Chad Underwood was a US Navy Lieutenant serving as a weapons and sensors officer (WSO) aboard an F/A-18F with Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41) at the time of the 2004 Nimitz UAP Incident.1 On 2004-11-14, following the return of David Fravor’s FASTEAGLE flight, Underwood and his pilot were briefed in the paraloft by Fravor’s crew, who described the Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) and asked them to attempt to see and record what they could.2 Underwood’s flight subsequently departed the USS Nimitz, climbing to approximately 6,100 metres and flying at roughly 560 kilometres per hour groundspeed.3
Underwood’s initial awareness of the AAV came through the APG-73 Radar, which detected initial tracks at approximately 55 to 75 kilometres to the south of the aircraft.4 He made multiple attempts to transition the radar to Single Target Track (STT) mode but was unable to obtain a lock; the radar’s b-sweep would raster around the return, generate an initial aspect vector that failed to stabilise, and then drop the track.5 Underwood reported there were no conventional electronic attack (EA) jamming cues — no strobe, champagne bubbles, or normal EA indications — and characterised the radar’s behaviour as simply being unable to gather sufficient information to form a track file.6 This account differs from that offered by David Fravor, who stated in a 2020 podcast that the ATFLIR Pod radar produced warning strobes across all modes simultaneously during Underwood’s lock attempts.14 Using the ATFLIR pod’s forward-looking infrared (FLIR) sensor, Underwood estimated the AAV to be between approximately 4,600 and 6,100 metres altitude.7 The FLIR displayed the object at zero antenna train angle and approximately minus five degrees elevation, appearing stationary with only closure attributable to the aircraft’s own movement.8
Underwood switched from radar to the ATFLIR Pod by using the castle switch, at which point the pod — already slaved to the radar’s line of sight — began passively tracking the AAV via infrared pixel contrast.14 He then cycled through all available FLIR pod modes — wide, medium, narrow infrared, and narrow TV — in order to gather as much data on the object as possible, a process that accounts for the shifts in background polarity visible in the released footage.15 No infrared plume or sign of propulsive gases was detected in any mode.19 The recording was captured on an 8mm High-8 tape as a direct digital feed from the display.18 Eventually the AAV moved out of the FLIR’s field of view; Underwood made no attempt to slew the pod and subsequently lost situational awareness of the object, after which the flight continued with its training mission.9 Underwood was clear that he could not confirm the FLIR object was the same as that described by Fravor’s flight, as he had no visual contact and only observed it through the sensor.10 Fravor, however, stated that when he viewed the footage it was consistent with what his own flight had observed, saying “that’s exactly it”.13
After landing, Underwood’s flight met David Fravor’s crew and together proceeded to the Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC).2 The CVIC section attempted to collect Underwood’s tapes, which he initially refused; copies were ultimately made, with a set being turned over to the intelligence section.11 Fravor separately recalled that CVIC intelligence officers requested and took custody of the FLIR tapes, which were classified at the SECRET level owing to the data they contained.16,17 Underwood stated he was not asked to sign any non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and was uncertain how far up the chain of command the reporting went beyond his commanding officer.12
In December 2019, Underwood spoke to New York Magazine about filming the Tic Tac Sighting, stating that the object was “not behaving by normal laws of physics”20 and directly quoting: “The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible."21 Regarding the aftermath, Underwood stated that he answered a few questions in a telephone call with someone from NORAD shortly after landing, but that no pilots were formally debriefed at the time about what had occurred.22 According to Luis Luis Elizondo, beyond those few questions put to Underwood by a NORAD investigator, no other internal agency was reported to have investigated the encounter.23 The Navy F/A-18F Nimitz Encounter Video recorded by Underwood subsequently became one of the most discussed pieces of UAP sensor footage in the public domain following its release.