Tic Tac

The "Tic Tac" is the white, wingless, smooth lozenge-shaped object that Navy F/A-18 pilots from the USS Nimitz carrier group encountered off the California coast in November 2004, tracked simultaneously on the cruiser USS Princeton's advanced radar and filmed on cockpit FLIR by pilot Commander David Fravor and his wingman. Fravor's own description of the object's shape, size, and coloring against the candy it visually resembled — smooth, white, roughly the proportions of the breath-mint — gave the case its enduring nickname, and pilot testimony described the object performing acceleration and maneuvers the crew considered inconsistent with any known aircraft's flight envelope. The case remained almost entirely unknown to the public for thirteen years until the December 2017 New York Times AATIP story brought both the pilot testimony and the associated cockpit video to mass attention for the first time, instantly making Nimitz the modern era's flagship unknown and a centerpiece of the 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment's 144 reviewed incidents. Skeptical analysts have proposed parallax and camera-tracking artifacts to explain some of the video's apparent motion, while Fravor and other Nimitz-involved pilots maintain their direct visual sighting, radar corroboration, and close-range observation independently support a genuinely anomalous object regardless of how the later-released video is interpreted.