USS Theodore Roosevelt: The "Gimbal" & "GoFast" Encounters

Theoretical Alignment

The case aligns only moderately with the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: official government confirmation and radar/IR corroboration lend it institutional weight most UFO reports never receive, but a rigorous, quantitative 2025 Pentagon resolution for GoFast and a well-supported optical-artifact explanation for Gimbal push meaningful probability toward ordinary misperception (PSH) of conventional aircraft, balloons, or drones rather than genuinely novel technology.

Background

By the time the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) departed Naval Station Norfolk on January 8, 2015, to begin a Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX) with Carrier Strike Group 12 and Carrier Air Wing 1 (CVW-1), its aircrews had already spent roughly six months reporting something unusual. Sometime around the summer of 2014, Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11), the "Red Rippers," began flying F/A-18F Super Hornets recently upgraded with the AN/APG-79 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar — a substantial capability jump from the older mechanically scanned sets it replaced, feeding a new situational-awareness (SA) display that could paint contacts with far greater fidelity than before. Within weeks of the upgrade, pilots flying training missions in the Navy's W-72 Warning Area and adjoining airspace off Virginia Beach began seeing objects on that SA display that did not correlate with any known air traffic: unidentified contacts, sometimes singly and sometimes in apparent clusters, appearing at altitudes up to roughly 30,000 feet, exhibiting no radar cross-section consistent with a conventional aircraft, and showing none of the infrared exhaust plume a jet or missile would produce.

Lieutenant Ryan Graves, then an F/A-18F pilot with VFA-11, would later become the wave's most visible on-record witness. Graves and other Navy pilots told The New York Times in 2019 that the objects appeared "almost daily" from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, reaching 30,000 feet and showing no visible engine or infrared exhaust plume. Graves later testified that in one incident off Virginia Beach a dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere passed within 50 feet of his squadron's lead aircraft. The pilots said they worried that reporting the objects would harm their careers, and flight-safety concerns drove the reports up the chain of command. It was against this backdrop of a sustained, unit-wide pattern rather than a single sighting that the Theodore Roosevelt's January 2015 training produced the two ATFLIR recordings that later reached the public: "Gimbal," showing an apparently rotating oblong shape above a cloud layer while the aircrew remark on "a whole fleet" of contacts on their radar display, and "GoFast," showing a small object that appears at first glance to skim the ocean at high speed. According to dates the Navy gave The Black Vault's John Greenewald, both were recorded on January 21, 2015, off the East Coast; other accounts give January 20 for Gimbal, and AARO places GoFast in January 2015 off Florida. Documents released under FOIA place the Gimbal encounter off Jacksonville, Florida, during the carrier group's COMPTUEX exercise.

The Theodore Roosevelt's January 2015 COMPTUEX was, by design, a large and complex undertaking. Carrier Air Wing 1 embarked nine separate squadrons for the work-up, including VFA-11 "Red Rippers," VFA-136 "Knighthawks," and VFA-211 "Checkmates" flying F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, the Marine Corps' VMFA-251 "Thunderbolts," electronic-attack squadron VAQ-137 "Rooks," airborne early-warning squadron VAW-125 "Tigertails," logistics squadron VRC-40 "Rawhides," and helicopter squadrons HSM-46 and HS-11 — in total, dozens of aircraft operating simultaneously in the same training blocks off the Virginia and Florida coasts, a level of routine airspace traffic that both makes the "whole fleet" radar corroboration more meaningful (multiple independent aircraft and sensor operators, not one crew alone) and gives conventional-explanation researchers a legitimate reason to ask how confidently any single contact can be distinguished from ordinary exercise clutter.

The videos reached the public in stages. On December 16, 2017, The New York Times published its report on the Pentagon's AATIP program together with two videos: the 2004 Nimitz "FLIR1" clip and the 2015 Gimbal clip, both also posted that day by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA). Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and TTSA adviser, has said he obtained the videos from Pentagon sources and passed them to the press. GoFast followed on March 9, 2018, released by TTSA and accompanying an op-ed by Mellon in The Washington Post. That chain of custody, the Navy's initially ambiguous position on the clips, and the gap of more than five years between the encounters and their formal release in April 2020 are part of this case's story.

