USS Nimitz Tic Tac UFO Caught On Camera

UFOs in broad daylight In 2017, the New York Times released not one but three short videos taken by US Navy pilots showing footage of crafts that are impossible to exist, flying faster and harder than any man-made object. They were called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, as the media quickly dubbed them. The focus of this video will be on the first of these filmed encounters, which took place in 2004 and was observed by the pilots from the aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz.

An encounter with a craft that was oblong and white in shape akin to a giant pill or a tic-tac breath mint, which is why this has become known as the tic-tac UFO. So what happened out there over the lonely Pacific Ocean in November of 2004? And why is it so darn terrifying?

America's pride of the US Navy, the nuclear powered USS Nimitz, was operating a training exercise off the coast of Mexico in winter of 2004. The Nimitz was ordinarily docked at the US Navy base in San Diego, so these maneuvers in the Pacific Ocean were considered pretty much in its own backyard. Its strike group also included the smaller missile cruiser, the USS Princeton, and it's this small cruiser that our story begins today.

The state-of-the-art ship was testing a new, highly advanced radar, which was picking up several mysterious objects for several days. In fact, the Princeton's radar had tracked well over a hundred of these mysterious objects over the course of a week. At first they thought that this state-of-the-art radar system was bugging out, like static on an untuned radio.

Even after calibrating the system and even restarting it, these objects appeared even more accurate. And the picture it painted was nothing short of chaos. One of the ship's radar operators would later state in an interview that watching the objects on the radar display was like watching snow falling from the sky.

The radar operators couldn't believe what they were watching. Objects that seemed to fly at altitudes greater than 80,000 feet, which was far higher than what commercial or even military jets typically operate at. Even more disconcerting what these objects seemed to drop with an astonishing speed into far lower and busier airspace, from practically orbit to sea level in less than a minute.

They were too high to be birds, too slow to be conventional aircraft, and were not travelling on any established flight path. By that morning on the 14th, it was decided on the Princeton that these unidentified objects had to be somehow intercepted and if possible, stopped. The carrier group had two fighter jets already performing training missions in the area, and it was thought that they would be their best bet at witnessing whatever the heck these objects were.

They were ordered to stop their training and immediately recede to the new coordinates what the operations officer on board the Princeton called a real world task. Fighter jet pilots Alex Dietricht and her then commanding officer David Fraver were two pilots tasked to investigate the mysterious radar contacts. Upon approaching the designated area where the radar contact had been located, they first noticed an unusual churning of the ocean surface, a foaming mass that looked like a large aircraft like the size of a Boeing 737 submerged under the water.

But it is what they witnessed next that was even more unsettling. The pilots then saw what they described as a smooth white oblong object that looked like a giant tic-tac skimming about 50 metres or 164 feet above the waves and flying at what looked like a very high speed, erratically and changing directions without any care to physics. At first they thought it was a helicopter, but the lack of rotors and sheer bone crushing g-forces exhibited ruled that out.

In his jet, David Fraver attempted to engage with the object. He began a long spiral to get closer to the churning water surface, but seemingly the object stopped its movements and began an opposite helix upwards motion, almost mirroring the fighter jet. Whatever it was, it knew he was there.

Now closer, the craft seemed to lack what the pilots would later recall as any visible flight control surfaces or means of propulsion, and it was seen at as least big as the F-18. Fraver, who was a decorated pilot instructor and a 16 year veteran of the Navy's famous Top Gun program for fighter pilots, was stunned by what he saw. Upon trying to get closer, the object accelerated to a hypersonic velocity and vanished over the horizon, leaving the water and the sky as calm as a winter afternoon.

There's something out there that was better than our aeroplane, Fraver later said. I don't know who's building it, who's got the technology, who's got the brains. With eyewitness accounts confirming something strange was out there in the Pacific that day, the military decided to equip all the next aircraft to take off with the best cameras the US taxpayers could buy and with a special request.

The hunting season was open. On the next mission, another F-18 pilot, Chad Underwood, managed to get a radar ping 20 miles away. He couldn't see anything, but he was able to lock onto the target with his advanced targeting forward-looking infrared camera, a high-tech camera that can see way beyond the sight of a human.

