AP PRESS

In November 2004, one hundred miles off the coast of San Diego, the radar operators of the USS Princeton began tracking something they could not explain. Over two weeks, the objects appeared again and again — descending from eighty thousand feet to the surface of the Pacific in less than a second. Then, on November 14th, the Navy sent two fighter jets to intercept. This is what happened next — according to the people who were there, and the documents that followed.

This is UAP Press. We don't tell you what to believe. We show you the record — the witnesses on the record, the footage the government released, and the documents that followed — and let the file speak for itself.

The USS Princeton is a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser. In the fall of 2004 she was operating as part of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, running training exercises in the warning areas southwest of San Diego, ahead of a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

The Princeton's job in the strike group is air defense. For that, she carries the SPY-1 radar — a system designed to track hundreds of targets at once, from sea level to the edge of space. Her crew were among the best-trained radar operators in the Navy. Which is what makes what happened next so difficult to dismiss.

Beginning around November 10th, the Princeton's radar picked up tracks that made no sense. Objects appearing at roughly eighty thousand feet — above the operating ceiling of any aircraft in the region — then descending to a few hundred feet above the water in a matter of seconds.

The senior operators' first assumption was the professional one: the system was broken. They took the radar down, recalibrated it, and brought it back up. The tracks came back — sharper. Whatever the SPY-1 was seeing, it was seeing it clearly.

For four days the anomalous tracks came and went, sometimes in groups, moving south along the coast of Baja California. The Princeton logged them and waited. On the morning of November 14th, with fighters from the carrier Nimitz airborne on a training mission, the operators got permission to do something about it. They called off the training exercise — and gave the pilots a real-world vector.

Two F/A-18F Super Hornets answered the call, from strike fighter squadron VFA-41, the Black Aces. In the lead jet: Commander David Fravor, the squadron's commanding officer, a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School — TOPGUN. In the second: Lieutenant Alex Dietrich. Four aviators in total, counting the two weapons systems officers in the back seats.

The Princeton steered them to the coordinates. The pilots looked down at a calm sea — and saw the water itself misbehaving. An area of whitewater churn, roughly the size of a Boeing 737, as if something just under the surface was disturbing the ocean.

And just above the whitewater, low over the waves, all four aviators saw it: a smooth, white, oblong object — no wings, no rotors, no engines, no exhaust, no markings. Roughly forty feet long. The shape, Fravor would later say, of a Tic Tac breath mint. The name stuck.

The object was moving erratically — north, south, east, west, like a ping-pong ball, Fravor said — but staying near the disturbance. Fravor began a descending spiral to get closer. And here is the detail that separates this case from a thousand others: the object reacted. It began climbing to meet him, mirroring his descent — as if it was aware of him.

As Fravor cut across the circle toward it, the object accelerated — and vanished. Not into cloud. Not over the horizon. Gone, in under a second, across the entire field of view of four trained observers. Dietrich would later describe it with a word pilots don't use lightly: impossible.

Then came the radio call from the Princeton that still defines this case. The object — or something exactly like it — had reappeared on radar at the pilots' pre-briefed rendezvous point. Sixty miles away. Within seconds. As Fravor put it later: it was like it knew where they were going.

Fravor's flight was low on fuel and returned to the Nimitz. A second crew launched to look for the object — among them Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, with a targeting pod on his jet. If the thing was still out there, this time there would be video.

Underwood found the track on his radar — and the radar struggled to hold it. But his infrared targeting pod locked on. What it recorded is the footage you are watching now: a white, oblong shape, no exhaust plume, no control surfaces — and at the end of the clip, a sharp acceleration off the left of the frame.

This clip — known as FLIR1 — is not a leak of dubious origin. It is official U.S. Navy sensor footage, and in April 2020 the Department of Defense formally released it, confirming its authenticity, and stating the phenomenon in it remains — quote — unidentified.

For thirteen years, the Nimitz encounter lived in ready-room stories and a brief, inconclusive report. No formal investigation. The pilots were debriefed, lightly ribbed by their squadrons — and the fleet moved on. Fravor stayed in the Navy, retired a commander. The tape sat in a vault.

Then, in December 2017, the New York Times published a front-page story revealing a secret Pentagon program — the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — and with it, the Tic Tac footage and David Fravor's account. For the first time since Project Blue Book closed in 1969, the U.S. government was on the record studying unidentified aerial phenomena.

What followed was the most consequential stretch of official activity in the history of this subject. In 2020, the Pentagon released the footage and stood behind it. In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a preliminary assessment covering 144 military UAP reports — and could explain exactly one of them.

And in July 2023, David Fravor raised his right hand before a congressional subcommittee and testified under oath. His account had not changed in nineteen years. Four aviators, one radar picture, one infrared tape — all telling the same story.

A channel called UAP Press owes you the counter-argument, so here it is. Skeptics have proposed that the FLIR video alone can be explained — that the famous final acceleration may be an artifact of the camera changing zoom and losing track, and the object a distant aircraft distorted by an infrared sensor.

Those explanations deserve to be taken seriously — and they have a limit. They address the tape. They do not address the eyes of four aviators at close range, the water disturbance, the mirrored descent — or two weeks of tracks on the most capable air-defense radar the Navy operates, before, during, and after the intercept.

That is what makes Nimitz the strongest case in the modern file: multiple sensors, multiple witnesses, multiple days — and a government that, twenty years later, has confirmed the evidence is real and declined to explain it.

The Tic Tac case didn't end in 2004, and it didn't end with the hearings. It is the reason the word UAP exists in federal law today — and the standard against which every other case in this series will be measured.

In 1986, a Japanese Airlines 747 over Alaska was shadowed for thirty minutes by something its captain described as twice the size of an aircraft carrier — and this time, the FAA kept the radar data. That's the next case file. Subscribe so you don't miss it. This is UAP Press. The file stays open. > Standing sign-off, every episode: "This is UAP Press. The file stays open."