The reports were first treated inside the Navy as a flight-safety and airspace-security problem, not a UFO story. A pilot from the Gimbal encounter told Senate staff in 2019, according to briefing notes released under FOIA, that he initially thought the contact might be a simulated adversary aircraft built into the COMPTUEX training scenario, and treated it as such before concluding otherwise. Foreign surveillance drones, balloons, aircraft glare and sensor artifacts all remain on the table and are examined later in this case file.

Complete Timeline

Date	Event
Summer 2014	VFA-11 "Red Rippers" F/A-18F Super Hornets, recently upgraded with AN/APG-79 AESA radar, begin logging unidentified contacts on their situational-awareness displays during training operations off Virginia Beach.
Summer 2014 – March 2015	Unidentified objects are reported by multiple aircrew "almost daily," per later testimony — a sustained pattern rather than an isolated sighting, prompting internal Navy safety concerns.
January 8, 2015	USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), Carrier Strike Group 12, and Carrier Air Wing 1 depart Naval Station Norfolk to begin COMPTUEX.
January 21, 2015	The "Gimbal" video is recorded by an F/A-18F Super Hornet's ATFLIR pod off the Florida coast, per the Navy's dates as given to The Black Vault (some accounts give January 20): an apparently rotating oblong object is tracked above a cloud layer while the aircrew remark, "There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the SA!"
January 21, 2015	The "GoFast" video is recorded, per the same Navy dates (AARO says January 2015, off Florida): a small object appears in ATFLIR infrared to skim the ocean surface at high apparent speed until the pod locks on to it.
December 16, 2017	The New York Times (Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, Helene Cooper) publishes its report on the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) with two videos, the 2004 Nimitz "FLIR1" clip and the 2015 Gimbal clip; Christopher Mellon later says he provided the videos to the press. TTSA posts both the same day.
March 9, 2018	To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), with Mellon as national security affairs advisor and Luis Elizondo among its principals, publicly releases the GoFast video, describing it as an authentic 2015 Navy encounter off the East Coast; Mellon's op-ed in The Washington Post the same day discusses it.
May 26, 2019	The New York Times publishes "'Wow, What Is That?' Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects," the first extensive on-record account of the wider 2014–2015 wave, naming Ryan Graves and quoting several of his squadronmates.
September 2019	Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher confirms to reporters that the leaked videos are genuine and that the Navy designates their contents as "unidentified aerial phenomena," while noting the footage had not been formally cleared for public release.
April 27, 2020	The Department of Defense officially declassifies and releases all three videos — FLIR1, Gimbal, and GoFast — via a public statement from spokesperson Sue Gough, ending more than two years of ambiguity since the first leak.
May 16, 2021	Ryan Graves appears on 60 Minutes (CBS, Bill Whitaker), describing near-daily UAP contacts by his squadron throughout 2014–2015 and calling the phenomenon a flight-safety issue.
June 25, 2021	The Office of the Director of National Intelligence releases its "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," folding the 2014–2015 East Coast reports into a broader 144-case dataset, the large majority of which remain formally unresolved.
May 17, 2022	The House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation holds the first public congressional UAP hearing in over 50 years; Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray testify and reference the broader Navy pilot reporting pattern.
July 26, 2023	House Oversight Committee hearing, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency." Ryan Graves testifies under oath alongside David Grusch and David Fravor, describing the 2014–2015 activity and near mid-air-collision safety hazards in training airspace.
September 14, 2023	NASA's UAP Independent Study Team releases its final report, using GoFast as a worked example of how motion parallax can make a slow, distant object appear to move at extraordinary speed.
March 8, 2024	The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) releases its Historical Record Report Volume I on past U.S. government UAP-related activity.
November 2024 – February 2025	AARO director Jon Kosloski tells Congress in November 2024 that the GoFast object was "not actually close to the water"; AARO's "GoFast" case resolution, dated February 6, 2025, concludes it was near 13,000 feet, moving at 5–92 mph with the wind, and "did not move at anomalous speeds," while noting that the original video file and metadata had been lost.
2025–2026	Gimbal itself remains without an official AARO case resolution. A camera-relative infrared-glare explanation proposed by analyst Mick West and others remains the leading technical counter-hypothesis but continues to be disputed by proponents of the anomalous interpretation.

