# The Fleet Behind the Gimbal [View on uap.fun]() CASE FILE 017 · 2014–2015 Published: September 17, 2026 In 2014 Navy pilots off Virginia began seeing objects on their new radar nearly every day. One described a dark cube inside a clear sphere passing within fifty feet of his jet. In January 2015 an infrared pod caught a dark oblong that seemed to roll on its edge while a voice said, “There’s a whole fleet of them.” Skeptics say the roll belongs to the camera. The radar tapes that showed the fleet have never been released. ![Full infrared display frame from the official U.S. Navy Gimbal video, letterboxed in a wide image, with targeting symbology surrounding a dark oblong heat signature above clouds.]() Authentic frame from the official U.S. Navy Gimbal video; side bars preserve the complete 4:3 sensor display in the 2:1 archive frame. ## AT A GLANCE - **DATE:** Summer 2014–March 2015; the Navy dates the Gimbal and GoFast recordings to January 21, 2015 - **LOCATION:** Atlantic training ranges from Virginia to Florida, associated with USS Theodore Roosevelt - **REPORT TYPE:** Military encounter - **RESOLUTION:** [Partly explained]() - **RECORD STATUS:** Gimbal unresolved; GoFast motion explained ## The story ### New eyes over the Atlantic In 2014 the F/A-18F Super Hornets of Strike Fighter Squadron 11—the Red Rippers, out of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach—were fitted with a new radar, the APG-79, and almost at once began seeing things. “After upgrades were made to our jet’s radar systems, we began detecting unknown objects,” Lt. Ryan Graves, then a pilot with the squadron, told Congress nine years later. The aircrews assumed software ghosts. But the tracks kept coming back, day after day, in the warning areas off the Virginia coast where the squadron trained, and soon the crews were matching them to their infrared pods and, now and then, to something out the window. Sources: [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() · [Written testimony of Ryan Graves]() · [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() ### The contacts become weather Graves has described the objects less as visitors than as residents. They sat at 30,000 feet, at 20,000, down near the waves; they would hold position “completely stationary in category four hurricane winds” and then “accelerate to supersonic speeds”; “these things would be out there all day,” he told The New York Times. Five aircrew told the paper the sightings ran almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015. The squadron’s language changed with them: unknown objects went into the preflight brief, next to weather and fuel. “It turned from a potentially classified drone program to a safety issue,” Graves said. Another pilot, Lt. Danny Accoin, was blunt about the alternative. “We’re here to do a job, with excellence,” he said, “not make up myths.” Sources: [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() · [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() · [Written testimony of Ryan Graves]() ### The merge that found nothing Accoin twice tried to get eyes on one. The first time he flew a thousand feet beneath a radar contact and should, he said, have been able to see it with his helmet camera; there was nothing there. Days later a training missile on his jet locked onto another object and his infrared camera picked it up as well. “I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” he told the Times. “I could not pick it up visually.” Two sensors on the aircraft agreed that something was there. The pilot’s eyes could not find it. Sources: [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() ### A cube inside a clear sphere Late in 2014 two Super Hornets entered Warning Area W-72, ten miles off Virginia Beach, in close formation, about a hundred feet apart. Sitting at the entry point, motionless against the wind, was what the pilot later described to Graves as “a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere”—the tips of the cube touching the inside of the sphere, five to fifteen feet across. It passed between the two jets, “within 50 feet of the lead aircraft.” The mission commander terminated the flight immediately. Back at Oceana, Graves found the pilot in the ready room with all his gear on and his mouth open. “I almost hit one of those things,” he said. Sources: [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() · [Written testimony of Ryan Graves]() · [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() ### The safety report that vanished into procedure A mishap report was filed. “Our squadron submitted a safety report,” Graves testified, “but there was no official acknowledgement of the incident and no further mechanism