme maneuvers that defied any known technological capabilities, again supported by sophisticated multi-source sensor data.
• The Pentagon has confirmed that videos of the 2004 and the 2014-2015 incidents are genuine. These pilots witnessed technology well beyond the bounds of science. The capabilities exhibited by these objects represent an astonishing leap forward from the status quo. The return on investment in fully investigating these phenomena could be significant, for a few key reasons.
• First, there are national security implications. These unknown objects might pose a serious collision risk. And by some accounts, these incidents are occurring with increased frequency. Such advanced technology should be seized by a world democratic power rather than an authoritarian power.
• Second, there can be no doubt that earth’s climate is undergoing tremendous change. Researchers are examining how clouds can be manipulated to combat climate change. Alternative technology that allows for indefinite flight time at extreme speeds deserves particularly close scrutiny.
• Third, the technology Fravor witnessed could allow a craft to move effortlessly through water, air and space at extraordinary speeds. This should prompt a fundamental shift toward the study of this new physics. The human inclination to explore the unknown has precipitated monumental advances in a short span of time. A well-funded and efficiently managed public investigation of this technology should be a priority.
UFO “sightings” are the stuff of tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists. That is, until one hears the extraordinary account of retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor and his colleagues. Fravor, a career fighter pilot, former squadron commander and level-headed skipper in an acclaimed PBS documentary, makes a particularly compelling witness to an as-yet unexplained incident that occurred off the coast of Southern California in 2004.
As CDR Fravor recalls, he, his weapon systems officer and another two-seat F/A-18F Super Hornet were flying a routine training mission on a calm, clear November day. But their exercise is suddenly canceled and their two-ship formation instructed to divert on a “real-world vector.” Unknown to Fravor and his fellow officers, a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, has spent weeks tracking numerous radar contacts moving in ways that defy explanation.
For the first time, fast-moving fighter aircraft are aloft when the Princeton’s hyper-sensitive radar array picks up the peculiar contacts. CDR Fravor’s Super Hornet and the jet accompanying them are tasked with taking a closer look.
What happens next is best described only by CDR Fravor and one of the weapon systems officers flying that day. In short, Fravor was “weirded out” by an object – with no visible propulsion system or wings – that accelerated, decelerated and, ultimately, disappeared from view at extreme speed, “like nothing [he had] ever seen.”
David Fravor
In Fravor’s account, the USS Princeton’s radar reacquired the object 30 seconds later – 60 miles away. If accurate, this implies a velocity roughly six times that of the top speed of Fravor’s super-fast Super Hornet.
Later that day, thanks to a combination of luck and targeting skill, a follow-up flight managed to capture the object on video.
Without a doubt, the 2004 incident is unique. No fewer than seven naval aviators as well as surface warfare officers – hardly conspiratorially-minded nut jobs – reported first-hand accounts of this event. Perhaps most importantly, they are corroborated by radar, infrared and optical data.
A series of similar events occurred 11 years later. Naval aircrews operating off the U.S. East Coast reported contacts with objects conducting extreme maneuvers that defied any known (or remotely conceivable) technological capabilities. Like the 2004 incident, their accounts are reinforced by sophisticated multi-source sensor data.
The Pentagon has confirmed that videos of the 2004 and 2014-2015 incidents are genuine, ultimately drawing scrutiny from Congress.
2:45 minute ‘Tic Tac’ UFO video from November 2004 off of San Diego (To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences YouTube)
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• Kevin Day, now retired, was the US Navy Senior Chief Operations Specialist who served as a radar operator on the USS Princeton, part of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group that encountered the “Tic Tac”-shaped UFO during exercises off of San Diego in November 2004.
• During a recent interview on the “Truth Be Told” podcast (see below for the full interview), Day says that radar detection of the UFO group (the Tic Tac UFO was a part of a group of UFOs flying in formation) was made possible by an upgrade to the warships’ spyware. Day told the Daily Star, “There had been a top-secret upgrade of our system. …They upgraded our cooperative engagement capability and did some tweaking on our spy radar and the way that it all works. I think because of these upgrades we were suddenly able to see things that had always been there.”
