Tic Tac Kinematics

The Drop view replays the claim. An altitude column rises from the midday sea, a white capsule waits at the top, and pressing play runs the reported descent at a labelled playback speed (a real 0.78 s drop is a literal blink, so it defaults to a ~6 s compression; a Real button gives you the blink). The capsule brakes, stops, and hovers at the reported 50-foot floor while rings of whitewater spread beneath it; then, the way the testimony ends, it accelerates away laterally toward the horizon and is gone, the whitewater fading behind it. A chart strip draws altitude and acceleration as it falls, and every liberty the drawing takes, the oversized capsule, the too-near ship, is flagged on the panel.

The three sliders and the profile toggle are the whole argument. Start altitude (28,000 ft in the account; 80,000 ft in its wilder version), descent time (0.78 s as told, up to a leisurely 120 s any fighter could fly), and mass, which scales the energy bill only. The toggle chooses the kindest physics available: brake-to-hover at a = 4h/t², matching the testimony, or constant-acceleration arrival at half the g and none of the hover. Nothing is asserted; you dial, it computes.

The Ledger view places your inputs on one log-log chart: implied peak acceleration against descent time, one 1/t² curve cutting through every measured reference line, a pilot's 9 g, John Stapp's 46.2 g rocket-sled record, an agile missile's ~60 g, the 15,500 g a guided artillery shell's electronics survive. Below it, two log ladders price the kinetic energy in tons of TNT and the drag power against humanity's ~18.5 TW. Click any line for its story.

This instrument hangs on the same wall as the Wow! Signal and Pulsar LGM-1 because the three together are one complete lesson. LGM-1 closed in weeks: its signal came back every 1.3373 seconds, on demand, so it could be tested. Wow! has hung open for nearly fifty years: it rang once. The Tic Tac belongs to a third and hardest class: it left no testable public data at all, only testimony, seventy-eight seconds of infrared video, and a number no tape has ever corroborated. A signal that repeats can be closed; a signal that rang once can be held open; a number that exists only in recollection has to fight for the right to be held open at all. What this page does is put that fight on the table.

It also picks up threads from two other instruments. 'Oumuamua is the control group: just as strange, with an "artificial" reading argued in earnest, but it has real measured data, so every hypothesis could be tested one by one. And the Laser Sail supplies the energy scale: humanity's boldest design needs a 100-gigawatt phased array to push 3.6 grams to seventeen thousand g. The reported Tic Tac applies shell-grade acceleration to an object plausibly weighing a ton, silently, darkly, with no visible mechanism. Read the two pages side by side and you have every ruler you need to weigh this one.

One kinematic identity runs the whole instrument: fix a height and a time, and the acceleration follows, with no room for opinion on any side of the argument.

a = 4h/t² (brake to hover) · a = 2h/t² (arrive at speed) · v_peak = 2h/t · E = ½mv² · P_drag = ½ρv³·C_d A

The kinematics is exact and assumption-minimal. Start at rest, cover height h in time t, and either brake to a stop (peak a = 4h/t², the profile that matches the hover in the testimony) or never brake at all (a = 2h/t², the kindest possible reading, which ends with the object hitting the deck at speed). Both peak speeds are 2h/t. Everything on the panel follows from these two lines; the instrument contains no other motion model.

The atmosphere is standard, and labelled. Density falls exponentially with altitude and the local speed of sound comes from a standard temperature profile, evaluated at the drop's midpoint. That is enough to make Mach, drag power P = ½ρv³·CdA (Cd ≈ 0.3, A ≈ 7 m² for the reported shape) and the ideal-gas stagnation temperature honest at the order-of-magnitude level, which is the only level the argument needs.

The SCU cross-check is reproduced, not copied. Type the reported inputs and the brake profile returns ≈ 5,700 g; the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies published ≈ 5,370 g from the same account under slightly different assumptions. The instrument shows its own arithmetic so the two can disagree in front of you, which is what honest modelling of unverifiable inputs looks like.

The comparison ladder is measured, not rhetorical. 9 g is centrifuge-verified pilot tolerance; 46.2 g is a specific man on a specific sled in 1954; 15,500 g is a procurement specification for electronics that fly out of gun barrels every year. The claim is never called impossible: it is placed, to scale, among everything measured that flies, and the distance is left to speak for itself.

The evidence is tagged as you go. The bottom-left table is the conscience of the sim, and this one needs a fourth tag: REPORTED, for the two weeks of tracks, the 0.78 s and the whitewater, testimony with no released data beneath it; MEASURED for the FLIR1 video's existence and every rung of the ladder; MODELLED for all the arithmetic; READING for what it was. Rows flash as you touch the matching control.

The tracks, the drop time and the whitewater are reported. The video's existence and the comparison ladder are measured. Every number on the panel is modelled, exactly, from inputs no one can verify. And the only reading in the story is the one this site never supplies: what it was. The instrument computes; you conclude.

