GIMBAL

What can be opened

• The recording, “2 - GIMBAL.wmv”, in the Navy FOIA reading room: 34.5 seconds with sound (our measurement). The Department of Defense released it with two other Navy videos on 27 April 2020. The Navy’s public-affairs card of 24 July 2020 says that in September 2019 the Navy confirmed the three videos “were indeed copies of actual Navy videos”, and that the two of January 2015 “first appeared in the New York Times in December 2017”.
• The DoD statement and that card, which date the recording only to January 2015.
• AARO’s index of released recordings, which lists it as “NAVAIR - FOIA: Unresolved Case: GIMBAL Video” and describes it as “Video of a U.S. Navy F/A-18 jet crew’s encounter with an unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP).”
• The sworn testimony of Ryan Graves to a House subcommittee on 26 July 2023 and his written statement for that hearing. In 2014 Graves was “an F–18 Foxtrot pilot in the Navy Fighter Attack Squadron 11” (p. 10). In the written statement he writes: “My understanding is that all UAP videos since 2021 are classified Secret or above, which prevents the American people and even some Members of Congress from seeing UAP videos like the full GIMBAL video recorded by my squadron.”

What Graves testified

Asked whether, among the cases he had analysed, several craft had ever been seen in a single formation, Graves answered: “I have one particular case and that was during the Gimbal incident. The recording on the AT FLIR system shows a single object that rotates. You hear the pilots refer to a fleet of objects that is not visible on the FLIR system and that was something that I witnessed during the debrief as part of the radar data on the situational awareness page.” (p. 38)

Earlier, a member asked about “the Gimbal video Go Fast incident” and what happens at the end of the released footage. Graves: “There was some uncertainty or, you know, instability with the object. It seemed to rock a bit, and that is the last I had seen of the video.” (p. 24) He asked for the radar data to be analysed, data “that would provide precise kinematics on the object as well as the fleet of objects that were operating nearby” (pp. 24–25).

What the radar showed reaches us only through his words: the radar data cannot be opened.

What no document says

Where the recording was made, on which day of January 2015, who the crew were, and what the object was. No document we can open measures the rotation or explains it. The Navy’s card of July 2020 says that “Neither the Navy nor DOD has publicly released characterizations or descriptions, nor released any hypothesis or conclusions in reference to any reported sightings/observations.”, and AARO, which has published a resolution of the other video of January 2015, GOFAST, lists this one as unresolved.

The case does not carry the mark ◆: no document we can open measures the object on the recording, and a record that shows only that something was there does not count (see the methodology).

Why this scores where it does

Witnesses: 3. One F/A-18 crew, whose voices are on the recording but whose own accounts cannot be opened, and a pilot of the squadron who testified under oath about the recording and about the radar data he saw at the debrief (printed hearing, p. 38).

Radar: 2. Graves testified that the “fleet of objects” the pilots talk about was something he witnessed at the debrief “as part of the radar data on the situational awareness page” (p. 38), and he asked for that data to be analysed (pp. 24–25). It cannot be opened, so the radar is known only from his testimony.

Optics: 4. The infrared clip itself, 34.5 seconds with sound, one of the three videos that the Navy confirmed in September 2019 “were indeed copies of actual Navy videos” (CHINFO card, 24 July 2020); the figures on its display are not blacked out (our reading of the clip). Not 5: the full recording is classified, by Graves’s written statement, and the sensor pod’s data for each frame cannot be opened.

Physical trace: 0. None.

Multi-channel: 2. The infrared recording and the radar data Graves describes are two sensors, but the second reaches us only through his words.

Documentation: 2. A clip, the Department of Defense’s release statement, a public-affairs card, a line in AARO’s index and testimony eight years later; no report from the flight, no day and no place.

Anomaly: 3. An object that “rotates” on the recording and others seen only on radar, by Graves’s account (p. 38); no document we can open measures the rotation or the objects’ movements.

Data today: 3. The clip is public and can be examined frame by frame; the full recording, the pod’s data and the radar data cannot be opened.

The overall is 2.3: class C, material gaps.

What would settle it

The full recording, which Graves says is classified, with the sensor pod’s data for each frame; the radar data he saw at the debrief; the crew’s own accounts; the time and position of the flight. None of them can be opened.