to report the sightings.” The pilots had assumed at first that they were seeing a classified drone program. A program that parked a vehicle at the entrance to a training area, in the path of two fighters, made no sense to them; and a hazard nobody would acknowledge was, to an aviator, worse than a mystery. In his written statement Graves preserved one piece of the paper trail: a 2015 email on the Navy’s classified network, subject line “Urgent safety of flight issue,” with the GoFast video attached, sent by the strike group’s commander—and deleted from the system the next day. Sources: [Written testimony of Ryan Graves]() · [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() · [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() ### Roosevelt sails into the puzzle USS Theodore Roosevelt left Norfolk on January 8, 2015, for its Composite Training Unit Exercise, fresh from a $2.6 billion, four-year refueling overhaul. It carried Carrier Air Wing 1, the Navy’s first deployable detachment of the new E-2D Advanced Hawkeye radar aircraft, and the network that let the strike group’s ships and aircraft pool their sensor pictures. It was, in other words, about the most heavily instrumented patch of ocean in the world. Somewhere in that exercise, at sunset, a Red Ripper crew with the call sign Ripper 11 finished an air-to-air training mission, called bingo fuel, turned for the ship, and found contacts in the way. Sources: [Upgraded carrier Roosevelt starts pre-deployment exercises]() · [GIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”]() ### Ripper 11 turns toward the strangers Graves was airborne elsewhere in the exercise when it happened and sat in on the briefing to the strike group’s admiral afterward. In his telling, Ripper 11 assumed the contacts were a penetration test and went to identify them, closing to within six or eight nautical miles. Night was falling; the targeting pod’s television mode was useless, so the weapons officer slewed its infrared camera onto the nearest radar contact. The pod was an ATFLIR, and its display is what the world has seen: thirty-four seconds of a magnified heat signature, recorded by a pilot Graves calls the top performer on the East Coast and a back-seater, his own classmate, “with a mustache that has become legendary.” Neither has ever been named. Sources: [GIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”]() · [Gimbal: official U.S. Navy infrared footage]() ### “There’s a whole fleet of them” The clip opens on a dark, bright-edged oblong riding above a thin cloud deck; partway through, the operator flips the sensor from white-hot to black-hot. The azimuth readout walks from the left side of the jet toward its nose. The voices are what make it. “It’s a fucking drone, bro,” one says. Then: “There’s a whole fleet of them. Look on the S.A.”—the situational-awareness page that shows the radar picture. “My gosh!” “They’re all going against the wind. The wind’s 120 knots to the west.” “Look at that thing, dude.” The camera shows one object. The fleet lives in the crew’s glance at their radar display and in Graves’s memory of the debrief: four or five more contacts spaced three to five miles apart, flying in a wedge, with the object on the screen five to ten miles from the jet. Sources: [Gimbal: official U.S. Navy infrared footage]() · [Gimbal: the first official UAP footage from the USG for public release]() · [GIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”]() [Watch the complete official Gimbal clip]() The complete 34-second U.S. Navy Gimbal clip, recorded in January 2015 and officially released in 2020. Public domain in the United States as a federal work. [Video source]() ### “It’s rotating” Near the end, as the cloud field slides beneath it, the oblong appears to tip up on its edge. “Look at that thing!” “It’s rotating.” That was the moment that gave the file its name—the object looked, Graves wrote, “disc or ‘gimbal’ shaped and somewhat tilted”—and its mythology: a wingless dark shape rolling broadside with no plume and no control surfaces. What happened next is not in the released seconds. By Graves’s account of the debrief, the formation on the radar page turned about 180 degrees together, and the object on the screen made a “zero-radius reversal… lightning fast” to stay with it. The public clip cuts off just after the turn. Sources: [Gimbal: official U.S. Navy infrared footage]() · [Gimbal: the first official UAP footage from the USG for public release]() · [GIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”]() ### The little egg above the ocean A second Roosevelt clip, GoFast, plays the opposite trick. A tiny cold dot tears across the sea while the tracking box chases it, misses, and