• DOCUMENTED Nobody outside government has seen the originals. Every public copy is a compressed, re-encoded derivative. AARO's own "Go Fast" Case Resolution Report (6 Feb 2025) states that the original file and its metadata are no longer available and that AARO performed its analysis on the publicly released compressed video. If the agency that owns the case is working from a YouTube-grade file, so is everyone else.
• DOCUMENTED These are infrared sensor images, not photographs. The camera is the Raytheon AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR pod on the F/A-18F. It images mid-wave infrared, applies automatic gain, contrast and sharpening, and displays the result on a low-resolution cockpit feed that is then recorded. Shape, size and edge detail in these clips are properties of the imaging chain as much as of the object.
• DOCUMENTED Two of the three videos have no trustworthy range. GoFast's display carries a slant-range readout, which closes the geometry and makes altitude and speed calculable. FLIR1 and Gimbal do not give the viewer a comparably reliable range. Without range, distance, size and speed are all unconstrained — an object can be small and near or huge and far, and the video cannot tell you which.
• DOCUMENTED The clips are seconds long and stripped of context. None includes the radar tracks, sensor logs, or mission data that would let an outside analyst reconstruct the encounter. What was released is the least informative artifact of each event.

AARO, "Go Fast" Case Resolution Report and Methodology, 6 February 2025 (aaro.mil, Case Resolution Reports). Raytheon AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR product literature; US Navy NAVAIR platform documentation.

• DOCUMENTED FLIR1 ("Tic Tac") — recorded 14 November 2004. Filmed off Southern California during USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group operations by Lt Cdr Chad Underwood, a weapons systems officer in an F/A-18F. Underwood flew a later sortie than Cdr David Fravor's visual encounter — the video and the famous eyewitness account are two separate events on the same day.
• DOCUMENTED FLIR1 leaked years before its "release." A copy circulated on UFO forums from at least 2007, roughly a decade before the mainstream publication. Any narrative that treats 2017 as the moment the footage escaped is wrong.
• DOCUMENTED 16 December 2017 — FLIR1 and Gimbal published by the New York Times. The paper obtained them from Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who was at the time associated with To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science.
• DOCUMENTED Gimbal — recorded January 2015 (sources give 20 or 21 January), off the US East Coast near Jacksonville, Florida, by aircrew from the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group work-ups.
• DOCUMENTED GoFast — recorded January 2015, released March 2018 by To The Stars Academy on its own website, not by a newspaper and not in the December 2017 batch. Sites that list all three as a single December 2017 release have it wrong.
• DOCUMENTED 27 April 2020 — the Department of Defense formally released all three. The stated reason was to clear up public misconceptions about whether the circulating footage was real; DoD said release did not reveal sensitive capabilities and that the phenomena in them "remain characterized as unidentified."

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New York Times, "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money'", 16 December 2017. US DoD, "Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos", 27 April 2020. To The Stars Academy release, March 2018. AARO "Go Fast" Case Resolution Report, 6 February 2025. See also Metabunk, "Flir1, Go Fast, Gimbal — Navy Releases New Information: Official Dates".

• DOCUMENTED The footage is authentic Navy footage. In September 2019, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, confirmed to multiple outlets that the videos are genuine, that they were never cleared for public release, and that "the Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena."
• DOCUMENTED "Unidentified" is an administrative status, not a finding. The DoD's April 2020 statement says the phenomena "remain characterized as unidentified." That is a statement about the state of the analysis, not a claim about the objects' nature, origin, or performance.
• UNSUPPORTED "The Pentagon confirmed these are not human aircraft." No US government statement in the public record says this about FLIR1, Gimbal or GoFast. The claim circulates in headlines and social media; what is missing is any official document or on-the-record statement asserting non-human or non-terrestrial origin for these three clips.
• DOCUMENTED The government's own reporting warns about sensor artifacts. ODNI's Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (25 June 2021) explicitly lists sensor errors, spoofing, and observer misperception among the categories that UAP reports may fall into.

Joseph Gradisher statements to CNN, TIME and The Black Vault, September 2019. ODNI, "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena", 25 June 2021. DoD statement, 27 April 2020.

