The Roosevelt encounters (GIMBAL and GOFAST)

Through late 2014 and early 2015, aircrews of Carrier Air Wing One, working up off the U.S. east coast aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt, reported near-daily radar tracks of unknown objects following the upgrade of their jets to APG-79 AESA radar — objects holding station in high winds or traveling at speed with no visible exhaust. One near-miss prompted an aviation safety report. In January 2015 two weapons-system operators recorded the encounters that became GIMBAL — a saucer-like infrared shape appearing to rotate atop the clouds while an aircrew exclaims there's 'a whole fleet of them' on the situational display — and GOFAST, an object apparently racing across the ocean surface to whoops in the cockpit.

Both videos surfaced publicly in 2017–18 through the To The Stars Academy and the New York Times, and the Department of Defense confirmed their authenticity and formally released them on 27 April 2020, stating the phenomena remain characterized as unidentified. Lt. Ryan Graves and other squadron aviators have since testified to Congress about the track pattern; the videos anchored the Navy's 2019 creation of formal UAP reporting procedures — the first institutional intake for military aircrew since Blue Book closed.

AARO's public analysis, presented from 2023, argues GOFAST's speed is a parallax illusion — the object, by the display's own numbers, drifting near wind speed well above the water — and attributes GIMBAL's rotation plausibly to glare artifacts in the targeting pod's gimbal mechanics. The aircrews involved dispute that the analyses account for the accompanying radar behavior, which remains unreleased. The pair thus sits exactly where this archive's grading vocabulary points: officially unidentified, publicly argued, and resolvable only by data still withheld.