locks. “Whoa, got it!” “Wow, what is that, man?” “Look at it fly!” Someone asks whether the box has a moving target; it is in autotrack. The name promised a sea-skimming projectile, and the display itself carried the numbers that undid it. NASA’s independent study team worked them in 2023: at the range shown, the object was at about 13,000 feet, 4.2 miles in front of the water behind it, and had moved about 390 meters in twenty-two seconds—roughly forty miles an hour, and colder than the ocean. The rush was the jet’s own 435-mile-an-hour motion, seen through a telephoto lens. Sources: [Go Fast: official U.S. Navy infrared footage]() · [2015 Go Fast footage]() · [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() · [UAP Independent Study Team final report: GoFast analysis]() [Watch the complete official GoFast clip]() The complete 34-second U.S. Navy GoFast clip. The target looks close to the sea, but NASA and AARO place it near 13,000 feet. [Video source]() ### A date hidden inside competing catalogs When the clips first appeared, the Pentagon would not say when or where they were made. In September 2019 a Navy spokesman gave The Black Vault a date: January 21, 2015, for both Gimbal and GoFast. Two analysts who later reconstructed the Gimbal flight found the file’s own metadata stamped January 25 at 02:29 UTC—the evening of the 24th on the East Coast—and an unclassified Defense Department email dating the event to the 25th, some 300 miles off Jacksonville, with weather records for that evening matching the 120-knot wind the crew calls out. The Navy’s date and the file’s date are four days apart. Nobody has reconciled them, and nobody outside the government has seen the mission records that would. Sources: [U.S. Navy releases dates of three officially acknowledged encounters with phenomena]() · [The Gimbal UAP video: a reconstruction of the object’s motion]() · [Statement on the release of the historical Navy videos]() ### From unauthorized clips to official icons Gimbal went public in mid-December 2017, posted by To The Stars Academy and embedded in the New York Times story that revealed a Pentagon UFO program. To The Stars was the venture co-founded by the musician Tom DeLonge and staffed by former intelligence officials; GoFast followed in March 2018. Graves, watching, recognized the sortie—“I was airborne when the video you released was recorded,” he wrote to the group—and waited three months for a reply. In September 2019 the Navy confirmed that the recordings were its own, that “the objects contained in these videos” were designated unidentified aerial phenomena, and that they had never been cleared for release. On April 27, 2020, the Defense Department released all three—Gimbal, GoFast, and the 2004 Nimitz clip—to end the argument over whether the circulating files were real, adding that the phenomena in them “remain characterized as ‘unidentified.’” By then the grainy shapes, the tracking boxes, and the voices had become the visual grammar of a new era. Sources: [Gimbal: the first official UAP footage from the USG for public release]() · [2015 Go Fast footage]() · [GIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”]() · [U.S. Navy releases dates of three officially acknowledged encounters with phenomena]() · [Statement on the release of the historical Navy videos]() ### What the fleet left behind Roosevelt sailed for the Middle East on March 11, 2015, and the sightings, the aircrew told the Times, tapered off once the strike group left American waters. Graves left the Navy, founded an aviators’ safety group, and in July 2023 sat at a witness table beside David Fravor and David Grusch to tell the House Oversight Committee that the encounters had gone on for almost eight years and, as far as he knew, were still occurring. Every clip has now been examined by NASA, the Pentagon, and a great many amateurs. What has not been examined, because it has never been released, is everything else: the radar tapes that showed the fleet, the mishap report on the cube, the full Gimbal recording, the names of the two men in the cockpit. Was the formation on the S.A. page five objects or five ghosts on a new radar? What did Ripper 11 see out the canopy when it was six miles away? And who deleted the safety-of-flight email? Sources: [Upgraded carrier Roosevelt starts pre-deployment exercises]() · [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() · [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() · [Written testimony of Ryan Graves]() ## The evidence ### What the public record securely establishes Gimbal and GoFast are authentic Navy ATFLIR recordings from January 2015, acknowledged by the Navy in 2019 and released by the Defense Department in 2020. Two