San Diego is a coastal city in southern California and a longstanding hub for US Navy carrier operations. In November 2004, the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) Carrier Strike Group was training approximately 160 kilometres southwest of the city.1 Five vessels had begun travelling together in the waters off San Diego to form the strike group ahead of what became known as the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter.2 Within a few hours of the initial radar sightings on 2004-11-14, the USS Nimitz planned to launch as many as 30 aircraft, with more scheduled to join the exercise from San Diego.3 The encounter itself took place further out, in the north-eastern Pacific Ocean about 100 kilometres off the coast, at a point midway between San Diego and Ensenada, Mexico.4
On the day of the encounter, David Fravor and his squadron were conducting a work-up integrating ships and the carrier air wing off the coast of San Diego.5 Conditions were clear, with light winds, no whitecaps and no clouds.6 Radar operators first tracked the unidentified aerial objects at an altitude of over approximately 24,000 metres, heading south towards the carrier fleet from the direction of San Clemente Island.7 Fravor flew an F/A-18 Hornet and circled down to confront a Tic Tac-shaped object, in what is also catalogued as the 2004 USS Nimitz Unidentified Aerial Phenomena / Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) encounter.8 His crew observed a patch of whitewater disturbance on the ocean surface below.9 Christopher K. Mellon has said that the USS Nimitz was operating off San Diego at the time, escorted by the USS Princeton.10
San Diego also features in Fravor’s earlier career. Some years before the Nimitz encounter, he flew an A-6 Intruder together with Chris Sato aboard the USS Ranger during a night landing off San Diego in poor weather, during an El Nino year.11 Fravor has said the marine layer cloud ceiling off San Diego is typically around 370 metres, and that on the night in question it was lower than that, with heavy rain and thunderstorms.12 Separately, in September 2002, Bruce Leininger attended a Natoma Bay reunion in San Diego, expecting to find answers there.13
The most widely circulated visual evidence from the area emerged only later. The forward-looking infrared (FLIR) video of the object leaked online around 2008 to early 2009, after Fravor had retired from the Navy and was working in San Diego.14 In August 2017, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) released a video of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jets from the USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego.15
The area also recurs in wider UAP research. The egg-shaped UAP form reported at Socorro in 1964 is echoed in later sightings, most famously the 2004 encounters off San Diego.16 To The Stars Academy (TTSA) planned a location in Encinitas, California, about thirty minutes north of San Diego along the coast.17 During Luis Elizondo’s family’s move to California, his daughter Taylor Elizondo stayed behind for college while his daughter Alex Elizondo was uprooted to finish her senior year of high school.18