No wings, no exhaust, gone in seconds: inside the Navy’s most famous UFO case

Four crew members in two aircraft watched a small white object hovering above disturbed water for around five minutes in November 2004. It had no wings, no visible markings and no exhaust plume, and appeared roughly the size of an F/A-18 fighter jet.

The sighting occurred when retired US Navy Commander David Fravor was leading a squadron from the USS Nimitz during a training exercise off San Diego. Radar operators aboard the USS Princeton had already been tracking unidentified objects descending from about 80,000 feet in an extremely short time before disappearing, prompting Fravor and fellow pilot Lt. Cmdr Alex Dietrich to investigate.

As Fravor moved in for a closer look, the object seemed to respond to his manoeuvres. ‘It was aware we were there,’ he later told investigators. It then accelerated rapidly and disappeared from view, with radar detecting it about 60 miles away in less than a minute.

The event, now widely known as the ‘Tic Tac’ incident, remains one of the best-known unidentified aerial phenomena cases examined by US defence officials, given the multiple trained military witnesses, radar tracking and infrared footage involved, though no definitive explanation has been publicly confirmed.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by JMK