named former aviators, Ryan Graves and Danny Accoin, have described the wider East Coast encounters on the record, and Graves has repeated the central claims under oath. The clips establish that Navy aircrew tracked unresolved infrared targets and reacted to them in real time. They do not establish the targets’ size, range, or origin. Sources: [Statement on the release of the historical Navy videos]() · [U.S. Navy releases dates of three officially acknowledged encounters with phenomena]() · [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() · [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() ### The rotation may belong to the camera The leading conventional reading of Gimbal’s turn is that the dark shape is not the object but a glare around a distant hot exhaust, rotated by the ATFLIR pod’s own optics and image derotation as the line of sight crosses the aircraft’s nose. Mick West points to camera bumps at 23, 27, 28, and 32 seconds, to background light patterns that rotate with the shape at 28 seconds, and to a rotation curve that tracks what the pod’s geometry predicts. On that model the object could be a jet some thirty miles away and the “fleet” other aircraft. Yannick Peings and Marik von Rennenkampff answer that the same sight lines, if the object was within ten miles, describe a vertical U-turn, which is what Graves says the debrief showed. The glare model explains the visible turn without an object that rolls. It does not explain the radar contacts the crew was looking at. Sources: [A Gimbal glare explainer]() · [The Gimbal UAP video: a reconstruction of the object’s motion]() · [GIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”]() ### GoFast is no longer evidence of extraordinary speed NASA’s panel put the target at 13,000 feet and about forty miles an hour. AARO’s 2025 resolution card, after modeling the wind, gives a range of five to ninety-two miles an hour, finds that the object “did not move against the wind in any simulation,” estimates it at a meter or less—“comparable to a small drone or bird”—and says it “cannot definitively identify the object, but it displayed no anomalous performance characteristics.” The office “sought but was unable to obtain witness accounts,” and the original file with its metadata is “no longer available.” The clip is genuine and the object is unidentified; the impression of something skimming the waves at fantastic speed is an artifact of a moving camera. Sources: [UAP Independent Study Team final report: GoFast analysis]() · [GoFast case resolution card and methodology]() · [Go Fast: official U.S. Navy infrared footage]() ### The strongest evidence is still missing No radar data, mission tapes, mishap report, full-length Gimbal recording, or named account from the Gimbal crew or the pilot who met the cube is public. AARO has resolved GoFast and said nothing about Gimbal. Graves’s testimony joins separate episodes into a coherent squadron history, but much of it reached the record years later, and the cube-in-sphere near miss rests on his account of what a colleague told him. Those missing records are exactly what would separate an unusual object from balloons, drones, distant jets, radar artifacts, or several unrelated hazards folded into one legend. Sources: [Written testimony of Ryan Graves]() · [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() · [GIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”]() · [GoFast case resolution card and methodology]() ### Classification This file is classified as a documented military encounter cluster with mixed outcomes. GoFast’s apparent speed is resolved as parallax with its object unidentified. Gimbal is publicly unresolved, with a substantial optical explanation for its rotation and none for the fleet behind it. The near miss and the daily radar contacts remain the aviators’ word. The mystery is not one blob but whether the unreleased record ties these incidents into the persistent, multi-sensor pattern the pilots remember. Sources: [GoFast case resolution card and methodology]() · [A Gimbal glare explainer]() · [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() · [Statement on the release of the historical Navy videos]() ## Timeline - **2014:** VFA-11 receives the APG-79 radar and begins detecting unknown tracks almost daily off Virginia; the contacts enter routine flight briefs. - **LATE 2014:** A pilot reports a cube inside a clear sphere passing within fifty feet of the lead jet at the W-72 entry point. The squadron files a safety report. - **8 JAN 2015:** USS Theodore Roosevelt leaves Norfolk for COMPTUEX with Carrier Air Wing 1 and the first deployable E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes. - **21 JAN 2015 (NAVY