Tic Tac
The “Tic Tac” got its name from a 2004 case: pilots from the USS Nimitz strike group saw an elongated, white object with no wings or engines off the coast of Southern California, which an infrared camera also recorded later that day. There is still no official explanation for it, but according to skeptics, an instrument error, a misinterpretation or a distant aircraft could also be behind it.
The name “Tic Tac” comes from an incident on November 14, 2004, when the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group encountered an unidentified flying object over the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Southern California. The nickname came from the object's shape: according to the accounts, it was an elongated, oval, white object, about 12 meters long, with no visible wings or engines, shaped like the popular mint.
##What the participants claimed
According to the witnesses, the radar of the USS Princeton, a cruiser belonging to the strike group, tracked unusual targets for roughly two weeks that descended suddenly from high altitude and then hovered in one place. On November 14, Commander David Fravor and pilot Alex Dietrich set out in two fighter jets toward one of these targets. By their account, the four of them watched the object hovering above the ocean surface for about five minutes; as Fravor approached, it rose, followed his aircraft's movements, and then suddenly disappeared. According to the accounts, the object was capable of accelerations and changes of direction that no known aircraft is capable of.
The best-known footage of the case, the infrared video called “FLIR1,” was taken later that day during another sortie, with the camera of weapons systems officer Chad Underwood. The nickname “Tic Tac” also comes from him, but he did not see the object with his own eyes, so it is not certain that the video recorded the same object that Fravor and the others saw. A copy of the footage appeared on a UFO forum as early as 2007; the New York Times published it in December 2017, and the Pentagon confirmed its authenticity in 2019 and officially released it in April 2020.
##Official and skeptical positions
In 2020, the Pentagon classified the phenomena seen in the videos as unidentified, and the U.S. intelligence community's 2021 preliminary UAP report also reached no conclusion about their nature. No final official explanation has been released since, and the radar data are not public.
According to skeptical researchers, an instrument error, a parallax effect, a misinterpretation or a known aircraft could be behind the observations. According to Mick West and others, the object seen in the FLIR1 video could also be a distant aircraft whose shape is distorted by the infrared camera's glare, and the “zoom-away” at the end of the video may result from the camera losing the target. Since then, “Tic Tac” has also been used as a common noun in the UAP literature to describe similar oval-shaped objects without distinguishing features.