On November 14, 2004, Commander David Fravor and other F/A-18 pilots from the USS Nimitz carrier strike group encountered an oblong white object approximately 40 feet long with no visible propulsion or control surfaces, which maneuvered against the wind and accelerated out of visual range in under a second.

The USS Princeton, the strike group's guided-missile cruiser, had been tracking anomalous radar contacts descending from 80,000 feet for several weeks before the visual encounter. After Fravor approached the object, it vanished and immediately reappeared at the pilots' pre-briefed rendezvous point 60 miles away. An infrared video of the encounter, later called 'FLIR' or 'Tic Tac', was officially released by the Pentagon in April 2020.