The GO FAST and Gimbal Encounters off the Eastern Seaboard

In the years after the Nimitz Tic-Tac encounter of November 2004, the United States Navy began to record an increasing volume of unexplained sensor contacts and visual sightings during routine training operations on the Atlantic Test Range. The cluster of incidents that came to be known to investigators and to the public as the GO FAST and Gimbal encounters took place primarily between late 2014 and the early months of 2015, in the airspace and waters off Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, where the Navy’s East Coast F/A-18 Super Hornet community is based.

The aircrews involved were drawn from Carrier Air Wing One and Carrier Air Wing Eight, deploying respectively aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The encounters were not isolated. They formed part of a sustained pattern that, according to congressional testimony from former Navy pilot Lieutenant Ryan Graves, became routine enough that aircrews stopped formally reporting individual sightings and began discussing them only informally between sorties.

The Sensor Videos

The two videos that have come to be known by their internal Navy file names GIMBAL and GO FAST were captured by the Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared, or ATFLIR, pod mounted on the Super Hornet. ATFLIR is a high-resolution infrared and electro-optical sensor used for ground attack and reconnaissance, capable of automatic tracking of small targets at long range. Both videos show the system locking onto an unidentified target and tracking it through a series of unexpected manoeuvres.

GIMBAL, captured in January 2015, shows a small object surrounded by what appears to be an aerodynamic disturbance, rotating around its central axis as the aircraft tracks it. The aircrew can be heard on the soundtrack expressing visible astonishment at the object’s behaviour, with one voice exclaiming “Look at that thing, dude!” and another remarking on a “fleet” of similar objects on the radar display. GO FAST, captured in early 2015, shows a small object moving rapidly low over the surface of the Atlantic, with the targeting system requiring an unusual angle to maintain lock as the aircraft passes. Initial analysis by some independent observers suggested an extraordinary speed, although later technical reanalysis by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies indicated that the object’s true speed was significantly slower than its apparent speed, owing to parallax effects.

A third video, FLIR1, was captured during the 2004 Nimitz encounter rather than the 2014-2015 Atlantic series, but the three are commonly grouped together as the videos formally declassified by the United States Department of Defense in April 2020.

Lieutenant Graves and the Hearings

Lieutenant Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 pilot during the 2014-2015 deployments, became one of the principal public witnesses to the East Coast wave. In testimony to the United States Congress in July 2023, before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, Graves stated that members of his squadron had observed unidentified objects on a daily basis during their training off the Atlantic coast in 2014 and 2015. He described objects approximately the size of a basketball, dark in colour, moving against the prevailing wind, station-keeping at altitudes used by commercial and military traffic, and persisting in the operating area for entire training periods.

Graves further testified that aircrews had recorded a near-miss between an F/A-18 and one of the objects, an event significant enough to be the subject of a formal hazard report. He described the institutional reluctance of the Navy to engage with the reports as a flight safety issue, which began to change only after the establishment of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force within the Office of Naval Intelligence in August 2020.

For the broader institutional context of these reports, see our entry on the establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office within the Department of Defense.

What the Videos Show

Independent technical analysis of the GIMBAL and GO FAST videos has produced a wide range of interpretations. Mick West, a software engineer and prominent skeptic, has argued that both videos can be explained by conventional artefacts of the ATFLIR system, including the rotation of the gimbal mechanism itself in the case of GIMBAL and parallax in the case of GO FAST. Other analysts, including former Navy intelligence officer Lue Elizondo and aerospace engineer Robert Powell, have argued that the videos record genuinely anomalous behaviour that cannot be reduced to sensor artefacts.

The Pentagon’s own position, as articulated in successive reports from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is that a substantial fraction of UAP reports remain genuinely unidentified after analysis, while a portion can be attributed to sensor effects, weather, balloons, and conventional aircraft. The 2014-2015 East Coast wave is generally treated within the unresolved category.

Legacy

The GO FAST and Gimbal encounters, together with the earlier Nimitz event, established the modern framework within which the United States military discusses UAP. The Office of Naval Intelligence’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force was followed by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group in 2021 and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in 2022. Congressional hearings in 2022 and 2023 brought serving and retired military personnel into public testimony for the first time in decades. The GO FAST and GIMBAL videos themselves, together with the Lieutenant Graves testimony, have entered the public record as among the most thoroughly documented official UAP encounters of the early twenty-first century.

For another encounter from the same broader institutional moment, see our entry on the 2004 Nimitz Tic-Tac, which the East Coast wave was widely understood to mirror in important respects.

Sources

• United States Department of Defense. Statement Regarding the Release of Historical Navy Videos. April 27, 2020.
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. June 25, 2021.
• Graves, Ryan. Testimony to the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, July 26, 2023.
• Powell, Robert et al. Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. Analysis of the GIMBAL and GO FAST Videos. SCU, 2019.