The USS Roosevelt Encounters (Gimbal / GoFast)

The Sighting

Beginning around 2014, after their APG-79 AESA radar upgrade, Super Hornet crews of Carrier Air Wing One — training with the USS Theodore Roosevelt in Warning Area W-72 off Virginia Beach and later off Jacksonville — began detecting unknown objects with startling regularity: sometimes daily, holding station in high winds, moving at hypersonic and then loitering speeds, remaining aloft for hours without transponders, exhaust, or visible means of lift. Pilots initially wrote the tracks off as radar ghosts from the new system; then the objects began appearing on FLIR pods and, eventually, eyeballs. In late 2014, two Hornets flying trail had an object pass between them — described by the flight lead to squadron mate Lieutenant Ryan Graves as a dark cube suspended inside a translucent sphere, within about 50 feet of the aircraft. The squadron filed an aviation safety (hazard) report; training sorties were adjusted. Lieutenant Danny Accoin, another VFA-11 pilot, described tracking an object on radar and FLIR that he could never gain visually despite ideal geometry.

In January 2015, aircrew recorded the two videos later named for their content: 'Gimbal,' an infrared clip of a lens-shaped object skimming above the cloud deck that appears to stop and rotate on its axis as the aircrew exclaim 'there's a whole fleet of them' (a formation visible on the situational display); and 'GoFast,' an object apparently racing low over the water as the crew whoop at the difficulty of locking it.

The Investigation

The squadrons' hazard reports moved through Navy safety channels without public result. The story broke on December 16, 2017, when The New York Times published the videos alongside its AATIP expose; the To The Stars Academy had obtained and released them. On April 27, 2020 the Department of Defense formally released Gimbal, GoFast, and FLIR1, confirming authenticity and labeling the phenomena 'unidentified.' Graves and Accoin went public in 2019; Graves — the first active-duty-era pilot to speak systematically — testified before Congress in July 2023 that UAP were seen 'regularly' in military airspace, that most encounters go unreported due to stigma, and that the objects represented at minimum a flight-safety and at maximum a national-security problem. The Roosevelt encounters became core exhibits in the ODNI's June 2021 preliminary assessment (144 reports, 143 unexplained) and in the creation of AARO.

The Explanations

Skeptical analysis has been most effective against the videos themselves. GoFast: parallax analysis using the pod's own displayed numbers shows the object is likely slow-moving (perhaps 30-40 knots — a balloon or bird) at around 13,000 feet, its apparent speed an artifact of the fast-moving camera platform; even AARO later endorsed this reading. Gimbal: the object's 'rotation' matches the known gimbal-roll artifact of the ATFLIR pod's optics as it tracks through the nose position — the glare rotates, not necessarily the object — making the clip compatible with the exhaust glare of a distant conventional jet; critics of this analysis (including Graves, who saw the accompanying radar picture) respond that the sensor fusion showed a formation of objects stopping and reversing against 120-knot winds, data the public has never seen. The radar tracks in general: possible artifacts of the new AESA systems plus, some suggest, classified U.S. drone or balloon programs being tested against the fleet — which would explain persistence and impunity, at the cost of implying the Navy hazarded its own aircrews unknowingly.

The unresolved core is the totality: years of multi-sensor correlation (radar, FLIR, visual), near-midair reports with structured objects at close range, and dozens of aircrew witnesses — a pattern that no single artifact explanation covers, and that the government, after multiple reviews, still lists as unidentified.

Why It Endures

The Roosevelt encounters transformed the UFO question from 'what happened that night?' to 'what is in our airspace every day?' — recasting the subject as persistent, statistical, and operational rather than anecdotal. Graves's safety-and-stigma framing gave pilots institutional cover to report, seeded the Pentagon's reporting reforms, and made him the field's most consequential advocate-witness. Together with the Nimitz Tic Tac, these cases form the modern evidentiary spine: officially released sensor data, named witnesses under oath, and explanations (balloon, glare, artifact) that are individually plausible and collectively insufficient. The era of lone witnesses on desert roads gave way here to fleets of objects on fleet sensors — and the argument moved, permanently, into Congress.

Institutional consequences continue to compound. The Navy formalized UAP reporting procedures for aircrews in 2019 — explicitly citing the need to destigmatize reports — and confirmed on the record that the three videos depict 'unidentified aerial phenomena,' the first such official characterization in half a century of Pentagon language. Graves founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, which by the mid-2020s had received hundreds of pilot reports, civilian and military, becoming the de facto clearinghouse the FAA never built. And the Roosevelt data question remains open in the most literal sense: the full radar and sensor-fusion records that aircrew say showed formations maneuvering against the wind have never been released, meaning the strongest claimed evidence in the case is still, a decade later, behind classification — the modern era's version of the missing file.