• Day hypothesized that the older radar detection systems were simply unable to spot UFOs, which would explain why “everyone is seeing them” now, once the radar upgrade was introduced “fleet-wide.” Day mused that these UFOs might’ve been around for quite some time before the Nimitz incident.
• When the podcast’s host asked Day whether he thinks that the object they encountered back then was an extraterrestrial craft, Day said yes. “This was non-Newtonian, it was non-classical physics we’re seeing so it had to be something,” said Day. “What other explanations are there?”
It appears that the infamous encounter of an unidentified “Tic Tac”-shaped object by the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was made possible due to a certain upgrade introduced to the warships’ spyware, according the recent revelations made by a retired US Navy Senior Chief Operations Specialist named Kevin Day.
Ret. Navy radar specialist Kevin Day
During a recent interview on the “Truth Be Told” podcast, Day, who served as a radar operator on the USS Princeton, part of the aforementioned carrier group, mused that UFOs might’ve been around for quite some time before the Nimitz incident, when mankind upped its detection game.
“There had been a top-secret upgrade of our system that had gotten underway”, he said as quoted by the Daily Star.
“They upgraded our cooperative engagement capability and did some tweaking on our spy radar and the way that it all works. I think because of these upgrades we were suddenly able to see things that had always been there.”
Day also remarked that the hypothesis about the older detection systems simply being unable to spot UFOs might explain why “everyone is seeing them” now, after the radar upgrade in question was introduced “fleet-wide.”
And when the host asked him whether he thinks that the object they encountered back then was an extraterrestrial craft, Day said yes.
“This was non-newtonian, it was non-classical physics we’re seeing so it had to be something”, he said. “What other explanations are there?”
30:38 minute video of Kevin Day discussing the “Tic Tac” UFO incident (‘Truth Be Told Radio’ YouTube)
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• In December 2017, the New York Times and Politico reported that the Navy’s USS Nimitz battle group encountered a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO off of the coast of San Diego in November 2004. They included video of the incident, followed by video of two other UFO encounters off of the coasts of Florida and Virginia. The Pentagon remained quiet about these incidents. (see NY Times article here)
• On April 23rd the Navy issued a statement to Politico admitting, “There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years.”
• While the Navy hasn’t gone so far as to admit to any alien-controlled craft, it has changed its guidelines so that sailors and aviators can make UFO reports to Navy authorities without fear of ridicule or reprisal. (see article on new Navy guidelines here)
• The paper reveals that in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 ‘Tic Tac’ incident, a video of the encounter was shared and viewed widely by members aboard the USS Princeton and Nimitz via an internal military email system. Within 12 hours of the incident, a helicopter carrying nonuniformed personnel landed on the USS Princeton (pictured above) and approached Petty Officer Voorhis, who was in charge of the ship’s Cooperative Engagement Capability system, and requested that he turn over all the ship’s radar data, electronic information, and data recordings. Voorhis asked for their ID and was refused. But the ship’s captain soon ordered Voorhis to relinquished all the information, which was stored on magnetic tapes.
• The tapes contained crucial data that would shed light on the mysterious Tic Tac–shaped object. Said Voorhis, “You could literally plot the entire course of the object, you could extract the densities, the speeds, the way it moved, the way it displaced the air, its radar cross-section, how much of the radar itself was reflected off its surface. I mean you could pretty much recreate the entire event with the CEC data.”
• Powell and his colleagues found a 2013 Facebook page for the Nimitz that contains a conversation about the 2004 incident among various shipmates who served together at the time. All those on duty that day recalled it vividly in their Facebook comments; many said they were still befuddled by what they saw and why the data mysteriously disappeared.
• In mid-March 2019, Powell and other authors of the Nimitz incident paper gave a detailed presentation at a conference in Huntsville, Alabama, called the Scientific Conference on Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena. The conference was organized by a group that calls itself the “Scientific Coalition for Ufology” and includes scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The group says it endeavors to take a ‘cold-eyed’ approach to the UFO issue, examining only cases that have hard data and credible witnesses. “We’re looking to stay neutral and build a coalition of like-minded scientists,” says Rich Hoffman, who does information systems work for the U.S. military and was the lead organizer of the event.