The 2014–2015 East Coast Wave: "It Was a Daily Occurrence"

What sets the Gimbal and GoFast videos apart from most single-incident footage is that, by the aircrews' own account, they were not isolated. According to the 2019 New York Times account and Ryan Graves' later testimony, the contacts began after the squadron's Super Hornets received upgraded radar in 2014 and continued at a high rate; on 60 Minutes Graves described them as occurring "every day for at least a couple years." Pilots reported objects reaching about 30,000 feet with no visible engine or exhaust plume. In the Gimbal audio itself, the aircrew remark that the objects are "all going against the wind" and that "the wind's 120 knots to the west." According to the pilots, multiple aircrew logged contacts on different sorties; how far those reports were independently corroborated by separate aircraft has not been documented publicly.

The sightings created a flight-safety problem before they became a media story. Graves testified in July 2023 that his squadron filed a safety report after an object — a dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere, estimated at five to 15 feet across — passed within 50 feet of the lead aircraft of a pair of jets about 10 miles off Virginia Beach, and that the report received no official acknowledgment. That safety framing, more than any claim about origin, is what pushed the reports up the chain of command and, years later, led Graves to found Americans for Safe Aerospace and testify before Congress. His consistent public position has been that pilots needed a formal, stigma-free reporting pathway for a real aviation hazard, not that he could identify what the objects were.

Sensor-Only Contacts: How Gimbal and GoFast Differ from Nimitz

One distinction worth making explicit, since it is easy to lose in casual comparisons of the "big three" videos: the 2004 Nimitz encounter involved direct, unaided-eye visual observation — David Fravor and Alex Dietrich both maneuvered close enough to see the "Tic Tac" object with their own eyes before and independent of any camera footage. Gimbal and GoFast are, by contrast, sensor-only encounters: in neither case has any aircrew member described seeing the object directly with the naked eye at close range; what exists is ATFLIR infrared imagery captured at ranges the aircrews have not publicly stated — GoFast's on-screen range is about 4 nautical miles, and later analyses of Gimbal put it much farther — too far for the unaided eye to resolve a defined shape. This matters for how the case should be weighed. It removes one entire category of potential witness testimony — direct visual morphology, lighting, and proximity effects — that anchors cases like Nimitz or the Coyne helicopter incident, and it means that, unlike those cases, virtually the entire evidentiary weight of Gimbal and GoFast rests on the correct interpretation of instrument data rather than corroborated direct observation. That is precisely the kind of evidence most vulnerable to the optical and parallax artifacts Mick West and AARO have each proposed, and it is a legitimate part of why this case is rated differently than encounters built on direct multi-witness visual sightings.

The Gimbal Video: "There's a Whole Fleet of Them"

The video known as "Gimbal" runs about half a minute and shows a monochrome ATFLIR infrared view: a dark, oblong shape with a bright surrounding glow appears above a layer of clouds, seeming to rotate while the targeting reticle tracks it. Cockpit audio captures the aircrew reacting with surprise, including the line that became the video's signature — "There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the SA!" — referring to the radar situational-awareness display, which they say shows additional contacts. The object shows no visible wings or exhaust, and its apparent rotation gave the clip its name. The video itself displays no range to the target; distance estimates for it come from later analysis, not from the aircrew.

Both the "whole fleet" radio call and the rotation itself became central to the case's subsequent debate. Proponents point out that the aircrew's real-time radar cross-check — not just a visual impression, but an independent instrument confirming multiple simultaneous contacts — is difficult to dismiss as simple misperception, and that the footage was later formally confirmed as authentic, unaltered Navy sensor data by the Pentagon itself. Skeptics, most prominently analyst Mick West, argue that the "rotation" is not physical at all: because an ATFLIR pod uses a gimbal-mounted camera that must continuously re-orient itself to keep a moving target centered in frame as the tracking jet maneuvers, any infrared glare around a distant, ordinary aircraft's engine exhaust — larger and brighter than the aircraft itself in thermal imaging — will appear to rotate in lockstep with the camera's own gimbal motion, not with any actual movement of the object. West's analysis notes that the object's apparent spin correlates precisely with visible changes in the tracking display's own orientation indicators, which he argues would be an extraordinary coincidence if the rotation were a real physical property of a craft roughly 20–30 miles away rather than a camera-relative optical artifact.

The GoFast Video: Skimming the Waves — Or Not

"GoFast" is the more visually dramatic of the two clips: a small, indistinct object appears to streak just above the ocean surface at extraordinary apparent velocity as the F/A-18F's ATFLIR pod struggles to keep it centered, with cockpit audio capturing the aircrew's astonishment at how quickly it appears to be moving. For years after its 2018 release, the object's apparent low-altitude, high-speed flight past the wave tops was treated by many observers — including some Pentagon officials in informal comments — as one of the strongest visual arguments for genuinely exotic performance in the entire UAP video record.

