Gimbal — F/A-18 ATFLIR encounter, 2015

ATFLIR video captured from an F/A-18 Super Hornet operating with the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group shows a saucer-shaped object rotating against the prevailing wind. The Department of Defense has confirmed the footage as authentic Navy material; its identity remains officially unresolved.

The 34-second clip widely known as “Gimbal” was captured by the Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pod of an F/A-18F Super Hornet operating from the USS Theodore Roosevelt during a January 2015 training cruise off the U.S. East Coast. The video shows a smooth, lozenge-shaped object that appears to rotate on its centerline as the pilot tracks it. An audible aircrew exchange — including the line “look at that thing, dude” — accompanies the imagery.

What is on the record

• The ATFLIR video itself, declassified and released through Navy channels in 2017 and formally authenticated by the Department of Defense in April 2020 as “unidentified aerial phenomena” footage.
• Inclusion in the 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment, which counted the Roosevelt encounters among the 144 UAP reports the U.S. Intelligence Community could not fully account for.
• Sworn testimony from former Roosevelt aviators including Lt. Ryan Graves and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, given to congressional committees and CBS 60 Minutes in 2021.
• Crew accounts describing daily UAP contacts during the deployment, including detection on the Roosevelt’s upgraded APG-79 AESA radar.

Mundane explanations considered

1. Sensor rotation artifact. Mick West and other independent analysts have argued the apparent rotation of the object corresponds to the gimbal mechanism inside the ATFLIR pod itself — the camera horizon rotating, not the object. The aircrew’s exchange about a “whole fleet” moving against the wind suggests they saw something on radar consistent with their visual interpretation, but the rotation is the most-debated specific feature.
2. Atmospheric distortion or glare. The infrared signature is consistent with a hot object viewed against a colder background; no thermal anomaly that would require an exotic source has been confirmed.
3. Foreign UAS. The Roosevelt aircrews reported repeated daily encounters in restricted training airspace. No foreign program publicly known in 2015 fielded a system with the reported persistence and signature.

Open questions

• Full ATFLIR telemetry — slant range, target altitude, target velocity — has not been released alongside the public clip.
• The simultaneous APG-79 radar tracks have not been declassified.
• Other ATFLIR captures from the same deployment, referenced in pilot testimony, remain classified.

The Council’s verdict

Inconclusive. The video is authentic, the witnesses are professional, and the encounter occurred in instrumented military airspace. The strongest skeptical reading — a sensor-rotation artifact — addresses one feature of the imagery but does not account for the radar tracks pilots described in subsequent testimony or the persistence of the contacts across days. Without the underlying telemetry the public cannot adjudicate the case fully.

The Council’s recommended consumer thermal monocular for sky-watchers who want to understand what an ATFLIR pod is approximating is the Pulsar Helion 2 XP50. For wide-field tracking of unknown contacts at altitude, the Celestron SkyMaster 25×100 on a Manfrotto 055 tripod is the most light-gathering option under $700.