Chad Underwood is the U.S. Navy aviator most closely associated with FLIR1, the infrared recording that became the public visual anchor for the 2004 USS Nimitz "Tic Tac" case. The Defense Department officially authorized release of three unclassified Navy videos in 2020, including one taken in November 2004, and said the aerial phenomena in them remained characterized as unidentified.1
Underwood's importance is specific and evidentiary: he recorded sensor footage after David Fravor's earlier visual intercept, but he did not claim a naked-eye sighting and has avoided presenting the case as proof of extraterrestrial life.23
Nimitz Flight Context
On 14 November 2004, aircraft from Strike Fighter Squadron 41 were operating from USS Nimitz during workups off Southern California. Fravor, then commanding officer of VFA-41, later told Congress that his first two-aircraft flight was diverted from training by USS Princeton to investigate an object the ship had tracked on its Aegis radar system.4
Fravor's crew reported a white Tic Tac-shaped object above disturbed water, then returned to Nimitz. In his 2023 House statement, Fravor said one of his crews was preparing to launch when he returned, and that this later crew recorded the now-famous roughly 90-second video.4
The redacted Nimitz executive summary describes that second F/A-18F section as a follow-on flight told by the earlier aircrew to try to find and record what they could. It says the later crew's jet was at about 20,000 feet, with all onboard systems functioning normally, when the crew acquired an object through radar and the forward-looking infrared pod.2
Recording FLIR1
The executive summary states that the FLIR-tracking crew first saw radar tracks roughly 30 to 40 nautical miles south of the aircraft, attempted but failed to achieve a stable single-target radar lock, and then used the FLIR pod to observe an object. The report says the object appeared stationary in the infrared image, moved left out of the FLIR field of view, and was not visually seen by that crew.2
Underwood later identified himself publicly as the aviator who recorded the video. In his first published interview, he said he was concentrating on the FLIR display, not looking out of the cockpit, because the object was too far away for reliable naked-eye tracking. He also said he coined the "Tic Tac" description based on the object's appearance on the sensor display.3
His account emphasizes the limits of the recording as much as its importance. Underwood said he wanted to bring usable video back for intelligence personnel to analyze, while the executive summary says copies of the tapes were made after landing and one set was turned over to intelligence personnel.23
Public Release
FLIR1 entered the public conversation years after the event, first through unauthorized circulation and then through the 2017 reporting that brought the Nimitz encounter into mainstream UAP coverage. DoD's 2020 release said the videos had circulated after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017, and that the official release was meant to clear up whether the footage was real.1
Before that release, Navy spokesperson Joseph Gradisher told The Black Vault that the Navy considered the objects in the three videos unidentified aerial phenomena, while also saying the Navy had not released the videos to the general public at that time.5
A later Navy FOIA release of a UAP Task Force briefing to NASA included a slide on the 14 November 2004 Tic Tac case. The slide listed the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group participants, described the reported object as smooth, white, wingless, and about 46 feet long, and said aircrew and strike-group debriefs validated the event while leaving very limited data for technical analysis.6
Evidence Limits and Disputes
The public record around Underwood is unusually strong for provenance and unusually weak for raw technical context. The video is acknowledged by DoD as a real Navy video, and Underwood's firsthand account ties him to the recording; however, the underlying radar tapes, complete sensor metadata, and any longer original recording are not publicly available.136
There is also a notable disagreement over radar effects. The executive summary says the radar could not maintain a single-target track but recorded no normal electronic-attack indications, while Fravor's later congressional statement says the unseen radar tape showed APG-73 jamming. Without the raw tape, that conflict remains unresolved in public sources.24
The 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment placed UAP reporting from November 2004 through March 2021 into a broader intelligence context, warning that limited data and inconsistent reporting prevented firm conclusions in most cases.7 AARO's 2024 historical review went further on the extraterrestrial question, reporting no empirical evidence that any U.S. government investigation had confirmed UAP as extraterrestrial technology.8
Assessment
Underwood is best understood as a narrow but central evidence witness: the aviator who captured FLIR1 and named the object "Tic Tac," not the first visual witness and not a public claimant of recovered non-human technology. His recording helped transform the Nimitz encounter from a shipboard story into a durable public case, while the strongest official and near-primary records still leave the object's identity unresolved.
The careful reading is therefore two-sided. Underwood's role gives the Nimitz case an authenticated Navy video and a firsthand sensor-operator account, but the public evidence does not settle whether the object was a physical craft, a sensor or tracking artifact, a classified system, or something still outside the available record.1236