• The event’s big draw was Luis Elizondo, a career military intelligence officer who had managed security for the Pentagon’s highly classified $22M Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Elizondo didn’t offer anything new or noteworthy about the UFO program he once led at the Pentagon, although he did say the “effort” was ongoing (and didn’t expire in 2012 as the Pentagon says). Elizondo told the audience that he had remained in close touch with his successor in the program “… who’s still at the Pentagon, who works this effort, very closely…. I don’t mean the past, but actively working this. So it definitely continues. It’s still going. That, too, will come out hopefully soon in a very official way.”
• Elizondo insists that “disclosure has occurred” and that UFOs “are real.” “You now have people at the highest levels of the United States government and international communities of their governments finally taking this (UFO phenomenon) serious, applying real resources, real talent, real expertise to look at this and finally figure out what this is.”
• In late 2018, Elizondo gave a presentation to European UFO buffs in Rome. He mentioned a famous 1952 incident when flying saucers were reported over Washington D.C. and showed a slide of the famous image of the UFOs flying over the US Capitol. Skeptics were quick to point out that this photo was a fake. “It was actually a still [image] from a CGI [computer generated image],” says John Greenewald of the Black Vault. Elizondo apologized for the error on his company’s Facebook page.
• Skeptics have also attacked Elizondo for facilitating the release in 2017 of several video clips of Navy encounters with UFOs, saying that these videos had not been declassified, even though these video clips had been on the internet since 2007. (George Knapp and his ‘I-Team’ have recently proven that the Pentagon did, in fact, authorize those videos’ release.) Online skeptics maintain that these videos only show some sort of classified missile, aircraft or drone.
On the afternoon of Nov. 14, 2004, two F/A-18 “Super Hornet” fighter jets were 30 minutes into a training drill off the coast of Southern California when they were redirected by a Naval radio operator to a “real world situation.” Earlier that day, the USS Nimitz nuclear aircraft carrier and the USS Princeton missile cruiser had detected more than a dozen unidentified objects on their radar screens—what the Navy then referred to as anomalous aircraft vehicles.
The F/A-18s were told by the Princeton’s captain to intercept the closest anomalous vehicle, which was located about 150 miles southwest of the San Diego coastline. When the pilots reached their coordinates, they spotted from an altitude of 20,000 feet a disturbance at the ocean’s surface. One of the pilots, commanding officer Dave Fravor, reported that he saw a white oval or “Tic Tac”–shaped object about 50 to 60 feet in size moving just above the churning water.
Fravor headed down for a closer look. What happened next was “like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he recounted in a 2017 New York Times article. The object accelerated so fast that it disappeared in a blink of an eye. A pilot in the other F/A-18 has subsequently described the episode similarly; he also says he watched as the object zipped around Fravor’s plane before it darted off in a flash.
Meanwhile, according to testimony from Petty Officer Gary Voorhis, who was stationed on the Princeton at the time of the episode, “At a certain point there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking. That was towards the end of the encounter and they all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles, and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.”
Vague details of the incident first came to light several years ago, after the Times and other media outlets reported on it. No human-created military technology had such capabilities, the news stories suggested, so were the mysterious objects otherworldly or a mass delusion? The Pentagon wasn’t saying anything. But now, according to a statement issued on April 23 to Politico, the Navy admits, “There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years.”
Whoa. That was major news, as was the part about the U.S. military now pledging to update its guidelines so “reports of any such suspected [UFO] incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities.” Politico notes, “To be clear, the Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied—rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.”
This development comes on the heels of a detailed paper of the 2004 incident that was recently completed and made public by a group of researchers who aimed to demonstrate that the incident actually happened. Titled “A Forensic Analysis of Navy Carrier Strike Group Eleven’s Encounter with an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle,” the paper, which was not published in an academic journal, does not make any claims for the origins of the objects, though it should be stated that all the authors have a long-standing interest in the UFO topic. The lead author, Robert Powell, tells me that he mailed the analysis to various congressional committees, intelligence agencies, and branches of the military several months ago. Whatever the biases of Powell and his fellow authors, there is no denying the body of evidence they amassed via Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with service personnel.
