When the Pentagon Admitted It Doesn't Know

2026-06-11 · Unidentified Objects (UAP) · 8 min read

On a clear afternoon in November 2004, roughly a hundred miles southwest of San Diego, a U.S. Navy Super Hornet dropped out of a routine training flight toward something the radar crews aboard the cruiser USS Princeton could not name. For about two weeks the Princeton's advanced radar had been registering objects that appeared at around eighty thousand feet, descended toward the ocean within seconds, and then held position. Commander David Fravor, a senior pilot with the Nimitz carrier strike group, was directed to the coordinates. What he reported finding was a white, wingless oval roughly the size of his fighter, hovering above a churning patch of sea. It had no exhaust plume, no rotor and no visible control surfaces. When he spiraled down toward it, the object appeared to mirror his turn, then accelerated away and was gone. Minutes later the Princeton reacquired a contact about sixty miles off, near the point where the flight had been scheduled to rendezvous.

Because of its smooth white lozenge shape, the object acquired a nickname among aircrews: the Tic Tac. Infrared footage from a second aircraft that launched later the same day recorded a similar object. For more than a decade the encounter circulated mainly inside naval aviation, where pilots had learned that describing such sightings publicly was a reliable way to damage a career.

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