The USS Nimitz UAP Incident refers to a November 2004 encounter off San Diego in which U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets from the VFA-41 “Black Aces” squadron, operating from USS Nimitz, engaged an anomalous Tic Tac-shaped object. The event was witnessed in multiple sensor modalities (radar, infrared, visual) across ships and aircraft.
The associated FLIR video was among those officially released by the Pentagon in 2020 and has become one of the most cited modern U.S. military UAP encounters. It remains a cornerstone example in aaro briefings and in congressional hearings on uap-disclosure.
Retired Navy Cdr. david-fravor, former VFA-41 skipper, has testified publicly about the incident. According to src-uap-reddit-disclosure-conspiracy-2026-05, Fravor’s disclosure is described as a milestone in a “monumental looming UFO scandal” (Lomas et al. 2025). Unlike many UAP witnesses, Fravor states he has been “believed and relatively unharmed” by his account.
A July 1, 2026 avi-loeb Medium essay applies fireball/sonic-boom physics to the encounter: at Fravor’s reported 12m size and >5x-Mach speed, air-shock heating should have produced a >1,600 K fireball and an audible pressure wave within a few kilometers — but no witness reported hearing a sonic boom, which Loeb flags as physically anomalous regardless of the object’s propulsion mechanism (src-loeb-orbs-fireballs-council-2026-07).
Sources
- src-wright-patterson-general-missing-2026-03
- src-uap-reddit-disclosure-conspiracy-2026-05 — Fravor’s disclosure as milestone; Nimitz incident as key data point in transparency-effect analysis
- src-loeb-orbs-fireballs-council-2026-07 — Jul 1 2026: fireball/sonic-boom physics critique, missing sonic boom flagged as anomalous