The Fleet Behind the Gimbal (2014–2015)

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 transparencyWritten 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 ObjectsUnidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparencyWritten 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.

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 GravesUnidentified 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 exercisesGIMBAL: “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.

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 Open video

Sources: Gimbal: official U.S. Navy infrared footageGimbal: the first official UAP footage from the USG for public releaseGIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”

“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 footageGimbal: the first official UAP footage from the USG for public releaseGIMBAL: “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.

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 Open video

Sources: Go Fast: official U.S. Navy infrared footage2015 Go Fast footage‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying ObjectsUAP Independent Study Team final report: GoFast analysis

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 phenomenaThe Gimbal UAP video: a reconstruction of the object’s motionStatement 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 release2015 Go Fast footageGIMBAL: “There’s a whole fleet of them…”U.S. Navy releases dates of three officially acknowledged encounters with phenomenaStatement 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 ObjectsUnidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparencyWritten testimony of Ryan Graves

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 videosU.S. Navy releases dates of three officially acknowledged encounters with phenomena‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying ObjectsUnidentified 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 explainerThe Gimbal UAP video: a reconstruction of the object’s motionGIMBAL: “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 analysisGoFast case resolution card and methodologyGo 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 GravesUnidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparencyGIMBAL: “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 methodologyA Gimbal glare explainerUnidentified Anomalous Phenomena: implications on national security, public safety, and government transparencyStatement on the release of the historical Navy videos

GO TO THE SOURCE

Sources & interviews

Gimbal: official U.S. Navy infrared footageU.S. Navy · January 2015 · Officially released April 27, 2020 · Public-domain federal work Go Fast: official U.S. Navy infrared footageU.S. Navy · January 2015 · Officially released April 27, 2020 · Public-domain federal work Upgraded carrier Roosevelt starts pre-deployment exercisesSam LaGrone · USNI News · January 12, 2015 Gimbal: the first official UAP footage from the USG for public releaseTo The Stars Academy · December 2017 · Original release page with transcript · Via the Internet Archive 2015 Go Fast footageTo The Stars Academy · March 2018 · Original release page · Via the Internet Archive ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying ObjectsHelene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean · The New York Times · May 26, 2019 U.S. Navy releases dates of three officially acknowledged encounters with phenomenaJohn Greenewald Jr. · The Black Vault · September 11, 2019 · Statement of Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher Statement on the release of the historical Navy videosU.S. Department of Defense · April 27, 2020 A Gimbal glare explainerMick 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 motionYannick 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 transparencyU.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability · Hearing transcript · July 26, 2023 Written testimony of Ryan GravesU.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability · July 26, 2023 UAP Independent Study Team final report: GoFast analysisNASA · September 14, 2023 · p. 28 GoFast case resolution card and methodologyAll-domain Anomaly Resolution Office · February 6, 2025

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Connected files

The Nimitz EncounterThe 2004 carrier-group encounter that produced the third Pentagon video and the template for reading this one.The Heat Signature over AguadillaAnother infrared clip in which a moving camera and an unknown range turned a small target into impossible speed.The Sphere at the WaterlineThe West Coast cousin: a short Navy clip standing in for a larger, unreleased sensor story.David FravorThe Nimitz pilot who sat beside Graves at the 2023 hearing.Luis ElizondoThe To The Stars figure who took three months to answer the pilot who had been in the air when Gimbal was filmed.Leslie KeanCo-author of the 2017 story that carried Gimbal into the world and the 2019 story that let its pilots speak.

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