Tic Tac
- First reported
- November 14, 2004 (USS Nimitz carrier strike group, off the coast of southern California)
- Peak decade
- 2000s-2020s
Composite silhouette from witness reports
Profile
A smooth, white, featureless oblong roughly the size and proportion of the breath-mint candy that gave it its nickname: 40 feet long, no wings, no visible engines, exhaust, or control surfaces of any kind. The type entered public consciousness through Navy F/A-18 pilots off the coast of San Diego in November 2004, who watched a Tic Tac-shaped object mirror a jet's abrupt descent and then accelerate away with no visible means of propulsion, later captured on gun-camera infrared video. Unlike the disc or triangle, Tic Tac reports emphasize instrumented, cross-corroborated data over eyewitness narrative: multiple aircraft radar locks, a cruiser's advanced radar system tracking unknowns at the same coordinates over preceding days, and pilot testimony given years later under their real names to Congress and the press — a dramatic departure from ufology's usual anonymous-witness pattern. Reported flight behavior centers on what UAP investigators call 'the five observables': sudden and instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity without a sonic boom, apparent antigravity lift, cloaking or sudden disappearance, and trans-medium travel between air and water. No entities or windows are ever reported with Tic Tacs — the entire case for anomaly rests on flight physics captured by military sensors rather than any morphological detail beyond the smooth, blank oblong shape itself.
Skeptical reading
The Nimitz Tic Tac itself remains one of the least mundanely explained cases in the modern record, which is precisely why it triggered the post-2017 disclosure wave. Skeptics led by Mick West have, however, shown that the *separate* 2015 Gimbal and GoFast infrared videos — often lumped in with the Tic Tac under the same 'Navy UAP' umbrella — are well explained by parallax and glare artifacts from a rotating camera pod tracking a distant, ordinary aircraft, with the object's apparent shape and motion largely an artifact of the sensor rather than the target. The distinction between the genuinely puzzling 2004 radar/visual case and the more explicable 2015 infrared clips is frequently lost in popular retellings that treat all three as equally anomalous.