‘It was aware we were there’: a Navy pilot’s account of the Tic Tac UFO

On November 14, 2004, retired US Navy Commander David Fravor was leading an F/A-18F squadron from the USS Nimitz during a training exercise about 100 miles southwest of San Diego. Before the flight, radar operators aboard the USS Princeton had been tracking unidentified objects that appeared to descend from about 80,000 feet in an extremely short time before disappearing.

Fravor and fellow pilot Lt. Cmdr Alex Dietrich were sent to investigate. When they reached the location, Fravor said they noticed an unusual patch of disturbed water, with a small white object hovering above it that reminded him of a Tic Tac mint. ‘I said, dude, do you see that thing down there? And we saw this little white Tic Tac-looking object. And it’s just kind of moving above the whitewater area,’ he later recalled. Four crew members in two aircraft watched the object for around five minutes; it had no wings, no visible markings and no exhaust plume, and appeared roughly the size of his fighter jet.

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

The Pentagon has not confirmed the object’s origin, and the case, now widely known as the ‘Tic Tac’ incident, remains one of the most closely examined unidentified aerial phenomena cases because it involved multiple trained military witnesses, radar tracking and infrared footage.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by JMK