UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RECORDSENSOR FOOTAGE

The FLIR1 ‘Tic Tac’ Video (2004)

FLIR1 is a short clip recorded in November 2004 by a U.S. Navy F/A-18 crew from the USS Nimitz carrier group during training off southern California. It was filmed through the jet’s targeting pod, a passive camera system, after Cmdr. David Fravor’s flight returned from a close encounter with a white object he described as shaped like a ‘Tic Tac’. Navy pilot Chad Underwood, who flew the later sortie, has said he recorded it.

The footage shows the pod’s display tracking a small, oblong shape against an empty sky, alternating between infrared and black-and-white TV imagery and between zoom levels. Onscreen symbols give the camera’s heading and settings. Near the end the shape slides toward the left of the frame and the track is lost, which many viewers read as a sudden burst of speed. Fravor told Congress that, viewed on a big screen, the video shows ‘two little objects that came out of the bottom of it’.

The Pentagon has said the Navy videos circulated publicly after ‘unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017’; FLIR1 drew wide attention when The New York Times and To The Stars Academy published it in December 2017. In September 2019 Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher said the Navy considered the phenomena in FLIR1, GIMBAL and GOFAST ‘unidentified’. On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense formally released all three, saying the phenomena ‘remain characterized as ‘unidentified’’.

Skeptic Mick West has argued the clip is consistent with a distant aircraft flying away from the camera, possibly more than 50 miles off. He attributes the dramatic-looking exit to a sudden jump between 1x and 2x zoom combined with the camera lock drifting, writing that the object ‘gently drifts off to the left’. Fravor has stressed that the video is only part of the record, telling Congress that radar tape of the event was ‘never released’.

FLIR1 is the footage most closely tied to the 2004 Nimitz encounter, one of the most widely discussed military UAP cases. Fravor testified in 2023 that the object his crew saw was ‘far superior to anything that we had’. Because the video itself shows little more than a small, distant shape, it has become a test case for how much a brief sensor clip can, and cannot, establish on its own.