Gimbal and GoFast videos

Gimbal and GoFast videos

Type	Case (military infrared videos)
File names	GIMBAL.wmv, GOFAST.wmv
Recorded	Early 2015 (Gimbal dated 20 January 2015)
Place	Off the U.S. East Coast
Recorded by	F/A-18 Super Hornet aircrews from USS Theodore Roosevelt, using the AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR targeting pod
Leaked	December 2017 (Gimbal), March 2018 (GoFast)
Official release	27 April 2020, Department of Defense
Official status	"Unidentified"
Also known as	Gimbal, GoFast, FLIR1
On the Timeline	3 events, 2004–2020

The Gimbal and GoFast videos are two infrared videos of unidentified objects recorded in early 2015 by U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet aircrews from the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, operating off the U.S. East Coast. With the 2004 "FLIR1" or "Tic Tac" video from the USS Nimitz, they make up the three "Pentagon UFO videos", which were leaked to the press from 2017 and formally released by the Department of Defense on 27 April 2020. The Pentagon still classifies the objects as "unidentified".^[1][2][6]

The videos, which include cockpit display data and audio of the aircrews' reactions, have been widely described as official documentation of UFOs and received extensive media coverage. Skeptical analysts, and in the case of GoFast a NASA study team, have argued that they show ordinary objects — a distant aircraft and a slow-moving object such as a balloon — made to look extraordinary by the camera's mechanics and the motion of the jet.^[1][6][9]

Background

The first of the Pentagon videos was recorded on 14 November 2004 during the USS Nimitz incident off southern California. After Commander David Fravor reported seeing a white, oval object about 40 feet long hovering over a disturbance in the ocean, a second wave of fighters took off, and the weapons systems officer Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood recorded an infrared video of an object he described as a "Tic Tac". Ten years later a similar series of encounters began on the other side of the country.^[1]

Recording

In 2014–2015 fighter pilots of the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, including Lieutenant Ryan Graves, were training off the East Coast of the United States when they reported instrument detections of unknown aerial objects they could not identify. According to the pilots' later accounts, the objects appeared almost daily on their newly upgraded radars. Both videos were recorded with the AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pod, an infrared camera carried under the Super Hornet, whose screen shows the targeting data along with the image.^[1][3][6]

Gimbal

The Gimbal video is dated 20 January 2015. It shows a dark, oblong object with a glowing outline that appears to slowly rotate as the camera tracks it. The aircrew can be heard commenting on the object and on a "whole fleet" of others visible on their radar.^[1][3]

GoFast

The GoFast video, also from early 2015, shows the camera locking onto a small object that appears to race low over the surface of the ocean, while the crew members express their excitement. The release of the video by To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science described the object as moving quickly and low across the water.^[1][6]

Leak and release

On 16 December 2017 The New York Times published a report on the Pentagon's secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), together with two videos, "FLIR" and "GIMBAL", said to show encounters by jets from the Nimitz and the Theodore Roosevelt with unusually shaped, fast-moving aircraft. The videos were posted online by To The Stars Academy, the UFO research company co-founded by the former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge, and GoFast followed in March 2018; Wikipedia notes that The Washington Post also published GoFast. The videos had first been given to the press by Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Around the same time, AATIP's director, Luis Elizondo, had resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 in protest at government secrecy, writing to Defense Secretary James Mattis that the program was not being taken seriously. According to Wired, a copy of one of the videos had been on a UFO forum since at least 2007.^[1][4][6]

The stories set off "fevered speculation by UFO investigators". The journalism professor Keith Kloor criticised the coverage as "a curious narrative that appears to be driven by thinly-sourced and slanted reporting", arguing that it gave only cursory attention to the most likely prosaic explanations and instead played on the catchy "UFO" label.^[1]

Official confirmation

In September 2019 the Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough confirmed that the videos had been made by naval aviators and were "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years". In February 2020 the Navy confirmed that naval intelligence officials had briefed members of Congress. On 27 April 2020 the Department of Defense formally released the three videos, saying it was doing so "in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real", and that "the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified'". It gave no explanation of what they showed.^[1][2][5][6]

Analysis

Gimbal: a rotating glare

The science writer and skeptic Mick West, who has documented his analyses in a series of YouTube videos and on his website Metabunk, argues that Gimbal shows a plane seen by the infrared glare of its hot engines. In his view, the object's apparent rotation is not the object turning at all, but the glare being rotated by the camera's gimbal mechanism as it keeps the target locked in view, and he has shown how a gimbal-mounted infrared camera can produce both the rotating glare and the sharpened image seen in the footage. On 2 August 2022 he published a detailed analysis of the optical effects he proposes.^[1][6]

GoFast: parallax

West and others used the numbers on the display to calculate that the GoFast object was not skimming the sea but flying slowly at high altitude, appearing fast because of parallax: as the jet moves, objects at different distances seem to move at different speeds against the ocean far below. West suggested the object was a balloon.^[1][6]

