It wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t a plane.

It was definitely a UFO.

Fifteen years after U.S. navy pilot Chad Underwood filmed something strange over the Pacific Ocean, he broke his silence in an interview with New York Magazine.

The video that Underwood captured from the radar pod on his F/A-18 Super Hornet has been featured by the New York Times, and it confirms another sighting by a different pilot earlier the same day.

They call the object that they saw “the Tic Tac” because it appeared to be about 40-feet long and a white oblong shape, hovering above the Pacific off the coast of Mexico.

“It is just what we call a UFO. I couldn’t identify it. It was flying. And it was an object. It’s as simple as that,” Underwood said.

Underwood, who has served as a flight instructor as well as a navy pilot, said he doesn’t want to be caught up in “the little green men crazies” who obsess over UFOs and extraterrestrials. But he insists that he saw something, and he’s quite sure that the obvious explanations don’t fit the facts.

The object went from around 50,000 feet down to about a hundred feet above sea level in seconds, according to the observations. Despite moving so fast, the object didn’t create a sonic boom, and it didn’t give any indication of exhaust plumes that would indicate some sort of propulsion.

Related

For starters, Underwood doesn’t believe it was a bird.

“You don’t see birds at 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 feet. That’s just not how birds operate,” he said.

And it probably wasn’t some sort of top-secret test aircraft, because someone in the military probably would’ve just told him if that was the case. Somebody from NORAD phoned the USS Nimitz immediately after the sighting to get an account of what Underwood saw.

“You know, I’ve got top-secret clearance with a ton of special-project clearances. So, it’s not like I wasn’t cleared to know. But, as I’m sure you’ve found in your research, to have clearance to know something, you have to have both the clearance that it’s elevated to and you have to have the ‘need to know’ it. And, clearly, whatever it was, if it was a government project, I did not need to know.”

The incident was sufficiently serious that the military also spent two weeks trying to figure out what Underwood saw, including recalibrating the radar system to make sure it was working properly.

“The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving. And what I mean by ‘erratic’ is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets,’ Underwood told the magazine.

“Because, aircraft, whether they’re manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. 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.”

‘If it was obeying physics like a normal object that you would encounter in the sky — an aircraft, or a cruise missile, or some sort of special project that the government didn’t tell you about — that would have made more sense to me. The part that drew our attention was how it wasn’t behaving within the normal laws of physics”

2019 has been a big year for UFO stuff. In May, the New York Times reported on objects observed by navy pilots, including one incident in 2014 where a Super Hornet nearly hit something. That report built on a 2017 story about the Pentagon’s secretive Advanced Aerospace Thread Identification Program which analyzes UFO sightings.

And then in September, the Times reported on the work of former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge, who quit the band to become a UFO researcher. It was the DeLonge’s work in part that apparently caused the U.S. military to acknowledge several objects caught on film that cannot be identified. Flying objects.

“We’ve been waiting around as scholars and researchers on the subject for many decades and hoping to God that one day the government would come out and acknowledge what this is,” DeLonge told the newspaper.

One of the key videos that DeLonge and his organization, The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, have focused on in their research, is the 2004 Tic Tac video filmed by Underwood.