LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — The most consequential UFO incident in modern history is about to reach a milestone, and while the Pentagon still can’t explain what happened, the incident’s impact is still being felt 20 years later.
On Nov. 14, 2004, U.S. Naval aviators were sent to intercept an otherworldly object that “took off like a bullet fired from a gun.” It was dubbed the “Tic Tac” UFO due to its shape and color, which resembled the popular breath mint. However, this breath mint was 45 feet across. It was detected by the Navy dozens of times in Nov. 2024.
The now-famous video of the Tic Tac, which was recorded by Navy pilots, was initially buried by the military. However, a clandestine investigation based in Las Vegas eventually documented why the encounter was so revolutionary.
During two weeks in Nov. 2004, the world’s most sophisticated sensor systems attached to the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group were befuddled by repeated cat-and-mouse type incursions by unknown objects off of the coast of Southern California. Objects were detected one moment and gone the next. On Nov. 14, radar operators finally got a lock on one object—the Tic Tac.
Top Gun pilot David Fravor was sent to investigate. The commander of the “Black Aces” Strike Fighter Squadron 41 sped through the skies in his F-18 and could not believe what he saw. Years later, his opinion hasn’t changed.
“The video was taken by a crew after us when we came back and landed,” Fravor recounted. “There were four of us. We chased it visually, and I looked at it for over five minutes.”
Fravor described watching it move and interact with his jet. He was confident that what he saw was not one of the usual aerial suspects.
“It’s not a bird. It’s not a weather balloon. It had no wings, it had no rotors, there was no wash,” he said. “The four of us will to this day tell you that we have no idea what we saw, as far as where it was from or what it was, but it had incredible performance characteristics that were well beyond brand new Super Hornets right out of the factory, which [were] the jets we were flying.”
Commander Chad Underwood was in the second F-18 sent after the Tic Tac. A recording device on his plane recorded the grainy image from an infrared sensor. Underwood said a second recording of the incident has never been released, adding that the Tic Tac engaged in active jamming.
“I did get jamming cues on my radar tape,” Underwood said.
Accounts vary regarding what happened to the recordings afterward, although the encounter was not investigated by the Navy, nor was it sent up the organization’s hierarchy. A few years later, a bootleg of the recording appeared online without much fanfare. A more detailed article penned by a former Navy pilot appeared in an online aviation publication without much notice.
In Dec. 2017, the Tic Tac became worldwide news as the centerpiece of a front-page story in the New York Times. The article revealed the existence of previously unknown Department of Defense programs looking into UFOs. The video of the Tic Tac alongside Fravor’s account was, and still is, viewed as solid proof that genuine unknowns have continued to perplex the world’s most powerful military.
The New York Times article turned the UFO subject on its head, and other mainstream media started investigating the cover-up. Members of Congress asked questions and demanded briefings. The public showed renewed interest in a subject long dismissed as nonsense. Veteran journalist Ralph Blumenthal said the story was a tough sell to his editors.
“Everything was, you know, it was documented,” Blumenthal said. “But it was still a difficult topic for the times to grapple with, and the Times has a history of being very skeptical of UFOs.”
The larger story exposed a previously unknown investigation into UFO encounters within the U.S. Military. AATIP, or the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was described as “a program” by some and “a working group” by others.
Lue Elizondo, a career intelligence officer who left his Pentagon position in 2017, was instrumental in getting the Tic Tac video into the hands of the New York Times. In 2018, he confirmed that other instances similar to the Tic Tac exist in hidden military files.
“There are many, many Nimitz incidences that are equally compelling that are told from the eyes of people like Commander Dave Fravor,” Elizondo said, with documents later confirming that Elizondo had taken formal steps to get the Tic Tac video and others like it, released to the public.
Chris Mellon, a former intelligence insider, admitted that he put the videos into the hands of the New York Times, creating a wave of publicity that led to the creation of a new Department of Defense investigation: the UAP Task Force. That organization, headed by veteran intelligence professional Jay Stratton, quietly compiled and analyzed other UFO videos and cases. A few of them eventually surfaced in media reports.
In Stratton’s very first on-camera interview, he said a major goal of the task force was to reduce the stigma so that more military pilots would be willing to report their encounters, and to give them a formalized process to submit what they saw.
“If you look back to that Tic Tac incident that happened in 2004, and you know from some of the releases that it wasn’t until 2009, 2010 that things were looked at because they had nowhere to send it,” Stratton said.
What has changed in 2024? Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of UFO investigation AARO, or the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said the majority of UFO cases can be explained, as could the Tic Tac if more data were available. However, a detailed analysis of the Tic Tac and its capabilities was created. It was the first case investigated by AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program, another secretive program based in Las Vegas.
It’s a project that Dr. James Lacatski, former director of AAWSAP, said did not have a vague purpose.
“It was completely UFO-related,” Lacatski said.
Contrary to what the public has been told, the U.S. government knows quite a bit about the Tic Tac, with one of its goals being to construct its own.