NASA's independent study team on unidentified anomalous phenomena, which presented its work at a public meeting on 31 May 2023, used GoFast as its worked example in its final report of 14 September 2023. From the camera's elevation angle, the range to the target and the jet's altitude, it calculated that the object was at about 13,000 feet and 4.2 miles from the ocean behind it. With the jet's ground speed at about 435 mph, the report concluded that the impression of rapid motion was at least partly due to the speed of the sensor combined with parallax. Analysing a 22-second stretch in which the jet was banking left at about 15 degrees, it calculated that the object moved only about 390 metres — an average of about 40 mph, a typical wind speed at that altitude. The team noted that the object appeared colder than the ocean, so there was no sign of heat from any propulsion system, which further suggested it was drifting with the wind, though it added that more data would be needed for a firmer conclusion. The report cited GoFast as an example of how apparently anomalous behaviour can often be explained by the motion of the sensor platform.^[7][9]

Why no official explanation?

West has argued that the Navy does not publish its own analysis because doing so would reveal operational details, such as how the ATFLIR system works or the limitations of American radar, and that the military is secretive by default. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, called the leap from "unidentified" to extraterrestrial visitors or a government cover-up "amazing", and said all three videos had far more likely explanations than alien visitation. Both said they did not rule out the possibility that pilots were seeing something extraordinary, but thought other explanations more likely.^[6]

Other views

Pilots who flew with the strike group, and other supporters, argue that the skeptical explanations do not account for the radar tracks and visual reports made at the time. Ryan Graves testified alongside David Fravor and the former intelligence officer David Grusch at a 2023 hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.^[1][3]

Other commentators have suggested earthly technology. The astrophysicist Adam Frank, writing in The New York Times, said the evidence for physics-defying alien technology "doesn't amount to much", and suggested the objects might be drones sent by rivals such as Russia or China to lure pilots into revealing their sensor capabilities; the astronomer Thomas Bania suggested some form of electronic warfare. Senator Marco Rubio, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he feared the objects might be Chinese or Russian technology, while the retired Admiral Gary Roughead said that in his time "most of the assessments were inconclusive". Adam Dodd and the security expert Jack Weinstein argued that neither country could build aircraft with such capabilities. The writer Jeff Wise suggested that electronic-warfare "spoofing" of U.S. sensors could create false readings of speed and position.^[1]

Aftermath

To encourage pilots to report incursions that had "been occurring regularly since 2014", the Navy updated its procedures for reporting unexplained aerial observations; a spokesman suggested the growing availability of small drones such as quadcopters might explain the increase. On 25 June 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary report on UAP drawing mainly on Navy reports from the previous 20 years. It reached no conclusion about what they were, said they "probably lack a single explanation", and proposed five categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or industry technology, foreign craft, and "other".^[1]

The government transparency site The Black Vault filed a Freedom of Information request with the Navy in April 2020 for more footage. About two years later the Navy confirmed it held more but refused to release it, saying this could give adversaries valuable information about its operations, vulnerabilities or capabilities. In February 2026 President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to prepare UAP records for public release, and on 8 May 2026 about 162 declassified UAP records were published; officials said they contained no confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial life or technology.^[1]

Later videos

In April 2021 the Pentagon confirmed that leaked footage of triangular objects blinking in the clouds had been taken by Navy personnel aboard the destroyer USS Russell in 2019; West suggested the triangles were "bokeh", an optical effect that makes out-of-focus lights take the shape of the camera's aperture. The Pentagon also confirmed photos of objects described as a "sphere", an "acorn" and a "metallic blimp". The following month it confirmed a video recorded on 15 July 2019 aboard the USS Omaha, showing a spherical object crossing the screen at night before easing down into the water; West said the simplest explanation was "just a plane".^[1][8]

In 2023 the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) analysed and released further military footage, attributing an apparently anomalous trail filmed by two MQ-9 drones to a commercial aircraft and a 2021 infrared video from the western United States to commercial airliners, while saying it could not identify a "metallic orb" filmed over the Middle East, which some skeptics suggested was a balloon.^[1]

In popular culture

The videos featured in the 2019 History Channel series Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation, and on 5 October 2019 episode 1361 of The Joe Rogan Experience discussed them and interviewed David Fravor.^[1]

On the UAP Timeline

• USS Princeton data recordings claim (14 November 2004) — USS Princeton radar staff say two men took the Tic Tac encounter data recordings.
• Gradisher–Gough FOIA coordination emails (10 July 2020) — A Navy spokesman's email shows efforts to coordinate FOIA replies about UAP across agencies.
• Karson Kammerzell's Tic Tac account (30 November 2020) — A Navy communications operator describes the Tic Tac event from the USS Princeton.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Pentagon UFO videos”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.