It was this footage that would be famously designated as FLIR-1. The object being filmed was shown to be a wingless, highly mobile, white and oblong shaped. 6 meters in length, with no visible markings on it and no glass windows or any other portals into the craft visible from any angle.

It was moving so fast not to create a sonic boom and apparently no heat trail. Normally, you would see engines emitting a heat plume. This object was not doing that.

The video shows a source of heat, but the normal signatures of an exhaust plume were not there. There was no sign of propulsion. Looking at the footage after a brief period of time, either the camera loses track of the object or the object itself accelerates to well over Mach 6 and vanishes 100 kilometers over the horizon instantly, appearing to slide casually and somewhat aloofly away.

While this event is considered shocking, it's the lack of response from the officers that give it a bit more of a conspiracy turn. Upon returning with the footage, the military officers on board the carrier group seemed to not be fussed at all by the event, leading many to imagine that they knew what these objects were of some high-tech drone variety. The footage was shared amongst the crew until unknown persons arrived, overriding the Admiral T and insisting that they have all the footage, the hard drives wiped and no one to talk about it ever again.

It's only because one crewman copied the footage to a disc and hid it away that we ever saw the light of day. As with any alleged conspiracy or cover-up, there are always those who rush in to debunk it. A large debunker is Mick West, a former video game designer and well-known skeptic of all things paranormal.

In West's opinion, the images of the tic-tac UFO are what happens when filming a fighter jet flying away at high speed. The resulting elongated shape that looks eerily like a giant tic-tac is merely the glare on the lens of the infrared camera. West contends that what looks like a UFO is nothing more than light and motion creating optical distortion.

He also says that the information shown on the screen of the video, such as the camera zoom level, indicates that the sweeping movements were made by the camera itself, not the so-called mystery. West further points out that the camera itself would be moving at a very high speed. This speed, together with a high zoom rate, would reflect what is known as the parallax effect, in which the relationship and apparent speed of an object and its background change, sometimes very dramatically, depending on the angle being viewed.

Could these objects simply be the result of lights and a camera error? But what about the radar pings and the eyewitness accounts? Eyewitnesses, mind you, from some of history's best and most experienced pilots.

In the midst of all of this, there is one pesky question that needs answering. How is it that the United States military saw fit to release this video after so many decades of constant denials regarding UFOs? The simple answer is that the military never intended for the 2004 video of the tic-tac UFO to go public.

It was released by mistake. It so happens that the UFO research group to the STARS Academy of Arts and Science had made a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request. These requests for classified information are routinely denied by the US military on the pretext of that old chestnut, national security, or with a simple, nothing to see here stands.

Not this time. The Freedom of Information request was granted due to a series of unintentional blunders by the military worthy of a movie caper by the Coen brothers. The military was forced to admit their knowledge of these videos.

A spokesperson confirmed that the leaked footage by the crew member was authentic, which was then reported by the Washington Post, leading the US Navy to quickly summarize and reveal everything on the table. Interestingly, insiders from the Navy have confirmed that the actual video is much longer, with many more details of the unidentified craft that became known as a tic-tac UFO more visible. These military insiders claim that the longer video clearly shows an airborne vehicle that defies the laws of physics with great ease.

The existence of the longer video was confirmed by Chad Underwood himself in 2019, who remarked that the footage released into the public domain was merely a little video cut of what he originally filmed. And this would not be the only video released by the US military, but another two from an incident off the coast of Florida years later. But perhaps that's another video for another day, so subscribe if you want to see that one.

Obviously after this event occurred, many other media publications tried to get their hands on more footage or more information. However, all the follow-up Freedom of Information requests were denied, claiming that it would cause exceptional grave damage to the national security of the United States. Once again, the US military has fallen behind on that old chestnut.

Be as it may be, the object that Alex Dietrichs and David Fraver saw on that November day in 2004, and what Chad Underwood filmed remains what the United States military insists on calling unidentified. That single word has no doubt opened up a Pandora's box that will probably never close. And speaking of never closing, if you want constant updates from found and explained, then why don't you follow us on all of the social medias that I'm now putting up on the video.

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