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by Robbie Graham September 27, 2018 (mysteriousuniverse.org)
• Cases of pilot encounters with UFOs stand among the most credible and dramatic ever recorded. Here are five of the most compelling:
1. Japan Airlines – On November 17, 1986, daytime, at 35,000 feet over northeastern Alaska, Japanese Airlines Boeing 747 cargo plane en route from Paris to Tokyo suddenly found itself facing two pairs of squarish arrays of pulsating “amber and whitish” lights each the size of a commercial jet, side-by-side, hovering directly in front of the aircraft. The objects lit up the cockpit where Captain Kenju Terauchi could feel heat on his face. Then the pilot noticed a third much larger “mothership” UFO eight miles away, toward which the two bright UFOs were heading. All of this was confirmed by radar at Anchorage flight control and a nearby Air Force base. After a half hour, the UFOs were gone. Years later, an FAA investigator publicly testified to a CIA cover-up of flight data relating to this event.
2. Frederick Valentich – On October 21, 1978, at 7:12 pm, 20-year-old Frederick Valentich vanished while was flying a Cessna 182L light aircraft over Australia’s Bass Strait. Just before his disappearance, Valentich had advised Melbourne air traffic control that he was being orbited by a large shiny craft with a green light 300 meters above him. Then he made is final statement, “[the] strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It is hovering and it’s not an aircraft.” This was followed by a metallic scraping sound. No trace of Valentich or his aircraft was ever found.
3. Thomas Mantell – On January 7, 1948, 25 year old WWII vet Captain Thomas Mantell of the Kentucky Air National died while in pursuit of a UFO. The UFO was 300 ft. in diameter, white with a red border at the bottom. Against orders to break off pursuit, Mantell chased the UFO and got close enough to it to radio that the object was “metallic,” and of “tremendous size.” Then he lost consciousness, and his plane spiraled to the ground and crashed.
4. The ‘Tic Tac’ UFO – On November 14, 2004, (over the Pacific Ocean, off of the coast of San Diego), around noon on a clear day, the USS Princeton of the US Navy’s Nimitz carrier battle group instructed a pair of unarmed FA-18F Navy jets to intercept a radar blip. When pilots David Fravor and Jim Slaight reached the position, they noticed a disturbance in the ocean water below them, and then an object hovering 50 feet above the disturbance. The pilots described the UFO as resembling a large bright white “Tic Tac” (the breath mint) between 30 and 46 feet in length, with no visible engine or exhaust. As Fravor descended toward the object, it began to ascend, mirroring the Navy jet’s maneuvers. Then the UFO accelerated and was gone in two seconds.
5. Alderney, England – On 23 April 2007, Captain Ray Bowyer was flying a routine passenger plane from Southampton, England, to Alderney in the Channel Islands. For fifteen minutes, he and his passengers watched two very large, cigar-shaped UFOs, each a mile in length and emitting a brilliant yellow light, hovering stationary about 55 miles away. Peering through binoculars, Bowyer could distinguish their solid form. The plane flew to within 12 miles of the objects before the pilot flew away and landed. Another aircraft also confirmed the sighting.
If you’ve never done any research on the UFO topic, you might be forgiven for thinking that the only people who see them are hicks with worrying family trees; certainly this is the stereotype that has been perpetuated by Hollywood. In reality, however, UFOs are reported by men and women from all walks of life, and from all social and economic backgrounds: from burger-flippers to bankers, sex-workers to surgeons, pot-washers to politicians. With this in mind, it should come as little surprise that those who spend their working days in the skies above us also see their fair share of anomalous aerial phenomena. Indeed, cases of pilot encounters with UFOs stand among the most credible and dramatic ever recorded in the history of this enduring enigma.
Here are five of the most compelling…
#5. Alderney Sighting, 2007
Captain Ray Bowyer got the fright of his life on 23 April 2007 while piloting a routine passenger flight from Southampton, England, to Alderney in the Channel Islands. Over a 15 minute period, he and his passengers witnessed two UFOs so large and imposing that Bowyer–a pilot with 18 years of flying experience–wanted nothing more than to land his aircraft as soon as humanly possible “and have a cup of tea.” Typical Brit.