• DOCUMENTED The geometry is printed on the screen. GoFast's ATFLIR display shows slant range and sensor depression angle. Two frames are enough: at 4.4 nm range and roughly −26° depression, the object sits about 1.9 nm below the aircraft; at 3.4 nm and roughly −35°, about 1.95 nm below. With the jet near 25,000 ft, that puts the object around 13,000 ft — high in the air, not skimming the ocean.
• DOCUMENTED The apparent speed is parallax. The sea surface is far below and streaks past; the object is much closer to the jet's altitude and much nearer than the water, so it slides across the frame against a fast-moving background. Once the aircraft's own motion is removed, the object's ground speed collapses to tens of knots.
• DOCUMENTED Independent civilian analysis got there first. Mick West and contributors at Metabunk published this altitude-and-slow-speed result in 2018, within weeks of the video's release, using nothing but the on-screen numbers. Bruce Maccabee — a physicist generally sympathetic to UFO claims — independently estimated roughly 100 knots, slower than the jet.
• DOCUMENTED AARO reached the same conclusion with high confidence. The 6 February 2025 "Go Fast" Case Resolution Report places the object at approximately 13,000 ft, computes a wind-compensated speed of roughly 2–41.3 m/s (5–92 mph), and assesses that the object "did not move at anomalous speeds." Reported winds: about 30.9 m/s (69 mph) from 265° at the object's altitude, and 52 m/s (116 mph) from 255° at the aircraft's altitude. Pixel analysis suggested a size of one metre or less.
• DISPUTED Whether resolving the speed resolves the case. Ryan Graves argues AARO answered the wrong question — that the aircrew were never impressed by the object's speed, that the name "Go Fast" was applied afterwards, and that what mattered was the object's presence and persistence. He also faults AARO for never interviewing the weapons systems officer who shot the video. AARO's position is that its charter is the physical assessment of the recorded object.
• UNSUPPORTED "GoFast is a balloon." West and others have proposed a balloon, and a sub-metre object drifting slowly at 13,000 ft is consistent with one. But no balloon launch, flight track or recovery has ever been produced. "Consistent with a balloon" is not "identified as a balloon."

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AARO, "Go Fast" Case Resolution Report and Methodology, 6 February 2025. Metabunk, "Go Fast footage — analysis" thread, 2018. Ryan Graves / Americans for Safe Aerospace comments reported by Liberation Times, February 2025.

• DOCUMENTED What is on the file. A bright lens- or saucer-shaped IR signature tracked against cloud, which rotates roughly 90° over the clip while the aircraft manoeuvres. Cockpit audio on the released file includes crew remarking on "a whole fleet of them" on the situational awareness display and noting a strong wind — the audio's existence is a documented fact; the crew's real-time interpretation of it is testimony.
• DOCUMENTED No range is available. Unlike GoFast, Gimbal offers the outside analyst no reliable range. This is why published distance estimates range from a few nautical miles to tens of nautical miles, and why size and speed for Gimbal are simply not calculable from the public file. Every Gimbal kinematic claim — from any direction — rests on an assumed range.
• DISPUTED The rotating glare hypothesis (Mick West, Metabunk). West argues the object is infrared glare around a distant aircraft's engines, and that the rotation is an artifact of the ATFLIR pod. The pod's forward Electro-Optical Sensor Unit physically rolls as the line of sight approaches the pod's gimbal limits; a de-rotation element downstream keeps the scene upright, but glare generated at or forward of the front optics is upstream of that element and therefore rotates with the pod rather than with the world.
• DOCUMENTED The strongest single piece of evidence for the glare model. When the aircraft increases its bank at roughly 8 and 19 seconds, the horizon and cloud background rotate with the aircraft — and the "object" does not. Faint secondary artifacts elsewhere in the sky rotate in lockstep with the object, at the same rate and by the same amount. That pattern is what you expect from something fixed in the sensor's frame of reference, not the world's.
• DISPUTED The counterargument (Dave Falch, Chris Lehto and others). Falch, who has FLIR/ATFLIR industry background, argues the de-rotation mechanism acts on the whole scene, so glare should de-rotate along with everything else; he also notes the absence of the shimmering thermal wake he would expect from jet engines. Chris Lehto, a former USAF F-16 pilot, argues the dark shape is the object itself, rotating, and works the geometry from bank angle and line of sight to place it several miles out at subsonic speed.
• DISPUTED Where each side is weak. West's model requires a specific claim about which optical surfaces sit forward of the de-rotation element in a pod whose internal optical layout is not public. Lehto's range estimate relies on inferences from bank angle while dismissing other sensor-derived data as untrustworthy — selective trust in the same instrument. Lehto is also an F-16 pilot commenting on an F/A-18 pod he did not operate. Neither position has been settled by primary evidence, because the primary evidence — the raw file and the pod's engineering data — has not been released.
• UNSUPPORTED "It's a distant jet." Even accepting the glare model in full, the identity of the heat source is an assumption. No correlating flight track, tail number, or air traffic record has ever been produced for the Gimbal object. The glare hypothesis explains the rotation; it does not identify the object.

