The Gimbal and GoFast Videos
The account
Navy fighter jets filmed objects that rotated in midair and skimmed the sea with no visible wings or engines.
What investigators found
The Pentagon confirmed the videos as authentic; skeptical analysts attribute the rotation and speed to camera effects and parallax.
The story
In January 2015, F/A-18 fighters from the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt were training off the East Coast of the United States when their infrared sensors recorded unidentified objects. In the Gimbal video, an object appears to rotate in midair. In GoFast, a dot glides at high speed over the ocean. Pilots from the squadron said they saw strange objects almost daily during that period.
The videos leaked between 2017 and 2018, and the Pentagon officially released them in 2020, calling the objects unidentified aerial phenomena. Analyst Mick West and other skeptics argue that the Gimbal's rotation comes from the camera mechanism and that GoFast shows a slow object, such as a balloon, that only looks fast because of parallax.