That reading has not survived quantitative scrutiny. Independent analyst Mick West published a detailed rebuttal on his Metabunk forum within weeks of the March 2018 release, arguing from the numbers on screen — the ATFLIR's range, the jet's altitude and the camera's depression angle — that the object was not skimming the water but was roughly 13,000 feet up, and that its apparent speed across the frame was parallax: the effect of watching nearby scenery rush past a train window while a distant object seems to crawl, except that here the camera showed no foreground to break the illusion. Once range and altitude were factored in, West calculated a true speed consistent with a balloon or other object drifting with the wind.

What makes GoFast unusual is that the government's own review later reached substantially the same result. AARO director Jon Kosloski told Congress in November 2024 that the object was "not actually close to the water," and the office's "GoFast" case resolution, dated February 6, 2025, concluded that it was at about 13,000 feet over the Atlantic off Florida. Using the on-screen telemetry, historical wind data (about 69 mph from the west at that altitude) and trigonometry, AARO put its speed at between 5 and 92 mph depending on the jet's heading, "moving with the wind," and stated with high confidence that the object "did not move at anomalous speeds." AARO noted a limitation: it worked from a compressed copy of the video because the original file and its metadata had been lost, and it lacked complete flight telemetry for the jet. The convergence of West's 2018 calculation with AARO's 2025 resolution is one of the more solid conventional explanations in modern UAP literature, though it applies only to GoFast and does not resolve Gimbal.

The Proponents' Rebuttal: Disputing AARO's Resolution

AARO's GoFast resolution did not end the debate. Critics questioned how much weight it could bear given that the original video file and metadata had been lost, and disclosure advocates, including filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, have long argued that AARO's institutional record — including public disputes with former directors Sean Kirkpatrick and Timothy Phillips over the handling of witness testimony in other cases — is reason to treat any single AARO resolution with caution. An earlier version of this page attributed a specific quotation about the GoFast resolution to Corbell; it could not be traced and has been removed.

This case file treats that pushback as part of the record, while noting what it does not do: no proponent has published a competing reconstruction of GoFast's altitude, speed or path from the video's own telemetry that produces an anomalous result. The criticism has been aimed mainly at AARO's credibility and at the lost original data, rather than at a specific error in the calculation. A challenge to an institution's trustworthiness is a different kind of argument from a challenge to its math, and the two should be weighed separately. As of this writing, no independent reconstruction has overturned the roughly 13,000-foot, 5–92 mph estimate for GoFast; Gimbal has no equivalent official resolution to dispute.

From Leak to Official Release: Mellon, TTSA, and the New York Times

Unlike the Nimitz footage, which had circulated online since 2007, Gimbal and GoFast reached the public through a more controversial route. Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence frustrated by the government's reluctance to investigate UAP reports, says he obtained the videos through Pentagon contacts and provided them to the press; he was also a national security adviser to To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), alongside former AATIP official Luis Elizondo. Gimbal accompanied the Times's December 2017 AATIP story, and GoFast followed in March 2018, both described as authentic 2015 Navy encounters off the East Coast.

That release sequence became a controversy in its own right. Because the clips had not gone through formal release review when they were published, the Navy's position in September 2019 was awkward: spokesman Joseph Gradisher confirmed that the footage was genuine and that the Navy designated its contents "unidentified aerial phenomena," while the Navy maintained that the videos had never been cleared for public release. That ambiguity ended on April 27, 2020, when the Department of Defense formally released all three videos, explaining through spokesperson Sue Gough that it was doing so "to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos," after a review determined that release would not compromise sensitive capabilities or systems.

Congress, AARO, and the Broader Disclosure Debate

Gimbal and GoFast did not stay confined to internal Navy channels or niche UFO media. The May 2021 60 Minutes segment featuring Ryan Graves brought the wider 2014–2015 wave to a mainstream television audience for the first time, a month before the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its June 2021 "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," which folded the East Coast reports into a larger 144-case dataset and noted that the overwhelming majority remained officially unresolved. The following year, on May 17, 2022, the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation convened the first public congressional hearing on UAP in over fifty years, with Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray testifying about the broader Navy reporting pattern the Gimbal and GoFast cases had helped surface.

