On a crystal blue afternoon 20 years ago, on November 14, 2004, four Navy pilots sighted a mysterious flying object 160 kilometers away off the coast of San Diego. It looked like a Tic Tac candy, without wings, without flying surfaces, without windows and without a trace of smoke. It moved like a high-speed ping pong ball at a speed later estimated to be 74,000 kilometers per hour.
The Tic Tac incident became one of the key episodes that led to an unexpected revival of serious interest in UFOs in 2017, and the pilots They appeared later in 60 Minutes, CNN and other means to talk about your experience. Believers in UFOs (short for unidentified flying objects) often cite the event as the most credible sighting in history.
However, the general tone of the UFO debate changed abruptly in March, when the US government’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office published a highly skeptical report on the phenomenon. The director of the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean Kirkpatrick, argued that the renewed UFO mania had been driven by a “whirlwind of tall tales, inventions, and second- or third-hand accounts thereof.”
The report performed an important public service by authoritatively debunking some of the wildest claims in the UFO conversation, but it blinded many observers to the reality that the 45-page analysis did not attempt to solve the mystery of each of the alleged claims. sightings, nor did he intend to do so. The most fascinating of these unsolved mysteries is the Tic Tac incident, which was accompanied by a well-known videoas well as unexplained radar returns and visual sightings by members of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group beginning on November 10, 2004.
While it is true that there has never been a single concrete piece of evidence that the Tic Tac craft came from outer space, it is equally true that no compelling evidence has emerged to support the idea that it was a weather balloon, an advanced Chinese drone, a sophisticated “spoofing” test of US naval radar or an American experimental test ship. Some of the alternative hypotheses, which have been explored in detail in both pro- and anti-UFO forums, are almost as interesting as the alien spacecraft hypothesis. Some raise important questions of national security and flight safety, even two decades later.
While the March All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office report poured cold water on UFO enthusiasts, it confirmed one of their favorite theories: that many of history’s well-known UFO sightings were , in fact, secret government programs. As noted in the report, many “sightings since the 1940s have represented misidentification of never-before-seen experimental and operational space, rocket, and air systems, including stealth technologies and the proliferation of drone platforms. “Many of these technologies fit the description of a stereotypical Unidentified Flying Object.”
The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office lists 28 secret programs that could have been misinterpreted over the years as UFOs, including something called the “Flying Pancake.” It doesn’t take a great imagination to believe that Tic Tac belongs to this line of historical events.
But the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office document does not mention any program that could have caused the Nimitz observations, although it cites examples of drones that were subsequently tested. So the report, while demystifying the broader conversation about UFOs, actually ends up adding more mystery to the Tic Tac episode. If the US government has secret information about this notorious incident, one wonders how and why it has remained hidden all these years.
It would be a disservice to veterans like David Fravor, who have risked ridicule (and worse) to testify before Congress and in other public forums about the extraordinary things they saw, to simply abandon the search for the answer to the Nimitz case because the Congress and the media took some unrelated outlandish claims too seriously. This puzzling episode remains relevant and deserves continued investigation.
France is a former senior editor at BusinessWeek magazine and author of the Nimitz Compendium, a comprehensive bibliography on the Tic Tac incident. Lives in Brooklyn.
Original Story
Opinion: Was that really a UFO off the coast of San Diego? We may never know.
