Gimbal 2015: a Navy infrared clip the Pentagon still lists as unresolved

A 34-second Navy F/A-18 infrared video from January 2015, leaked in 2017 and officially released by the Pentagon in 2020, shows a glowing object whose outline turns on screen. AARO still lists it as an unresolved case.

36.8203° N · 76.0331° W · Off U.S. East Coast (VFA-11 base, NAS Oceana, Va.) · Jan 2015

Source: AARO Archive

What the clip shows

The realufo.org archive holds the video as a 34-second clip titled "GIMBAL - UAP", credited to Naval Air Systems Command and dated 2015 ^[1]. It is a recording of an infrared sensor display. An oblong object with a glowing halo sits just below the crosshair; the screen reads "IR" and "NAR Z 2.0", a figure of 25010 at lower right holds steady throughout, and the bearing at the top swings from 53° left to 4° right as the clip runs. About 12 seconds in, the "WHT" label changes to "BLK" and the image inverts, so the bright object turns dark. In the last few seconds the outline of the object visibly changes its orientation on the screen ^[1].

The Department of Defense's office for these reports, AARO, describes the clip in a single line and lists it as an unresolved case ^[5]. No official record cited here gives the exact date, the location, the crew or the object's range.

Video of a U.S. Navy F/A-18 jet crew’s encounter with an unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP).

— AARO, Official UAP Imagery page [5]

From leak to official release

The footage reached the public through The New York Times on 16 December 2017, in its report on the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The Times described a recording from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet "showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves", with the pilots heard trying to understand it. "There's a whole fleet of them," one exclaims. The paper added that defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident ^[3].

On 27 April 2020 the Department of Defense authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and two in January 2015, which had been circulating after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017. It said the Navy had already acknowledged that the circulating videos were Navy videos, that their release revealed no sensitive capabilities or systems, and that it was releasing them to clear up public misconceptions about whether the footage was real. The files were posted to the Naval Air Systems Command FOIA reading room ^[2].

The clip is widely described as "declassified", but the Pentagon's statement calls all three "unclassified" videos that had already leaked; what changed in 2020 was that the release became authorized ^[2].

The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as "unidentified."

— Department of Defense statement, 27 April 2020 [2]

The squadron behind the reports

In May 2019 the Times published accounts from Navy pilots who said they had seen strange objects almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high over the East Coast, during training off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt from Virginia to Florida. Lt. Ryan Graves and Lt. Danny Accoin of the VFA-11 "Red Rippers" squadron, based at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, spoke on the record; three other squadron pilots spoke without being named ^[4].

The pilots said the objects began appearing on their radar after an upgrade from 1980s-era equipment. Graves recounted a near miss in late 2014, when a squadron mate said something like a sphere encasing a cube flew between two jets east of Virginia Beach, and said a flight safety report was filed. A Navy spokesman, Joseph Gradisher, told the paper that new reporting guidance updated instructions sent to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents. The Roosevelt left the coast of Florida for the Persian Gulf in March 2015 ^[4].

The 2019 article does not tie the Gimbal clip to a named flight or crew ^[4]. Its account places the encounters off the East Coast in the same months to which the Pentagon dates two of its released videos ^[2].

one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind

— The New York Times, 26 May 2019 [4]

What the official assessments say

The intelligence community's June 2021 preliminary assessment covered 144 reports from U.S. government sources, from 2004 to 2021, and identified only one object with high confidence, a large deflating balloon. In 18 incidents, observers reported unusual movement, including objects that appeared to stay stationary in winds aloft or move against the wind. The report does not name any individual video ^[7].

AARO's 2024 historical report summarizes that assessment, including its caution that such observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing or observer misperception and need more rigorous analysis. It also records that the Navy led the UAP Task Force from 2020. It does not discuss the Gimbal video ^[8].

AARO has published an analysis of the other January 2015 clip, GO FAST. It assessed the object at about 13,000 feet and roughly 45 mph, in winds of about 60 knots, and concluded with high confidence that it showed no anomalous speeds or flight characteristics ^[6]. No comparable analysis of Gimbal has been released. On AARO's imagery page, captured in September 2026, GO FAST appears with a case resolution while Gimbal is still listed as an unresolved case ^[5]. What turns the object on screen is not settled by any official document.

the UAP did not demonstrate any anomalous speeds or flight characteristics

— AARO, GO FAST case slide, Senate hearing, 19 November 2024 [6]

Last fact-checked: 2026-10-03. Every claim cites its source.