What happened
On 27 April 2020 the Department of Defense officially published the three Navy infrared videos that had leaked years earlier. The clips, filed as FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST, came from F/A-18 targeting pods: one from November 2004 off southern California with the USS Nimitz group, two from January 2015 off the East Coast with the USS Theodore Roosevelt group. In the Gimbal clip a dark shape appears to rotate against the clouds while an aviator exclaims about a whole fleet of them; GoFast shows a small object skimming over the ocean. The Pentagon said a thorough review found the release would not expose sensitive systems or hamper investigations of airspace incursions, and that it was acting to clear up public misconceptions about whether the circulating footage was real. The clips were posted on the Naval Air Systems Command FOIA site. For the first time, the US government itself was distributing videos of objects its military could not identify, labelling them unidentified aerial phenomena.
The original account
After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.
Department of Defense statement on the release of historical Navy videos, 27 April 2020 (US government work, public domain)
The official explanation
The Pentagon offered no identification. Skeptical analysts, notably Mick West, argued that Gimbal's apparent rotation is a glare artifact that turns with the camera's gimbal mechanism, that GoFast's speed is a parallax illusion and the object is likely a slow balloon at altitude, and that FLIR1 shows a distant aircraft. Astrophysicist Adam Frank and others suggested rival-nation drones probing US defenses as another earthly possibility.
The anomalous case
These are the most scrutinized military UAP videos ever released, and the official verdict remains unidentified. The Gimbal and GoFast encounters came from a 2015 exercise where, retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet testified in 2024, a Fleet Forces email warned of multiple near midair collisions with unknown objects. The FLIR1 video is the infrared record of the 2004 Nimitz event, in which Commander David Fravor and three other aviators said they watched a white Tic Tac shaped object for about five minutes before it accelerated away, and radar operators reported tracking similar contacts dropping tens of thousands of feet. Supporters argue the videos are only fragments of a richer data set of radar, eyewitness and other sensor records that has never been publicly released.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Navy officially releases UFO/UAP videos (DoD statement text) official, theblackvault.com
Sources
- Navy Officially Releases UFO / UAP Videos, Calls Them 'Historical' The Black Vault
- Pentagon creates UFO task force to see if aerial objects pose threat Military Times
- Pentagon UFO videos Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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