USS Nimitz (CVN-68) is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, described as the lead vessel of the carrier strike group involved in the 2004 encounter with an unidentified object.1 David Fravor has described the ship as comprising approximately 1.8 hectares of sovereign United States territory that moves around the world’s oceans,2 with its embarked air wing forming its primary weapons capability.3 Christopher K. Mellon has said the carrier is worth approximately five billion US dollars and carries a crew of thousands,4 and has called it one of the premier assets in the United States Navy (USN).5 According to the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (CSG-11) Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) Incident Report, the ship was home to Carrier Air Wing 11 (CVW-11),6 and the strike group itself, Carrier Strike Group 11 (CSG-11), was comprised of USS Nimitz, USS Princeton (CG-59), USS Chafee, USS Higgins, and USS Louisville (SSN-724).7
David Fravor had an earlier connection to the ship: as a midshipman, he went on his freshman cruise aboard the Nimitz after his first year at the United States Naval Academy.8 During that cruise he observed Fighter Squadron 41 and Fighter Squadron 84, an F-14 Tomcat squadron, together with A-6 Intruder squadrons operating from the carrier,9 and time spent with A-6 Intruder pilots and bombardier-navigators led him to decide he wanted to fly from aircraft carriers.10 By November 2004, Fravor commanded the F/A-18 squadron aboard the Nimitz,11 Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41), which was attached to Carrier Air Wing 11 and stationed aboard the carrier.12 That year the Nimitz carrier group began a two-month workup cycle off the coast of California,13 preparing for a combat deployment to the Persian Gulf in support of ground forces in Iraq,14 with the at-sea period scheduled to run from early November to late December 2004.15 In November 2004 the strike group was training approximately 160 kilometres southwest of California San Diego,16 performing drills off the Southern Californian coastline ahead of the Persian Gulf deployment.17
Earlier on 2004-11-14, the commanding officer of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232 (VMFA-232) had launched from the Nimitz at approximately 1030 local time in a single-seat F/A-18C to conduct a functional check flight on an aircraft that had recently completed significant maintenance,18 recovering aboard the carrier at approximately 1200.19 Air defence for the exercise was being provided not by the Nimitz itself but by the accompanying Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, USS Princeton, using its then-new SPY-1 Aegis radar system.20 The Princeton’s radar detected a large number of manoeuvring objects that appeared to be descending from low earth orbit.21 Kevin Day confirmed that the Nimitz’s own radar was tracking the same cluster of 14 unidentified objects as the Princeton’s,22 and the Nimitz launched an E-2 Hawkeye airborne early-warning aircraft, which detected the closest object on its own radar.23 Day recommended to the Nimitz’s commanding officer, Captain James Smith, that aircraft be sent to investigate, and Smith concurred.24 Douglas Kurth was the first pilot to reach the area, arriving at an intercept point approximately 100 kilometres southwest of the Nimitz, where he found only a circular disturbance on the ocean surface, 50-100 metres across.25 His weapons systems officer, Jim Slaight, initially thought the disturbance might be a submarine taking part in the exercise, but this was ruled out by the Nimitz’s intelligence officer in a post-flight debrief.26
Fravor’s flight, flying FA-18 Super Hornet F/A-18Fs, then launched without issue and departed the Nimitz for the working area.27 After checking in with the air controller aboard the USS Princeton, the crew was told the training exercise was being suspended for real-world tasking and were directed toward a contact west of their Combat Air Patrol (CAP) point.28 The object was already waiting at the classified cap point when the pilots arrived, despite the location being known only within the Nimitz’s briefing room.29 Fravor and his wingman intercepted it at close quarters in conditions of perfect visibility,30 encountering a white object shaped like a Tic Tac, approximately 12 metres long and with no wings, manoeuvring in ways Fravor had not previously thought possible.31 As the pair turned back toward the Nimitz, the swarm of objects that had descended toward the ocean shot back above approximately 24,000 metres in a fraction of a second,32 and the flight rejoined and returned to the carrier.33
Back aboard the ship, Fravor’s flight met with the flight of Chad Underwood in the paraloft and passed on what they had seen.34 As Fravor and his wingman returned, a third pair of aircraft was heading out, one flown by Underwood, whose jet was fitted with an Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) targeting pod.35 Underwood’s flight departed the Nimitz, climbed to altitude and separated to begin its own training,36 before returning for a normal approach, landing and shutdown,37 after which the crew debriefed in the Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC).38 According to the book In Plain Sight, the resulting FLIR1 video was downloaded when Underwood returned to the ship, and conspiracy theories circulated among crewmen who saw it while the Nimitz was still at sea.39 Intelligence officers from the CVIC came to collect the tapes from Fravor’s squadron,40 and Fravor has said he personally went to the CVIC to retrieve them, threatening to “start tearing this place apart” if they were not returned within 30 seconds.41 The returning pilots received a good-natured ribbing about their ‘flying saucer’ sighting from the deck crew, some of whom wore tin-foil hats in jest,42 and for about two days afterwards the air wing’s flight schedule carried joke comics, styled after Men in Black, referencing the encounter and naming Fravor and Underwood as protecting the battle group.43 Immediately afterwards, two unknown individuals, presumably serving military, arrived aboard the Nimitz by navy helicopter.44 Fravor has denied a rumour that unidentified personnel arrived by helicopter aboard the Nimitz and USS Princeton specifically to confiscate recorded data related to the incident.45 No further jets from the Nimitz were sent up to engage the object,46 while USS Louisville was operating in the vicinity throughout the detection and intercept.47 Many crewmen aboard the Nimitz and the Princeton later shared the video via the Navy’s classified email system.48
Little follow-up investigation was conducted after the pilots returned to the Nimitz.49 In October 2019, researcher Christian Lambright filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence seeking records of the encounter,50 and according to In Plain Sight, the office subsequently acknowledged holding “Top Secret” records and a “Secret” video relating to the incident, as reported on 2020-01-08.51 Eric Davis’s team was responsible for a covert investigation into the encounter.52 In August 2017 the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) released a video described as showing a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F jets from the Nimitz off the coast of San Diego.53 Unlike the F/A-18 jets flown from the Nimitz in 2004, the F/A-18 jets involved in the 2014-2015 USS Roosevelt encounters carried new advanced AN/APG-79 Radar electronic beam scanning systems.54 Luis Elizondo has said the 2015 USS Roosevelt incursions shared characteristics with the Nimitz encounter, noting that both were nuclear-powered vessels involved in incidents near water,55 and that pilots and radar operators aboard the Roosevelt reported the same abilities that had astonished the Nimitz and Princeton crews a decade earlier.56 Salvatore Pais’s gravity-wave spacecraft patent application was filed in April 2016, twelve years after the Nimitz and its pilots tracked and videoed the object off the west coast.57 Mellon has said he does not consider the object encountered by the Nimitz to have been an experimental US aircraft.58