DATE):** Ripper 11 records the Gimbal clip at sunset; GoFast is recorded the same day by the Navy’s account, though the Gimbal file’s metadata reads January 24–25. - **2015:** The strike group commander emails an “Urgent safety of flight issue” message with GoFast attached on the classified network; it is deleted the next day. - **11 MAR 2015:** Roosevelt deploys from Norfolk; aircrew say the sightings taper off once they leave U.S. waters. - **DEC 2017 & 9 MAR 2018:** To The Stars Academy publishes Gimbal alongside the New York Times’ Pentagon-program story, then GoFast. - **26 MAY 2019:** Graves and Accoin describe the East Coast encounters on the record in The New York Times. - **11 SEP 2019:** The Navy confirms the videos are genuine, designates their objects unidentified aerial phenomena, and dates both clips to January 21, 2015. - **27 APR 2020:** The Defense Department officially releases Gimbal, GoFast, and FLIR1. - **27 SEP 2022:** Graves publishes his account of the Gimbal mission and debrief, including the four or five other contacts on the radar page. - **26 JUL 2023:** Graves testifies to the House Oversight Committee about the radar contacts, the cube-in-sphere near miss, and the absence of any reporting mechanism. - **14 SEP 2023:** NASA’s independent study report places the GoFast object at 13,000 feet and about forty miles an hour. - **6 FEB 2025:** AARO resolves GoFast as non-anomalous with the object unidentified; Gimbal remains without an official resolution. ## Sources & interviews - [Gimbal: official U.S. Navy infrared footage]() — U.S. Navy · January 2015 · Officially released April 27, 2020 · Public-domain federal work (video) - [Go Fast: official U.S. Navy infrared footage]() — U.S. Navy · January 2015 · Officially released April 27, 2020 · Public-domain federal work (video) - [Upgraded carrier Roosevelt starts pre-deployment exercises]() — Sam LaGrone · USNI News · January 12, 2015 - [Gimbal: the first official UAP footage from the USG for public release]() — To The Stars Academy · December 2017 · Original release page with transcript · Via the Internet Archive - [2015 Go Fast footage]() — To The Stars Academy · March 2018 · Original release page · Via the Internet Archive - [‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects]() — Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean · The New York Times · May 26, 2019 - [U.S. Navy releases dates of three officially acknowledged encounters with phenomena]() — John Greenewald Jr. · The Black Vault · September 11, 2019 · Statement of Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher - [Statement on the release of the historical Navy videos]() — U.S. Department of Defense · April 27, 2020 - [A Gimbal glare explainer]() — Mick West and Metabunk contributors · Optical-artifact analysis and technical debate · January 2022 onward - [GIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”]() — Ryan Graves · Everyday Occurrences · September 27, 2022 · A firsthand account of the mission and debrief · Via the Internet Archive - [The Gimbal UAP video: a reconstruction of the object’s motion]() — Yannick Peings and Marik von Rennenkampff · arXiv 2306.08773 · 2023 · Presented at AIAA Aviation 2023 - [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparency]() — U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability · Hearing transcript · July 26, 2023 - [Written testimony of Ryan Graves]() — U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability · July 26, 2023 - [UAP Independent Study Team final report: GoFast analysis]() — NASA · September 14, 2023 · p. 28 - [GoFast case resolution card and methodology]() — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office · February 6, 2025 Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun. ## Connected files - [The Nimitz Encounter]() — The 2004 carrier-group encounter that produced the third Pentagon video and the template for reading this one. - [The Heat Signature over Aguadilla]() — Another infrared clip in which a moving camera and an unknown range turned a small target into impossible speed. - [The Sphere at the Waterline]() — The West Coast cousin: a short Navy clip standing in for a larger, unreleased sensor story. - [David Fravor]() — The Nimitz pilot who sat beside Graves at the 2023 hearing. - [Luis Elizondo]() — The To The Stars figure who took three months to answer the pilot who had been in the air when Gimbal was filmed. - [Leslie Kean]() — Co-author of the 2017 story that carried Gimbal into the world and the 2019 story that let its pilots speak. ## A NOTE ON EVIDENCE Unidentified describes a limit of the available information. It doesn’t identify an origin. [NEXT CASE FILE: The Sphere at the Waterline]()