Bowyer’s aircraft gradually converged on two stationary, cigar-shaped craft, each emitting a brilliant yellow light. To the naked eye, the objects appeared unnervingly large, despite initially being some 55 miles away, and Bowyer would later estimate that the two mystery craft were each up to a mile across. Bowyer also viewed the objects through 10X magnification binoculars, through which he could distinguish their seemingly solid form, which grew clearer still as his aircraft drew nearer to them.
Bowyer would later recall: “I found myself astounded but curious, but at 12 miles’ distance these objects were becoming uncomfortably large, and I was glad to descend and land the aircraft. Many of my passengers saw the objects as did the pilots of another aircraft, 25 miles further south [a plane near Sark, which confirmed the presence, general position and altitude of the first object from the opposite direction].”
The encounter was thoroughly investigated but remains unexplained. Bowyer conservatively maintains that what he and his passengers witnessed was “definitely nothing from around these parts.”
#4. USS Nimitz Radar/Visual Encounter, 2004
At around 12:30 EST on November 14, 2004, an operations officer aboard the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton contacted two airborne US Navy jet fighters from USS Nimitz, instructing the pilots to change their course and investigate an unidentified blip that was showing up on the Princeton’s radar. The first fighter aircraft was piloted by Commander David Fravor, with his weapon systems officer in the back seat. The second jet was piloted by Commander Jim Slaight.
The weather conditions that day were near perfect: blue sky, no cloud cover, calm sea. When the jet fighters–both FA-18F Super Hornets–arrived at the site of the radar blip, the crew of four could see nothing untoward in the air. Below them, however, on the surface of the sea, they noticed an area “the size of a Boeing 737 airplane with a smoother area of lighter color at the center,” as if the waves were breaking over a large object just under the surface. Moments later, the crew noticed a strange object hovering erratically some 50 feet above the disturbance in the water. Both pilots later described the unidentified object as resembling a large bright white “Tic Tac” between 30 and 46 feet in length, with no visible engine or exhaust plume.
As Commander Fravor started a circular descent towards the object, it began ascending along a curved path, keeping a safe distance from the F-18 and mirroring its trajectory. Fravor then attempted to plunge his fighter below the object. No chance. The UFO accelerated “like a bullet from a gun” and was lost from his sight in less than two seconds. The nature and origin of the object remain a mystery (at least officially).
In 2017, Fravor spoke publicly about his “Tic Tac” encounter as part of a broader and ongoing public initiative to draw attention to the Pentagon’s shadowy UFO study program (now allegedly shut down), officially titled the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
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• In December 2017, the US Department of Defense allowed the release of the cockpit video of a Navy F/A-18 as it tracked a UFO in 2004 over the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego. It was later confirmed that U.S. defense chiefs had commissioned a 13-page report detailing the UFO event which has recently been released. The reports, leaked to a Las Vegas television station, described what happened on board the USS Princeton for a few days in 2004. (see 5:13 minute video of the I-Team’s George Knapp interviewing former head of a Pentagon UFO program, Luis Elizondo below)
• According to leaked Pentagon report a “supersonic tic tac”- shaped UFO stalked the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Nimitz strike group (pictured above) for five days in November, 2004 before disappearing into thin air. The “Anomalous Aerial Vehicle” (AAV) showed up on the USS Princeton’s radar, apparently hovering at about 60,000 feet above the surface of the ocean. The object then “nosedived” into the ocean, moving roughly six miles down to the surface in a matter of seconds. So fast did it move that crew members thought they might have had a close encounter with a ballistic missile.
• Two days later, the object, described as “solid white, smooth, with no edges… uniformly colored with no nacelles, pylons or wings,” appeared again, and two F/A-18 jets were sent up to intercept it. Once they got in the general region of the AAV, it had turned itself invisible. However, they reported that it was creating a circular disturbance in the water, about 150-300 feet in diameter.
