Witnesses to 2004 Tic-Tac-shaped UFO sighting reveal shocking cover-up of infamous USS Nimitz encounter

Witnesses to an infamous 2004 UFO incident reveal 'Tic-Tacs' spotted flying at incredible speeds by top Navy pilots off the California coast were also picked up on sonar speeding underwater.

Two Navy officers told DailyMail.com that masses of high-quality radar, sonar and other data of the strange craft were sent to a Naval base on shore – as they accuse the government of a cover up after the Pentagon claimed the data is nowhere to be found.

A source who investigated the incident for the Department of Defense told DailyMail.com that they were briefed about sonar data from a nearby submarine that tracked the UFOs moving at more than 460 mph underwater during the shocking November 2004 encounter.

Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the storied 'Nimitz Incident', their revelations add a new, intriguing dimension to the most prominent UFO case in recent history.

On November 14 2004, Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor was flying a training exercise off the coast of San Diego when he was re-routed to investigate a strange object spotted on radar by warships protecting his aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz.

Witnesses to an infamous 2004 Tic-Tac UFO incident have given shocking new information about the infamous incident to DailyMail.com. They include Kevin Day who was Senior Chief Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton at the time

Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar

What he found was a roughly 40ft white object with no windows or wings, shaped like a Tic-Tac, flitting about above the sea that was roiling below it, disturbed by something large submerged beneath the surface.

Commander Fravor told Congress last year that as he circled the object, it turned to mirror his movements, then shot off past him at thousands of miles per hour, somehow stopping a second later at a secret pre-designated rendezvous point 60 miles away, that only he and a handful of Navy staff on his ship were given ahead of their training exercise.

Fellow F-18 pilot Lieutenant Chad Underwood then flew out and caught the object on video – footage that was published by the New York Times in 2017, igniting a firestorm of intrigue about the government's knowledge of UFOs.

Kevin Day was Senior Chief Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton at the time, in charge of monitoring the skies with radar to protect the Nimitz.

He told DailyMail.com that in the 10 days prior to the incident, he saw similar objects on his radar, behaving inexplicably.

F-18 pilot Lieutenant Chad Underwood

Day said groups of about 10 objects were repeatedly detected 80,000ft above them, where the Earth's atmosphere becomes space, dropping down to 20,000ft in less than a second, then following the ships by flying through the air at a relatively leisurely 115mph, before zooming off towards Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico where they seemed to disappear under the sea.

'They originated from sub-earth orbit. They came in groups of five to 10 at a time. If you added up all the groups, it was about 100 contacts,' Day said.

'The very first group had 10 objects. They sat right around 80,000ft or so, off the east coast of Catalina Island. They just sat there for a time. 

'Then they would drop down as a group, instantly, down to between 20,000 and 28,000ft off the coast of Catalina Island, about 10 miles east of it.

'The really weird thing was, a single object would leave that group and travel very slowly right over the top of us, at between 20-28,000ft at about 100 knots, which was really slow.

'It would just track above us, and then the next one would depart, and the next one,' he added. 'All the groups did that.

'All 100 of them, to the best of my knowledge, disappeared in the same spot in the sky. And that spot was about 60 miles north of an island off the coast of Mexico called Guadalupe Island.

'Everyone was looking at me like, what is this? And I didn't have good answers.

'We agreed just to track and report. Of course we made our intentions known to the admiral on the Nimitz.'

The 'Tic-Tac' UFOs disappeared from sight about 60 miles north of Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico, according to witnesses who spoke with DailyMail.com

A screenshot from the video of a Navy pilot tracking the space craft over the Pacific. US military personnel in California believe they saw UFOs off the coast on November 14, 2004

The story has become one of the strongest examples of other-worldly craft routinely encountered by the military in US airspace.

But the story gets stranger from there.

DailyMail.com can reveal that unknown objects were also allegedly recorded zooming around underwater during the incident.

A senior sonar officer on board the USS Princeton at the time told comrades that while Day was seeing objects dropping from space and Fravor was dogfighting with the 'Tic-Tac', his team were picking up sonar returns for objects in the water.

This shocking revelation marks a new element to the infamous story, 20 years after it occurred.

Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton at the time of the sighting

Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar.

He says a senior sonar officer on the Princeton later told him about the underwater data.

'I was shopping at the local Navy commissary about a mile from my house. I bumped into a former shipmate who worked in the sonar department and was active during the exercise.

'He said that they were practically all around us. He goes, 'Man, we were tracking things underwater, just as much as they were tracking them in the air during that exercise.'