The most consequential single appearance came on July 26, 2023, when Graves testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee's hearing on "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency," seated alongside Nimitz pilot David Fravor and whistleblower David Grusch in what became the most-watched congressional UAP hearing in history. Graves' written and spoken testimony reiterated the near-daily 2014–2015 pattern, the near mid-air-collision safety hazard, and his central policy argument: that military and commercial aviators needed a formal, non-stigmatized reporting mechanism for encounters like these, independent of whatever the objects ultimately turn out to be. That same testimony helped drive continued congressional funding and oversight for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon body created in 2022 specifically to consolidate and investigate UAP reports across the services — the same office that would go on to publish the quantitative GoFast resolution in 2025. NASA's own UAP Independent Study Team, in its September 2023 final report, separately cited GoFast as an instructive public example of how easily ordinary phenomena can be misjudged from a moving aircraft, part of the team's broader recommendation that rigorous scientific method, not viral video, should drive future UAP assessment.

AARO's own institutional history runs directly through this case. Congress's fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Pentagon to stand up a dedicated body to synchronize UAP-related detection and reporting efforts across the military services, and on July 20, 2022, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks formally established AARO by expanding and renaming the short-lived Airborne Object Identification and Management Group, naming physicist Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick as its first director. AARO's stated mission — to detect, identify, and if possible attribute objects of interest operating in military airspace — was created substantially in response to the flight-safety concerns Graves and his fellow Red Rippers aircrew had first raised years earlier over incidents like Gimbal and GoFast, making the office's eventual 2025 technical resolution of one of the two videos something close to the system closing a loop it was originally built to address.

Navy Reporting Reform: A Lasting Institutional Legacy

Whatever the objects in Gimbal and GoFast ultimately prove to be, one concrete, verifiable outcome of the 2014–2015 wave is a permanent change in how the U.S. Navy formally handles UAP reports. Prior to this period, aircrew who encountered an unidentified object during a training flight had no clear, stigma-free channel to document it beyond an informal safety report, and multiple pilots quoted in the 2019 New York Times account described genuine reluctance to report contacts for fear of being ridiculed or having their flight status questioned. In the years following, the Navy updated its guidance to explicitly authorize and standardize UAP reporting through existing safety and intelligence channels, using the "unidentified aerial phenomena" terminology that spokesperson Joseph Gradisher would later use publicly in 2019. That institutional shift — from an unofficial culture of silence to a formal reporting pathway — is precisely the outcome Ryan Graves has said he was seeking when he founded Americans for Safe Aerospace and testified before Congress, and it represents one of the least disputed, most concretely documented legacies of this entire case, regardless of how the Gimbal-versus-GoFast technical debate is ultimately resolved.

Key Witnesses

The Five Observables Assessment

The Five Observables framework, developed by former AATIP director Luis Elizondo, is used to classify UAP encounters by performance characteristics exceeding known technology of their era:

Assessment: None of the five observables is confidently rated present in this case, a meaningfully different profile than higher-scoring cases like Nimitz or the Coyne helicopter incident, both of which combine direct visual observation with instrumented data in ways that Gimbal and GoFast, as sensor-only encounters, simply cannot. Hypersonic Velocity is explicitly marked contested: it was the headline claim associated with GoFast for years, but AARO's own 2025 quantitative resolution puts the object's true speed at 5–92 mph, and it is rated speculative rather than absent only because the broader 2014–2015 wave included separate pilot reports of objects reaching high altitude quickly that were never captured on video and so cannot be independently verified either way. Anti-Gravity Lift and Instant Acceleration are rated speculative on the strength of aircrew testimony describing objects that appeared to hold position against high-altitude winds or accelerate away abruptly, but neither video provides an unambiguous instrumented measurement of either behavior once camera-relative and parallax effects are accounted for. Low Observability is rated speculative because the objects were tracked on ATFLIR, while pilots described them as showing no visible engine or exhaust plume — a mixed signature rather than a clear case either way. Trans-Medium travel is rated absent: neither video, nor any witness account associated with this case, describes a genuine air-to-water or water-to-air transition.