• Two days later, the craft appeared again, and this time one of the pilots saw the same disturbance in the water, and saw the craft hovering above it.
• At least one other naval vessel was nearby, but they didn’t report anything. The submarine USS Louisville was in the general region, but picked up nothing underwater. Similarly, an E-2C Hawkeye surveillance plane also saw the craft on their radar, but were unable to “lock on,” suggesting that the vessel could evade radar.
• When the Navy pilots returned to the ship, they were greeted by shipmates who had donned tinfoil hats and ribbed them about their “UFO flight.” But as it turns out, the Pentagon has quietly been releasing UFO-related documents for the past few years. U.S. Navy pilots encountered a UFO off the East Coast in 2015, and the Pentagon even released footage of the incident (see 36-second video below).
A “supersonic Tic Tac”-shaped UFO stalked a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier for five days before disappearing into thin air, according to leaked Pentagon report.
As Fox News reports, the reports, leaked to a Las Vegas television station, described what happened on board the USS Princeton for a few days in 2004.
In November, 2004, the “Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV)” showed up on the ship’s radar, apparently hovering at about 60,000 feet above the surface of the ocean. The object then “nosedived” into the ocean, moving roughly six miles down to the surface in a matter of seconds. So fast did it move that crew members thought they might have had a close encounter with a ballistic missile.
Two days later, the object, described as “solid white, smooth, with no edges… uniformly colored with no nacelles, pylons or wings,” appeared again, and two F-18 jets were sent up to intercept it. Once they got in the general region of where the mysterious Tic Tac-shaped aircraft was supposed to be, the fighter pilots claimed that it had turned itself invisible. However, they reported that it was creating a circular disturbance in the water, about 150-300 feet in diameter.
Two days later, the craft appeared again, and this time one of the pilots saw the same disturbance in the water, and saw the craft hovering above it.
36-second video of a UFO video recorded by Navy pilots off of the U.S. East Coast
I-Team’s George Knapp interviews former head of Pentagon UFO program,
Luis Elizondo on KLAS-TV8 in Las Vegas, 5:13 minute video
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by Hugo Daniels and Emily Saul December 31, 2017 (thesun.co.uk)
• Retired Navy Commander, David Fravor, 53, was flying one of a pair of fighter jets on a routine training mission about 100 miles into the Pacific ocean off San Diego in 2004, an incident which has become the subject of a Department of Defense cockpit video released to the public in mid-December, causing a furor in the UFO and scientific world. Fravor and his wingman were diverted by the Navy cruiser the USS Princeton to check out an object spotted on their radar. The Princeton operator said they had been tracking up to a dozen mystery aircraft over two weeks but hadn’t deployed any aircraft when Fravor’s F/A-18 Super Hornet arrived on the scene.
• The object first appeared at 80,000 ft, then hurtled towards the sea, stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering before dropping out of radar. When Fravor arrived he saw a white aircraft hovering 50 feet above a disturbance in the ocean. The UFO craft was 40 ft long and rounded, resembling a tic tac with no wings. It was bright white but wasn’t reflecting a lot of light. It had no windows, no exhaust flume, and no visible form of propulsion. (see 43-second video below)
• As Fravor flew towards it, the craft began ascending towards him, passing him at about 12,000 ft. He thinks he got within half a mile of it. Fravor says, “I literally chased the thing and it started to mirror us, it was like it became aware we were there. I cut across to see if I could get closer and it rapidly accelerated and disappeared. Within a matter of a second it was gone.” “In 16 years of flying I had never seen anything like that.”
• Fravor said, “I know what I saw. It was impressive, it had incredible performance.” “I honestly don’t think humans have that technology to do what that thing did. Nor could the human body withstand accelerations like that.” Fravor insists that the object was alien in origin.
• Fravor offered his advice, “You can ignore them and hope they’re just going to observe, or you can do something about it and try to understand what they’re doing.” “We all need to take these seriously as a species, because right now we don’t know the intent of these things.”
Retired US Navy pilot commander David Fravor spoke out in support of ex US government intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who last week revealed he ran a real life “X Files” UFO research department at the Pentagon named the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) funded by £16 million ($22m) “black ops money” from Congress.
