USS Nimitz UFO Incident
On November 10th 2004, radar operator Kevin Day reported seeing strange slow moving objects flying in groups of 5 - 10 off San Clemente Island, on the San Diego coast. They were moving at approximately 140mph at roughly 28,000 feet - too slow for conventional aircraft and too high to be birds.
The objects “exhibited ballistic-missile characteristics” as they flew from 60,000 ft to 50 ft above the Pacific Ocean - never once producing sonic booms.
Radar operators at this station spent almost two weeks attempting to establish what the objects were. Going so far as to recalibrate the ship’s radar system to establish if the objects were simply false positives, or “ghost tracks”.
“The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving. And what I mean by “erratic” is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets. It was just behaving in ways that aren’t physically normal. That’s what caught my eye. Because, aircraft, whether they’re manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible.”
On November 14th David Fravor, commanding officer of the Black Aces, witnessed these objects first hand during a mid-flight training exercise from the nuclear aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz. He described them as 40ft long, white, oblong UFOs, that hovered between 15,000 and 24,000 ft.
It was during this same exercise that navy pilot Chad Underwood captured the famous “tic-tac” footage on an infrared camera on the left wing of his F/A-18 Super Hornet.
He recounts seeing a blip on his radar of the strange object he estimates was around 20 miles away from him at the time.
Both the footage and Underwood’s testimony show the object’s flight patterns as erratic, repeatedly altering altitude, speed and direction with seemingly no visible method of propulsion, wings, exhaust or heat signature.
Chad Underwood says that he observed the craft travel from 50,000ft to 100ft in just a couple of seconds, which in his words is “just not possible.”
“The interesting thing was, normally, if you see something out in the middle of the ocean that’s a test project, we would get debriefed on it, one-on-one, in a dark room. “Hey, yes, we were testing a project. This is what you saw.” That never happened, which leads me to think that it was not a government project.”