USS Princeton CG-59 — Radar Tracking of Nimitz Tic-Tac

While much public attention has focused on Cmdr David Fravor's visual encounter with the Tic-Tac object on November 14, 2004, the USS Princeton (CG-59) guided-missile cruiser — the designated air warfare command ship for the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group — had been tracking anomalous radar contacts for approximately two weeks prior to that encounter. Senior Chief Kevin Day, the Princeton's operations specialist responsible for overseeing the radar picture, documented radar tracks showing objects at approximately 80,000 feet altitude that would drop to sea level in a time he estimated at approximately 0.78 seconds. Calculated over that distance, the acceleration would require forces measured in thousands of G's — orders of magnitude beyond any known aircraft or missile. Day noted that the objects appeared in groups, showed up on radar as solid returns, and appeared to have foreknowledge of the F/A-18 flight patterns — appearing to move toward where the aircraft would be rather than where they were. Day later gave public testimony about the radar data at congressional hearings. The Princeton's radar data was preserved as part of the official record of the Nimitz encounters. The combination of the Princeton's two-week radar track, the shipboard confirmation, and the subsequent visual encounters by F/A-18 crews makes the Nimitz event cluster the most comprehensively documented multi-sensor UAP event in US Navy history.