Four ways to read the same account, all run through the same arithmetic so you can compare them fairly.

• 0.78 s · as told. The SCU inputs: 28,000 ft, brake to a hover. ≈ 5,700 g, ≈ Mach 68 at the midpoint, ≈ 57 t TNT of kinetic energy for a 1-tonne object, terawatts of implied drag power. The account, at face value, priced in physics.
• 4 s · two display updates. The same drop stretched to a couple of SPY-1 refresh intervals, the sort of time a screen memory could easily compress. Still ≈ 220 g, far beyond anything crewed, yet suddenly within sight of uncrewed hardware. The whole controversy lives between this preset and the last one.
• 120 s · a jet's steep dive. The same altitude flown the way flown things fly: under 0.1 g of net acceleration, transonic at worst. If the recollection compressed two minutes into a second, there is nothing here at all. The mundane anchor.
• 80,000 ft · the wilder version. The account's full opening act, from above the radar's normal search fence to the sea. At 0.78 s the brake profile implies ≈ 16,000 g and re-entry-grade energetics without the fireball. The version the arithmetic treats most harshly.

Every explanation seriously argued in print, with who argues it and where it stands. Unusually for this site's neighbours, this table has no winner: unlike the pulsar next door, nothing here has ever been closed.

1. Watch the claim at face value. Leave the 0.78 s preset on, press nothing, and just watch: a ~6 s compressed replay of something the account says happened in a blink. Then switch playback to Real and blink. That second replay is the entire eyewitness problem in one demonstration.
2. Find the crossover yourself. Drag the time slider slowly right and watch the readout walk down the ladder: past the shells, past Stapp, past the missiles, until somewhere near two minutes it reads like an aircraft. Note where you stop believing each explanation; that number is your prior, made visible.
3. Be maximally charitable. Flip the profile to Arrive at speed, halving the g, and set 4 s instead of 0.78. Even with every benefit of the doubt, the readout still sits above any crewed machine ever built. Charity narrows the gap; it does not close it.
4. Price the silence. With the 0.78 s preset on, open the Ledger and look at the two bottom ladders: tens of tons of TNT and terawatts of drag, and the account reports no boom, no flash, no splash. Either the object did not couple to the air, or the inputs are wrong. That dichotomy is the deepest fact on this page.
5. Give the skeptics their turn. Select the 4 s preset, then the 120 s preset, and reread the evidence table as you do: nothing tagged REPORTED changes, only the modelled numbers. The same testimony supports every scenario on the dial, which is exactly why the case stays open.
6. End next door. Open Pulsar LGM-1 after this and run its timing test. That case closed in weeks because its signal repeated on demand. This one cannot be closed the same way, and feeling why, data against recollection, is the real lesson of this wall.

The honest line between what is reported, what has been measured, what is modelled here, and what is a reading:

In one line: the two weeks of tracks, the 0.78 s drop and the whitewater are reported, testimony with no released data beneath them; the FLIR1 video's existence and the whole comparison ladder (9 g, 46.2 g, 15,500 g) are measured; every number this instrument computes is modelled, exact kinematics on inputs nobody can verify; and what it was remains a reading, the one this site leaves to you. The case is open, and the instrument is built to keep the arithmetic and the argument from being confused with each other.

• Powell, R., et al. / Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (2019). A Forensic Analysis of Navy Carrier Strike Group Eleven's Encounter with an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle. The source of the 0.78 s framing and the multi-thousand-g estimates; explicit that its inputs are witness-derived.
• Cooper, H., Blumenthal, R., & Kean, L. (2017). Glowing Auras and "Black Money": The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program. New York Times, 16 Dec 2017. The story that made Nimitz the founding case of the modern UAP era.
• Fravor, D. (2023). Testimony before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security. 26 July 2023. The intercept account under oath: the whitewater, the mirroring, the CAP-point reappearance.
• U.S. Department of Defense (2020). Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos. 27 April 2020. FLIR1, GIMBAL and GOFAST formally released; the depicted phenomena characterized as "unidentified."
• Gradisher, J. / U.S. Navy (2019). Statements to The Black Vault and press confirming the videos depict "unidentified aerial phenomena." The measured fact that the videos are genuine.
• Day, K. Interviews and filmed accounts from 2019 onward (incl. The Nimitz Encounters). The 28,000 ft recollection and the two weeks of tracks, in the operator's own words.
• West, M. (2019-2021). Metabunk analyses of FLIR1/Nimitz claims. The sensor-artefact and display-interval counter-reading: gimbal behaviour, zoom slides, and the case against reading g-forces off a screen memory.
• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (2024). Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP. The institutional context: most cases resolve mundane; some, including this one, stay contested.
• Stapp, J. P. (1954). Holloman AFB rocket-sled program records. The measured 46.2 g human deceleration record used on the comparison ladder.
• U.S. Army / Raytheon public specifications for the M982 Excalibur guided projectile. The ~15,500 g firing-shock survival figure for guidance electronics.