Elizondo secured the release of previously classified US Defense Department videos of UFO encounters – one of which shows the craft Fravor saw darting off at an incredible speed.
Commander Fravor, 53, was flying one of two fighter jets on a routine training mission about 100 miles into the Pacific ocean off San Diego when they were diverted to check out an aircraft spotted on radar from their navy cruiser the USS Princeton.
The operations operator said they had been tracking up to a dozen mystery aircraft over two weeks but hadn’t had manned planes deployed when they showed up.
The object first appeared at 80,000ft, then hurtled towards the sea, stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering before dropping out of radar.
When Commander Fravor arrived he saw a white aircraft hovering 50 feet above above a disturbance in the ocean.
He said: “It was just moving randomly around – this 40 foot long white tic tac looking thing, with no wings.
“It was a clear day with a blue background and it was perfectly white. We didn’t see any windows, no form of propulsion, nothing, just a big white object.
“It was rounded on both ends and had a cylindrical body which rounded in, same front to back.
“I couldn’t tell what it was made of, it was bright white but it wasn’t reflecting a bunch of light.”
Fravor flew towards it and the aircraft began ascending towards him, passing him at about 12,000 ft. He thinks he got within half a mile of it.
He said: “I literally chased the thing and it started to mirror us, it was like it became aware we were there. I cut across to see if I could get closer and it rapidly accelerated and disappeared. Within a matter of a second it was gone.”
Asked what was going through his mind, he said: “I was thinking ‘That’s pretty strange’. In 16 years of flying I had never seen anything like that. Nothing that can hover and climb at that rate up and then accelerate and just disappear.
“I was more curious then afraid. I wanted to see how close I could get to it, to see what it was.”
The two fighter jets were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away.
However the radio operator on the Princeton then radioed and said the mystery aircraft had turned up before them.
At this point another aircraft was sent to investigate and recorded radar footage of the aircraft. The 90 second video shows the oblong shaped object hovering before it darts off to the left at what appears to be an unprecedented velocity.
Fravor said: “It jammed the radar, you couldn’t lock it with a conventional radar, you could passively track it and see it, but if you tried to grab a lock it wouldn’t allow you to do that.
“When it takes off and goes to the side that’s a significant amount of distance to travel in a very short period of time, we’re talking miles, that thing just goes poof and in about a second it’s off the side of the screen.
“You look at the video of it there’s no exhaust flume, there’s no indication of how that thing is moving around. Having seen a lot of different airplanes, you can always at least hot spots where the exhaust is coming out. I was close enough visually to go ‘we don’t have anything like that’.”
He insisted the object was alien in origin.
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to describe what we had witnessed out in SOCAL during TIC TAC, I was openly laughed at. At the time my concern was purely safety of flight because of objects that I knew to be real and inexplicable were in our training areas. I also hold NAVY/DOD directly responsible for what I and others went through as a result of trying to uphold our own duty and simply do the job the American people paid and expected us to do .. I and others deserve a formal public apology and a redress for the costs I/we paid”, he wrote in a post on Facebook.
According to Luis Elizondo, former military intelligence officer and past head of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), they just might be.
The footage appears to depict what Fravor had identified as a 40-foot-long, white, oblong shape (hence “Tic Tac”), hovering somewhere between 15,000 and 24,000 feet in midair and exhibiting no notable exhaust from conventional propulsion sources, even as it makes a surprising dart leftward in the video’s final moments. Of the three UFO incidents captured by U.S. Navy airmen via infrared gun-camera pods, Underwood’s footage remains unique for its lack of cross talk between the pilots — a fact that has led to some speculation about its authenticity. But “there wasn’t anything on it that was protected,” Underwood’s retired former commanding officer Dave Fravor told Intelligencer. The missing audio, he says, “just didn’t make the copy that was taken from the storage drive.”
Footage of the moment an F/A-18 Super Hornet spotted the unknown object hurtling through the skies in 2004 became one of the most talked-about UFO sightings of all time, after it was released by the New York Times in 2017.
