USS Theodore Roosevelt UAP Incidents

The training ranges ran from Virginia to Florida. Restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach. Warning Area W-72, off Virginia and North Carolina. This was the working sky of VFA-11, the "Red Rippers", F/A-18 Super Hornet pilots out of NAS Oceana, flying with the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group.

Then the Navy upgraded the jets' 1980s-era radar. And the pilots began to see things.

At first they dismissed the tracks as false. But from summer 2014 to March 2015, the objects appeared almost daily. "These things would be out there all day," Lt. Ryan Graves told The New York Times. Some stayed aloft for up to 12 hours.

They reached about 30,000 feet, flew near sea level, accelerated to hypersonic speeds and made sudden stops and instant turns. Lt. Danny Accoin saw "no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume." His radar tracked one object, but flying about 1,000 feet below it, he still could not see it. A few days later a training missile on his jet locked onto it, and his infrared camera picked it up too. "I knew I had it," he said, but "I could not pick it up visually."

Then came the close pass. A Super Hornet and its wingman, flying about 100 feet apart, saw an object pass between them. The Times called it "a sphere encasing a cube," and Graves later described "dark gray or black cubes inside of a clear sphere." It came within about 50 feet. The jets took evasive action, and the mission was terminated immediately.

Two clips survive from those months. GIMBAL was filmed on 21 January 2015 by an F/A-18F off Jacksonville, Florida. In 34 seconds of infrared footage, a dark shape over the clouds appears to stop and rotate, and a voice on the audio says it plainly: "There's a whole fleet of them." GOFAST shows a small object apparently racing over the ocean. "Wow, what is that, man?" one aviator asks, and another says, "Look at it fly!"

In December 2017 The New York Times published GIMBAL. Christopher Mellon had given the videos to the press. On 27 April 2020 the Department of Defense formally released them. "The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified.'"

The paper trail proved harder. In 2019 the Naval Safety Center said it could not find the close pass safety report. In 2020 the Times tied the "sphere encasing a cube" to a hazard report dated 27 June 2013 instead. Leslie Kean later wrote that Graves said it "could have been 2013." On 26 July 2023, Graves gave sworn testimony to a House Oversight subcommittee.

Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher said some sightings could be commercial drones, while others remained unexplained. Mick West argues GIMBAL shows infrared glare from a distant jet, its rotation caused by the ATFLIR pod's optics. Yannick Peings and Marik von Rennenkampff disagree. Their 2023 reconstruction found flight paths consistent with the aircrew's "vertical U-turn." A NASA study placed the GOFAST object at 13,000 feet, moving at about 40 mph, consistent with wind. The impression of speed, it said, came from the jet's motion and parallax.

The pilots never claimed the objects were extraterrestrial. Graves suspected a threat observation program and did not rule out Russian or Chinese technology. "I am worried, frankly," he said. Released alongside the FLIR1 video from the USS Nimitz, GIMBAL and GOFAST remain officially unidentified.