Pacific Ocean about 100 miles south-west of San Diego (Carrier Strike Group 11)
Record
Curated case
Assessment
Unexplained
Evidence strength
NoneWeakModerateStrong
467 case pages by decade; this one falls in 2000s with 16 othersAll cases
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What was reported
After days of radar contacts reported by the cruiser USS Princeton, four aircrew in two F/A-18Fs (Cdr David Fravor and Lt Cmdr Alex Dietrich with their weapons officers) saw a smooth white object about 40 feet long with no wings or exhaust moving erratically above a patch of disturbed water; it rose toward Fravor and left in under a second, and the controller then reported it at the flight's unannounced patrol point about 60 miles away. Hours later another crew recorded the FLIR1 infrared video, which the Navy released in 2020 as unidentified. The radar data have never been released, the relocation and descents are secondhand to the pilots, and no one has shown publicly that the radar tracks, the visual object and the FLIR target were one object; the pilots' accounts differ on how long the encounter lasted. Knuth and colleagues (2019, peer-reviewed) derived accelerations in the thousands of g from these reported inputs; Mick West reads FLIR1 itself as a distant aircraft, which does not address the visual encounter.
What officials concluded
Unresolved
US Navy and DoD: unidentified; no explanation offered
Strongest ordinary reading
None established for the visual encounter; FLIR1 plausibly a distant aircraft
On 14 November 2004, four aircrew in two F/A-18s visually observed a roughly 40-foot white 'Tic Tac'-shaped object with no wings, rotors, or visible control surfaces off San Diego; the USS Princeton had reportedly tracked similar objects descending from over 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet and hovering for hours over the preceding two weeks.
the controller told us that these objects had been observed for over two weeks coming down from over 80 000 feet rapidly descending to 20 000 feet
When Fravor's aircraft approached, the object rapidly accelerated and disappeared; the intercept controller then reported the same object had reappeared roughly 60 miles away, at the aircrew's planned CAP point, in well under a minute.
sir you're not going to believe this but that thing is at your cat Point roughly 60 miles away in less than a minute
Minutes after losing visual contact, the Princeton radar controller told Fravor's flight the object had reappeared roughly 60 miles away, at the exact combat air patrol (CAP) point the flight had been assigned but had not broadcast over the radio.
sir you're not gonna believe this but that thing is at your cap, it showed back up, it just popped up, this is like 60 miles away, it just reappears
Fravor's and Dietrich's accounts of the encounter differ materially on duration: Dietrich has described roughly 8-10 seconds from merge-plot to the object departing, while Fravor has described about five minutes with all four aircrew having 'eyes on.'
Dietri account... her experience only lasted... 8 to 10 seconds... Commander Fra says it lasted about five minutes.
West's base assessment of the FLIR1 video itself is that it does not demonstrate anomalous physics and most likely shows a distant aircraft, separate from whatever Fravor's crew encountered hours earlier.
I think it's probably a different thing... it's some type of distant aircraft that's flying away.
