What happened
From mid-2014 to March 2015, pilots of F/A-18 squadrons from the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, training off the East Coast of the United States, regularly detected with new radars objects loitering at high altitudes for many hours. Some they also saw with their own eyes – including, according to Lieutenant Ryan Graves, a dark cube enclosed in a transparent sphere that passed between two fighters. In January 2015 infrared cameras recorded two videos: “Gimbal,” in which an object rotates in flight, and “GoFast,” showing a point speeding over the ocean. The videos were leaked in 2017–2018, and in 2020 the Pentagon officially released them.
Witnesses
Pilots of fighter squadron VFA-11 and other naval aviation units, including Lieutenants Ryan Graves and Danny Accoin.
Explanations and hypotheses
The Navy confirmed the authenticity of the videos and called the objects unidentified aerial phenomena. Analysts, including Mick West, argue that “Gimbal” shows a distant jet, with the rotation an artifact of the camera mechanism, while “GoFast” is a slowly drifting balloon whose speed is a parallax illusion. The pilots’ accounts of numerous close encounters remain without a publicly known explanation; some may be explained by drones and balloons.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
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