Evidence Assessment

Why "Disputed"

Gimbal and GoFast earn a DISPUTED rating because the case combines a genuinely unusual level of institutional corroboration — official Pentagon confirmation of authenticity, aircrew references to multiple radar contacts, and sworn congressional testimony describing a sustained, unit-wide pattern — with conventional explanations that are, for at least one of the two flagship videos, no longer speculative but quantitatively demonstrated. AARO's 2025 GoFast resolution is not a dismissive hand-wave; it is a worked, numbers-based methodology using the video's own displayed telemetry, cross-checked against independently verifiable historical wind data, that converges closely with an entirely separate civilian analyst's earlier parallax calculation. That level of convergent, transparent, falsifiable conventional analysis is rare in UAP literature and cannot honestly be waved away. At the same time, Gimbal itself has never received an equivalent official resolution: the camera-relative glare explanation is technically serious and well-argued, but it remains a proposed explanation rather than a Pentagon-confirmed one, and the underlying "whole fleet" radar corroboration — multiple contacts the aircrew describe on their radar display, not just a visual impression of one object — has no fully worked conventional explanation of comparable rigor. The broader 2014–2015 wave, meanwhile, sits in its own middle ground: its persistence and multi-witness character make simple hallucination or hoax implausible, but the same timing coincides suspiciously closely with a major radar hardware upgrade, leaving open a real possibility that at least some contacts reflect new sensor artifacts the squadron had not yet learned to filter out. That mixture — strong institutional acknowledgment and multi-witness corroboration on one hand, a genuinely rigorous and partially successful conventional resolution on the other, with real, unresolved technical questions remaining on both sides — is the definition of a disputed case rather than a credible or debunked one. It is worth being explicit about what this rating is not: it is not a claim that the aircrews lied, hallucinated, or behaved unprofessionally, nor is it a claim that AARO's GoFast resolution is beyond question. It is an honest reflection of a record that currently contains one video with a strong, quantitative, twice-independently-derived conventional explanation and one video that does not, sitting inside a wider reporting pattern too persistent and too multiply-witnessed to dismiss outright.

Sensor & Instrumentation Detection Profile

Both videos were captured by the AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pod carried by F/A-18F Super Hornets, cross-referenced in real time against each aircraft's AN/APG-79 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar and its cockpit situational-awareness (SA) display. Multiple aircraft reported simultaneous returns on their radar displays during the broader 2014–2015 wave. Because the ATFLIR pod overlays live range, bearing, closure-rate, and depression-angle telemetry directly onto the recorded video, both clips are unusually data-rich by UAP-footage standards — rich enough that independent analysts and, later, AARO itself, were able to reconstruct the tracked objects' probable true position and speed years after the fact using nothing but the numbers already burned into the frame.

Environmental & Geospatial Context

Encounters occurred over the winter North Atlantic in restricted military training airspace (principally Warning Area W-72 and adjoining blocks) stretching from off Virginia Beach south to Jacksonville, Florida, during the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group's COMPTUEX work-up cycle — a period of intentionally dense, multi-aircraft exercise traffic. AARO's 2025 GoFast resolution specifically relied on historical meteorological records for the recording date and location, finding sustained winds near 69 mph from the west at the object's calculated altitude — a figure that turned out to matter a great deal, since it is close to the speed range AARO ultimately attributed to the object itself.

Observer Credibility & Occupational Profile

Career U.S. Navy strike-fighter aircrew — pilots and weapon systems officers with AESA radar and ATFLIR training — logged the contacts; Lt. Ryan Graves later testified under oath before Congress, while the specific aircrew who recorded Gimbal and GoFast have never been publicly named. Unlike many classic UFO cases, none of the reporting aircrew had any prior public interest in ufology, several have said they initially worried reporting the objects would harm their careers, and the reports reached Navy leadership through routine safety channels rather than any deliberate publicity effort — a pattern investigators generally regard as evidence against fabrication, whatever the objects ultimately prove to be.

Physical & Material Assays

No debris or physical material of any kind was recovered from either encounter. The entire evidentiary record consists of two video/audio recordings, associated radar data, and testimony — itself now the subject of extensive independent forensic re-analysis. No radiological, chemical, or metallurgical sampling was ever possible, since neither object was ever approached, intercepted, or downed.

Historical Precedents & Archive Matches

Gimbal and GoFast form two-thirds of the "big three" Pentagon-released UAP videos alongside the 2004 Nimitz "Tic Tac" footage, and directly seeded the modern disclosure movement that produced David Grusch's 2023 testimony and the creation of AARO. They also inaugurated a specific sub-genre within that movement: cases where the government's own subsequent technical analysis, rather than outside skeptics alone, produced the leading conventional explanation — a pattern later echoed in AARO's other published case-resolution reports covering incidents at sites including Al Taqaddam Air Base and Puerto Rico.

