U.S. Navy UAP Videos (FLIR1, GIMBAL, GOFAST)

The three clips are short infrared recordings captured by U.S. Navy fighters using their Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pods. FLIR1 comes from the November 2004 Nimitz/Tic-Tac encounter off Southern California; GIMBAL and GOFAST were recorded in 2015 off the U.S. East Coast during USS Theodore Roosevelt operations. FLIR1 and GIMBAL entered public circulation in December 2017 — accompanying the New York Times’ reporting on AATIP/AAWSAP and shared by Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy — with GOFAST following in March 2018.

After the unauthorized release, the Navy moved to characterize the footage officially. In September 2019 a Navy spokesperson said the videos showed “unidentified aerial phenomena” and that the objects remained unidentified, while stressing the service had never cleared them for public release. On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense formally released all three clips through the Naval Air Systems Command, stating they were genuine and unaltered and that the phenomena remained “unidentified” — making them among the first UAP materials the U.S. government officially authenticated.

The videos’ meaning is genuinely contested, and the government’s acknowledgment was narrowly that they are real and unexplained, not that they show anything exotic. Skeptics — and AARO’s later analyses — argue prosaic optical effects can account for the apparent anomalies: GIMBAL’s “rotating” object is widely attributed to a rotating glare artifact of the gimballed optics, and GOFAST’s seemingly fast, low object resolves on parallax to a slow object high above the water. Proponents counter that the videos should be read alongside corroborating radar and eyewitness data rather than in isolation. The clips remain the most analyzed pieces of official UAP imagery.