The Tic Tac Incident: The Day Navy Pilots Chased Something the Pentagon Still Calls Unidentified
For about a week in November 2004, the radar screens of the USS Princeton, a guided-missile cruiser escorting the USS Nimitz carrier strike group off the coast of Southern California, kept showing something that made no sense. Operators, among them senior radar technician Kevin Day, tracked objects that appeared at around 80,000 feet — far above commercial traffic — and then dropped toward the sea in moments. The crew first suspected faulty equipment. The systems were checked and recalibrated. The tracks remained.
On 14 November, the Princeton did something unusual: it diverted two F/A-18F Super Hornets from a routine training exercise to investigate. In one jet sat Commander David Fravor, commanding officer of the Black Aces squadron and a graduate of the Navy's Top Gun program; in the other, Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich. Both later described the same scene, roughly 100 miles southwest of San Diego: a patch of churning, whitewater ocean, and above it a smooth white oblong object, around 40 feet long, shaped — as Fravor famously put it — like a Tic Tac breath mint. It had no wings, no rotors and no visible exhaust.
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