Material Analysis

No physical debris, landing trace, or recoverable artifact of any kind exists for this case, and none has ever been claimed by any witness or investigator — both encounters were purely sensor-and-visual, with no ground or sea recovery ever attempted. What this case does have, unusually, is a form of "material evidence" in the video and telemetry files themselves: unlike most UFO footage, which is often low-resolution, secondhand, or of disputed provenance, the Gimbal and GoFast ATFLIR recordings are original-format U.S. Navy sensor data, formally authenticated by the Department of Defense, complete with on-screen range, bearing, and closure-rate telemetry that has allowed multiple independent parties — Mick West, the NASA Independent Study Team, and AARO itself — to conduct genuine, falsifiable forensic reconstruction of the objects' actual flight paths rather than relying on witness estimation alone. That data-rich quality is precisely what allowed AARO's 2025 GoFast resolution to be a quantitative calculation rather than a subjective judgment call, and it is also what has allowed Mick West's Gimbal glare hypothesis to be checked, frame by frame, against the tracking display's own recorded orientation changes. In an evidentiary sense, the "material" being analyzed here is the recording apparatus's own instrument log, not a physical sample — but it has proven considerably more tractable to independent verification than the eyewitness-only testimony that dominates most historical UFO cases.

The Conventional Explanation Candidate: Parallax-Induced Misperception of a Slow, High-Altitude Object

For the GoFast video, the leading conventional explanation, now also AARO's, holds that the object was a balloon or small drone drifting at roughly 13,000 feet, and that its apparent speed skimming the ocean was parallax — the effect that makes nearby scenery rush past a moving vehicle's window while a distant object seems to crawl. It deserves to be taken seriously not because it is intuitive but because it has been derived twice with methods anyone can check against the video's own numbers: by Mick West in 2018 and by AARO in its February 2025 case resolution.

A caveat: this explanation is rated highly here because its method is reproducible against the video's displayed readouts, not because AARO adopted it. An official resolution that confirmed work an outside analyst had published about seven years earlier, from a compressed copy whose original metadata was lost, is different evidence from an office reconstructing the case from raw data; this file credits the finding on the strength of the reproducible convergence.

Camera-Relative Infrared Glare Artifact (Gimbal)

For the Gimbal video, the leading conventional candidate holds that the tracked object is a conventional aircraft roughly 20–30 miles distant, and that its apparent rotation is not a physical property of the object at all but an artifact of the ATFLIR pod's own gimbal-mounted camera continuously re-orienting to keep a moving target centered in frame, causing the bright infrared glare of the aircraft's engine exhaust — larger and more diffuse than the aircraft itself in thermal imaging — to appear to spin in step with the camera's own rotation. This candidate is well-argued and technically serious, matching the object's apparent spin to visible changes in the tracking system's own orientation readouts, but unlike GoFast, it has not been adopted as an official AARO case resolution; it remains the leading proposed explanation rather than a Pentagon-confirmed one, and it does not, by itself, fully account for the independent radar corroboration of multiple additional simultaneous contacts described in the aircrew's "whole fleet" remark.

Radar/Sensor Transition Artifacts During a New Hardware Rollout

A third, broader candidate addresses the wider 2014–2015 wave rather than either video specifically: it proposes that at least some of the near-daily contacts reported by VFA-11 in this period reflect new clutter, false tracks, or interpretation errors introduced by the squadron's contemporaneous transition to the AN/APG-79 AESA radar and its associated situational-awareness display — a substantially different sensor architecture than pilots had previously flown with, and one that a squadron might take months to fully calibrate their expectations against. This candidate is plausible as a partial contributor to the broader wave and has been raised informally by some technical commentators, but it does not, on its own, explain the specific ATFLIR-visualized objects in either Gimbal or GoFast, since infrared imaging is a separate sensor system from the AESA radar and would not share the same failure mode.

