IncidentGimbal Video (January 2015)

The Gimbal video is a 35-second infrared (mid-wave IR) clip captured in January 2015 by the ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared) pod of an F/A-18F Super Hornet operating off the U.S. East Coast, during the same operational period as the Roosevelt East Coast UAP encounters (see roosevelt-2014). The footage shows a saucer- or wing-shaped object against a clear sky; over the course of the clip, the object rotates approximately 90 degrees while appearing to maintain its forward trajectory. A pilot’s voice-over comments: “Look at that thing, dude! There’s a whole fleet of them — look on the SA [situational awareness display].”

The video was one of three officially declassified by the U.S. Navy on 27 April 2020, in a Pentagon press release that also released the Nimitz Tic Tac (FLIR1, see nimitz-tic-tac-2004) and the GoFast videos (see gofast-2015). The release confirmed that the videos were genuine Navy footage and that the objects shown had not been identified. Lt. Ryan Graves (see figure-graves), who flew F/A-18Fs in the same operational period, has testified that Gimbal-class encounters were routine during the Roosevelt deployment.

The credulous reading: the Gimbal footage shows a physical object that is rotating against its motion vector — a kinematic signature that no known conventional aircraft can produce. The pilots’ voice-over comment about “a whole fleet of them” on the situational-awareness display suggests multiple simultaneous radar contacts; the rotation, if real, is anomalous.

The skeptical reading, advanced most prominently by Mick West and the Metabunk community (see figure-west-mick), is that the rotation visible in the footage is an artifact of the ATFLIR pod’s gimbal mechanism interacting with the IR glare around a distant conventional aircraft. The ATFLIR pod’s gimbal de-rotates to keep the target image stable relative to the camera frame as the aircraft maneuvers; when the camera rotates physically, the gimbal counter-rotates the IR detector array. A point source of IR (a distant aircraft engine plume) produces a glare artifact around the target — a halo of IR contamination. When the camera physically rotates (because the F/A-18F is banking), the gimbal de-rotates the detector, but the glare halo — which is anchored to the detector geometry rather than to the target — rotates with the detector. The apparent rotation of the object is, in this reading, the rotation of the glare halo around an unchanging point-source target.

West’s analysis is published in detailed form at Metabunk.org with the ATFLIR’s gimbal-rotation mechanism modeled in CAD and the IR-glare geometry simulated. The U.S. Navy has not formally endorsed either interpretation; the official declassified status is that the object is “unidentified.” Some pilots associated with the encounters, including Cmdr. David Fravor (nimitz-tic-tac-2004) and Lt. Ryan Graves, have publicly disputed the IR-glare hypothesis, arguing that the visible rotation is consistent with the pilots’ contemporaneous observations of a physical object. The Gimbal case is one of the contemporary UAP corpus’s most directly contested cases between credulous and skeptical-technical readings.

See also: nimitz-tic-tac-2004; gofast-2015; figure-graves; figure-fravor; figure-west-mick; roosevelt-2014.