The top sonar tech, who asked not to be named, did not dispute the story when contacted by DailyMail.com, but declined to elaborate.

A source who worked as a senior official in defense intelligence told DailyMail.com that they investigated the incident several years later, and were briefed on sonar data recorded by a US submarine in the area of the Nimitz carrier strike group.

The source said that the sub's sonar caught the UFOs traveling at more than 400 knots, or 460 mph, through the water in the vicinity of the ships.

Day said that the ships in the group built a three-dimensional picture from combining their sophisticated radar and sonar, and that all the data was combined and sent to a Naval base in San Diego.

'We shared all the combat information, put it on a data link and sent it back to the beach. So anybody who was interested in these things, they could see our data,' he said.

'There's underwater stations called SOSUS. And we also have towed array. So we have those three sonar devices going off for each ship. All the ships are feeding the composite picture. So we have a really good three-dimensional picture underneath the water.'

Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton at the time of the TIc-Tac UFO sighting, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar

Warships guarding the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz as well as a submarine in the area spotted a sttrange object on radar in the Pacific in November 2004

Cahill has spoken openly about the 2004 UFO sighting before – including during a 2001 appearance on Fox News 

He said these records would routinely be kept for decades.

But the Pentagon official charged with investigating UFO incidents claimed that he couldn't find any data on the Nimitz incident.

'My opinion is that one is going to remain unresolved because there is no data. There is no radar data,' Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the recently-retired head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said in a March 2024 interview.

'I think the Tic-Tac is so far back in time, there's no data. We went and looked for all of it.

I asked around for it.'

The seminal case was also glossed over in a historical report released by AARO, the Pentagon's UFO investigation office, on March 6 2024.

Cahill and Day say Kirkpatrick is wrong, and could even be deliberately trying to hide the truth.

'Those things are available for decades of the most mundane events that happened and everyday operations, they should be there for all these all the vessels that were there. But they're all missing,' said Cahill.

'It seems like purposeful obfuscation to me. It seems like a dereliction of duty for them not to investigate what is the most famous, well-documented case of UAP activity that we have, with the most amount of witnesses, the most amount of assets placed on it. And it's public now.

'They completely ignored it.'

'I think he should give all his money back that he took in salary,' Day said.

They said Kirkpatrick should have also had access to high fidelity radar and satellite data from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) that could have picked up the Tic-Tac and other UFOs tracked by the warships in November 2004.

Others on the ship at the time say that tapes with data of the incident were erased and taken by mysterious visitors in flight suits.

Petty Officer Gary Voorhis told engineering news site Popular Mechanics in 2019: 'These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn't uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS [radar] system.

'They even told me to erase everything that's in the shop—even the blank tapes.'

The men were spotted returning with 'a bunch of bags', another witness on the ship, Leading Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt, told Popular Mechanics.

Reports of objects moving rapidly and in inexplicable ways underwater – as they allegedly were around the Nimitz in 2004 – are less well-known frontier in the UFO topic.

But they are increasingly coming under scrutiny, and now even have their own name: Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs.

Retired Navy Commander David Fravor testifies before a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing about UFOs in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC in 2023

UFO expert and author Richard Dolan is set to release a book on the topic this year called The History of USOs: The True Story of Anomalous Craft in Earth's Bodies of Water.

It documents more than 600 cases, including extraordinary incidents of objects picked up by submarine radar moving faster than torpedoes and executing impossible right-angle turns, hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean.

'For every one of these USO stories, there's probably close to 100 you don't know. It's often sheer luck that they come out,' Dolan told DailyMail.com.

'One of the shocking things that I've seen in my last two years of USO research, is the number of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers encountering objects that were actually able to disable them for certain periods of time. I have at least 10.

'If you're the US Navy, I can't think of anything more important to you than your fleet of aircraft carriers,' he added. 'Anything that's going to shut down those aircraft carriers is going to be of supreme importance.

'Ronald Moultrie [former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security] spoke to the Senate a couple of years ago, saying we're confident that if we encounter these UAP we can identify and, if necessary, mitigate them.

'That's such a joke on every level. We know full well that this is a major problem, and they're not mitigating anything.'

Since retiring from government, former Rear Admiral and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator Tim Gallaudet has revealed that he was briefed on similar incidents of submarines picking up UFOs on sonar moving at rapid speeds underwater.

In a statement to DailyMail.com, Gallaudet cautioned that he has not spoken with any of the sonar operators involved in the 2004 tic tac incident, but added that in general: ‘We have to investigate undersea and transmedium UAP in the same way we do other UAP to get a more complete understanding of the phenomenon.’