Related Cases

Further Reading — Recommended Literature

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Essential Viewing

Sources

• U.S. Department of Defense. "Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos," April 27, 2020. defense.gov
• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). "UAP Case Resolution Reports" (includes GoFast Case Resolution Card, Feb. 2025). aaro.mil
• AARO. "GoFast" case resolution, dated February 6, 2025 (PDF). aaro.mil
• The Black Vault. "Pentagon Releases AARO Report on 'Go Fast' Video Analysis," 2025. theblackvault.com
• The Black Vault. "U.S. Navy Releases Dates of Three Officially Acknowledged Encounters with 'Phenomena.'" theblackvault.com
• Cooper, Helene; Blumenthal, Ralph; Kean, Leslie. "'Wow, What Is That?' Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects," The New York Times, May 26, 2019 (republished via Seattle Times wire). seattletimes.com
• Kean, Leslie; Blumenthal, Ralph; Cooper, Helene. "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program," The New York Times, December 16, 2017.
• CBS News. "UFOs Regularly Spotted in Restricted U.S. Airspace," 60 Minutes, May 16, 2021. cbsnews.com
• NBC News. "Navy Confirms Videos Did Capture UFO Sightings, But It Calls Them by Another Name," September 2019. nbcnews.com
• Congress.gov. "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency," House Oversight Committee hearing, July 26, 2023. congress.gov
• Graves, Ryan. Written Testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, July 26, 2023. congress.gov
• NASA. "NASA Shares Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Report," September 14, 2023. science.nasa.gov
• Cade, DL. "That Navy UFO Footage Has an Optical Explanation," PetaPixel, April 28, 2020 (reporting on Mick West's analysis). petapixel.com
• West, Mick. "'GO FAST' Footage from Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy. Bird? Balloon?" Metabunk forum thread. metabunk.org
• West, Mick. "Gimbal UFO - A New Analysis," Metabunk forum thread. metabunk.org
• Wikimedia Commons. "Category:Pentagon UFO Videos" (hosts the original DoD-released Gimbal and GoFast video files as U.S. government public-domain works). commons.wikimedia.org
• Wikipedia. "Pentagon UFO Videos." en.wikipedia.org
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," June 25, 2021.
• Military.com. "Navy Declassifies Its Notorious 'UFO Sighting' Videos," April 27, 2020. military.com
• To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science. "2015 GO FAST Footage" archive page. thevault.tothestarsacademy.com
• Elizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs, William Morrow, 2024.
• Graff, Garrett M. UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, Avid Reader Press, 2023.
• Infobae / The Black Vault. "They revealed details of the statement to the US Congress of the pilot who filmed the famous UFO Gimbal," April 7, 2022 (2019 Senate staff briefing notes released under FOIA). infobae.com
• Mother Jones. "The Latest Congressional Hearing on UFOs Was Full of Wild Claims," July 2023 (Graves: cube in a clear sphere within 50 feet of the lead aircraft). motherjones.com

Corrections (October 2026)

This page was rechecked in October 2026. The earlier version said Gimbal and GoFast were not public when The New York Times published its AATIP story on December 16, 2017; Gimbal was published with that story, and GoFast followed on March 9, 2018. It dated Mick West's GoFast parallax analysis to 2020; he published it in 2018, within weeks of the video's release. It quoted Jeremy Corbell calling AARO's GoFast resolution "an insult to anybody paying attention"; that quotation could not be traced and was removed. It said the near mid-air collision Graves described came within about 100 feet; his 2023 testimony says the object passed within 50 feet of the lead aircraft. It said both videos were "each backed by real-time radar cross-checks from multiple aircraft"; the only radar reference is the Gimbal aircrew's remark about contacts on their display, and no radar data has been released. It gave crew range estimates of 10–30 nautical miles; no such crew estimates were found.

Following this review, the rating was changed from Disputed 48 to Disputed 42 (October 27, 2026), because the higher rating had rested partly on claims corrected or removed above.

Other corrections: AARO's GoFast resolution is dated February 6, 2025 (not "February 6–20"), was previewed to Congress in November 2024, and was based on a compressed copy because the original file and metadata were lost. The videos were recorded off Florida (the Gimbal encounter off Jacksonville), not off Virginia; the wider wave included incidents off Virginia Beach. Some sources date Gimbal to January 20, 2015. A paragraph presenting 2014 Russian activity as the Navy's working hypothesis was replaced with the documented account of a Gimbal pilot who first took the contact for a simulated adversary in the exercise. Claims that the crews reported inconsistent radar locks or IFF responses, and a "daylight, calm seas" weather description, were not supported and were removed, as were computed Moon, airport and weather values for a single map point.