USS Theodore Roosevelt 2014–2015 — the Atlantic encounters behind the Gimbal and GoFast videos

Between approximately mid-2014 and early 2015, US Navy aviators flying with the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group from Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia reported a sustained sequence of UAP encounters during routine operations off the US East Coast and over the Atlantic Operating Area. The encounters were sufficiently frequent that aviators developed informal practices for reporting them, and the sensor captures from several of the encounters subsequently became — through the December 2017 New York Times disclosures and adjacent reporting — among the most widely viewed UAP video records in any national archive. The "Gimbal" and "GoFast" videos publicly associated with this period are drawn from this operational context.

The operational pattern

The aviator community that flew with the Roosevelt strike group during the relevant period included Lieutenant Ryan Graves, whose subsequent public testimony has been a principal source of detail on the operational character of the encounters. By Graves's account and that of other aviators from the same community, UAP observations occurred during routine training operations over the Atlantic, including during air-combat-manoeuvring exercises in the W-72 warning area off the Virginia coast. The encounters were sufficiently common that aviator briefings began to include them as a recurring operational consideration.

The observations included visual sightings, radar contacts on the F/A-18's APG-79 radar, and ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared) captures. The objects were typically described as small, with no visible exhaust or aerodynamic surfaces, exhibiting flight characteristics that aviators could not reconcile with conventional aircraft or with the most obvious atmospheric or sensor-artefact candidates.

The publicly released sensor captures

Two of the ATFLIR captures from the Roosevelt-era encounters — informally known by the names "Gimbal" and "GoFast" — were released through the December 2017 New York Times reporting and subsequent disclosures. The US Navy formally confirmed the authenticity of the captures in 2019, characterising them as legitimate Navy sensor recordings of unresolved phenomena.

The captures themselves are short — a few tens of seconds each — and depict, in each case, a single object's interaction with the F/A-18's targeting system. The captures have been extensively analysed by independent reviewers in subsequent years. The consensus on the captures is that they are authentic Navy sensor recordings; analytical opinion on what they actually depict, in terms of the object's physical character and behaviour, varies substantially across the technical community.

The cases' continuing significance

The Roosevelt-era encounters are the most institutionally consequential single cluster of contemporary US Navy UAP observations because of the combination of sustained occurrence, multi-modality sensor capture, multiple-aviator witness corroboration, and substantial public-record release. The cases were directly cited in the June 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment, in the May 2022 House hearing testimony, and in subsequent AARO reporting cycles.

For comparison with the 2004 USS Nimitz Tic Tac encounter and with the broader contemporary US Navy UAP record, see the SkyLens UAP files page.

Editorial note: Independent SkyLens analysis of the contemporary US UAP institutional framework (AARO, UAPTF, AATIP) and the public documents and testimony associated with it. The case index linking related releases is on the SkyLens UAP files page.