The Tic Tac Incident: The Day Navy Pilots Chased Something the Pentagon Still Calls Unidentified

2026-06-09 · Unidentified Objects (UAP) · 7 min read

For the better part of a week in November 2004, the crew of the USS Princeton tracked objects that had no business appearing on their screens. The Princeton was a guided-missile cruiser sailing off the coast of Southern California, escorting the USS Nimitz carrier strike group through the workup exercises a battle group completes before it deploys. Its Aegis SPY-1 radar had been upgraded shortly before the cruise and was among the most capable sensors in the fleet. In the darkened combat information center, senior radar operator Kevin Day began seeing returns he could not account for.

The contacts first appeared around 10 November. They came in groups, at roughly 80,000 feet, far above any commercial or military traffic in the area. They would hold that altitude for a while and then, according to the operators watching them, descend toward the ocean at a rate that matched no aircraft anyone aboard could name. The crew's first assumption was the sane one: the new equipment was faulty. The radar was checked and recalibrated. The tracks did not go away. Over the following days Day logged scores of them, and the strike group began treating the contacts as a training problem worth intercepting.

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