Navy pilots report an object off California that Navy radar had tracked for days

The surviving footage is a short infrared clip recorded by a targeting pod aboard an F/A-18F. It shows a small object against the sky, without visible wings, rotor, or exhaust plume. The camera struggles to hold a lock on it. Near the end of the clip the object moves left out of frame faster than the pod can follow. Nothing in the video establishes the object's size or distance on its own; those come from the crews and the radar operators, not the picture.

Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, who flew the intercept, have both described in named public accounts an object roughly the size of an airliner fuselage, moving over a disturbance in the water, which then accelerated away in a manner neither could account for. Senior Chief Kevin Day, a radar operator aboard the USS Princeton, has said the cruiser's radar had been tracking objects descending from very high altitude over several days before the intercept was ordered. Fravor has stated the object's acceleration was beyond anything he had trained against.

The Department of Defense formally released the video in April 2020 and confirmed it was authentic Navy footage, having already acknowledged its authenticity in 2019. The Pentagon's stated reason for release was to clear up public confusion about whether the material circulating was real. No conventional identification has been offered. The Navy has said the objects in this and related encounters remain unidentified. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has since reviewed historical cases of this kind without publishing a resolution for this one.

What the object was has not been established. The video alone cannot fix its size, altitude, or speed, so those figures rest on witness estimates and radar data that has not been released in full. The relationship between the radar tracks over several days and the object the pilots saw has not been publicly demonstrated. No physical evidence exists.