USS Nimitz Tic Tac UFO Encounters Were Classified Until Whistleblower Disclosure

For more than a decade, Navy pilots who witnessed something extraordinary off the coast of San Diego kept quiet about it. The 2004 encounter between fighter jets and an unidentified object exhibiting impossible flight characteristics was not just unexplained—it was classified, locked away in government files, and effectively invisible to public scrutiny.

The pilots involved, along with their commanding officers and radar operators, observed a white, oblong object the size of a commercial airliner performing maneuvers that defied the known laws of physics. The object, later nicknamed the "Tic Tac" for its distinctive shape, accelerated, decelerated, and pivoted at speeds and angles that would have rendered any human pilot unconscious from the G-forces alone. Multiple witnesses saw it. Multiple sensors tracked it. Yet the incident remained buried.

For years, those who mentioned the encounters publicly faced the familiar dismissal: weather balloons, sensor artifacts, pilot misidentification. The Navy's official stance was essentially non-committal—the events were of no particular interest, no particular threat, and certainly no particular news. Mainstream media, dependent on official sourcing, largely ignored the story. The few outlets that covered it were relegated to fringe status.

Then, in 2017, something changed. Luis Elizondo, a career Pentagon intelligence official who had worked within a classified advanced aerospace threat identification program, came forward. He went public with details that had been protected at the highest classification levels. The New York Times published his account alongside corroborating interviews with pilots and Navy officials. Videos from the encounters—previously classified—were released.

What Elizondo revealed was that the government hadn't just failed to explain the 2004 incident. It had actively maintained a secret program specifically designed to investigate precisely these kinds of encounters. The program's existence itself had been compartmentalized, known only to select officials. Funding had been hidden in budget. Documentation had been classified under layers of protection typically reserved for threats.