The GIMBAL and GOFAST Videos

Summer 2014. Pilots of Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11, the "Red Rippers," began reporting unknown objects off the East Coast. From Virginia to Florida. Almost daily, until March 2015. The objects appeared after the jets' radars were upgraded, and at first the pilots wrote them off as false returns. They kept coming. Lt. Danny Accoin described "no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume." One object looked like "a sphere encasing a cube." Late in 2014, something flew between two Super Hornets flying about 100 ft apart. A safety report was filed.

January 2015. About 300 miles off Florida. An F/A-18F Super Hornet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group was flying with its infrared targeting pod running. On the screen, a dark, oblong object skimmed above a layer of cloud. It carried a glowing aura.

The crew's voices were on the tape. "There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the SA." Then: "They're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots to the west." Near the end of the 34-second clip, the object seemed to stop. And turn in mid-air. "Look at that thing! It's rotating!"

The aviators later described what the camera missed. The object was within 10 nautical miles of the jet. On the top-down radar display, it stopped and reversed direction with no radius of turn. It was accompanied by a formation of 4-6 other unknown objects. Ryan Graves described a wedge of five or six, with the Gimbal object stopping to let it pass.

A second clip, GOFAST, came from the same month. The pod locked onto a small object that seemed to race low over the ocean surface. "Whoa, got it!"

December 16, 2017. GIMBAL surfaced through The New York Times and Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy. GOFAST followed on March 9, 2018. TTSA called the clips declassified. In 2019 the Navy said they had not been cleared for release. But spokesman Joseph Gradisher was plain: "The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena."

April 27, 2020. The Department of Defense authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, two of them from January 2015. Its verdict was brief. "The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified.'"

Skeptic Mick West argues that GIMBAL shows the infrared glare of a distant jet's engines. In his words: "It's not rotating." The apparent spin, he says, is an artifact of the gimbal-mounted camera system. On the other side, Peings and von Rennenkampff reconstructed potential flight paths from the aircrew's testimony, including the close-range stop and reversal. Graves disputes the glare explanation too.

GOFAST met a firmer answer. Working from the numbers on screen, NASA panelist Joshua Semeter placed the object at an altitude of 13,000 feet. It moved about 390 m in 22 s, roughly 40 mph, consistent with the wind. The object "need not be moving at an extraordinary velocity." In February 2025, AARO assessed with high confidence that the apparent speed was motion parallax. No official resolution for GIMBAL has been published.

Graves carried the story further. He appeared in History's Unidentified and on 60 Minutes. On July 26, 2023, he told a House Oversight subcommittee about "a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere," and called the sightings an "open secret" among aircrew. Two clips. 34 seconds each. They have since become a painting, an internet meme and a fixture of the UAP debate.