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Metabunk threads "A Gimbal Glare Explainer" and "Gimbal Glare, Rotation, Clouds, and Angles"; Mick West's Gimbal simulator (metabunk.org/gimbal). Metabunk thread "F-16 pilot Chris Lehto analyses Gimbal footage." Dave Falch commentary as reproduced in those threads. Pod-hardware discussion: Metabunk, "ATFLIR Technician Jeremy Snow discusses Gimbal, FLIR1, and GoFast."

• DOCUMENTED The video is not the encounter. Fravor's close visual encounter and Underwood's footage were separate sorties. Nothing in the FLIR1 file depicts the manoeuvres Fravor describes. Conflating the two is the most common error made about this case, in both directions.
• TESTIMONY Fravor testified to a close visual encounter. Cdr David Fravor has stated publicly and, on 26 July 2023, before the House Oversight Committee, that he observed a white oblong object manoeuvring over a disturbance in the water and that it appeared to react to his aircraft. His account is corroborated in outline by other aircrew. It is testimony: the fact of the statement is verifiable, the events described are not independently documented in released records.
• TESTIMONY Radar operators described anomalous tracks. USS Princeton personnel including Senior Chief Kevin Day have described unusual AN/SPY-1 returns over several days. No radar tapes, track files or sensor logs from the Princeton have been publicly released, so this remains testimony rather than data.
• DISPUTED The final "zip off." The clip ends with the object apparently accelerating out of frame. Mick West argues the object does not translate across the screen except when the camera moves, that the ending is consistent with the tracking gate losing lock and the sensor slewing, and that the overall signature resembles an out-of-focus, backlit distant aircraft. Proponents including Fravor and Underwood dispute that the break of lock accounts for it. Without the pod's slew-rate data this cannot be resolved from the public file.
• DISPUTED Kinematic papers claiming extreme accelerations. Knuth, Powell and Reali, "Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles" (Entropy, 2019), applied Newtonian mechanics to the Nimitz and Aguadilla cases and derived accelerations orders of magnitude beyond known aircraft. The load-bearing weakness is that those figures scale directly with assumed range and assumed track geometry, both of which are drawn from testimony rather than released instrument data. Change the range assumption and the "impossible" accelerations become ordinary.
• UNSUPPORTED Specific performance figures for the Tic Tac. Numbers such as "descended 80,000 ft in under a second" circulate widely and originate in recollection and secondhand retelling, not in any released radar record. No primary document supporting them has been produced.

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency", 26 July 2023 (committee page; Congress.gov text). Chad Underwood interview, New York Magazine/Intelligencer, 2019. Knuth, Powell & Reali, Entropy 21(10):939, 2019. Metabunk, "Explained: The Navy UFO Videos."

• DOCUMENTED Motion parallax. A slow object seen from a fast-moving platform against a distant background appears to race. Fully accounts for GoFast; endorsed by AARO with high confidence. Weakness: it requires a known range to apply, so it cannot be invoked for Gimbal or FLIR1 without assuming the answer.
• DOCUMENTED IR glare and blooming. A hot compact source in mid-wave IR saturates the detector and spreads far beyond the object's true angular size, producing a shape that reflects the optics rather than the object. Real, reproducible, and the reason IR "shapes" are close to worthless as evidence of form. Weakness: demonstrating that glare can look like this does not demonstrate that this is glare.
• DOCUMENTED Bokeh from a shaped aperture. Out-of-focus point lights take the shape of the lens aperture. This is why the 2021 USS Russell "pyramid" footage shows triangles: a triangular iris on the night-vision camera imaging ordinary aircraft lights and stars. Trivially reproducible with consumer gear. Weakness: explains the shape, not the presence of the lights.
• DISPUTED Sensor-frame rotation. The Gimbal argument above. Strong circumstantial support from the background evidence; not closed, because the pod's optical layout is not public.
• UNSUPPORTED "It's a distant airliner" as a general-purpose answer. Deployed repeatedly across cases without a matching flight track being produced. Where a specific aircraft has been identified, say so; where it has not, "probably a plane" is a hypothesis, not a resolution. Skeptics are entitled to parsimony, not to a free pass on the same burden of proof they impose on proponents.

Metabunk case threads and reproduction experiments, 2018–2021 — GoFast, Gimbal glare, "Pyramid" UFOs are bokeh; AARO "Go Fast" Case Resolution Report, 6 February 2025.

• DOCUMENTED USS Omaha "spherical object," July 2019. Recorded off San Diego; released publicly in 2021 by filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and journalist George Knapp. The Pentagon, via spokesperson Susan Gough, confirmed the imagery was taken by Navy personnel. The clip shows a dark spherical shape descending toward the water and disappearing from view. No public analysis has identified it, and no radar or sonar data has been released.
• RESOLVED USS Russell "pyramids," July 2019. Released by Corbell in 2021 and widely reported as triangular craft. The triangles are bokeh — out-of-focus point sources taking the shape of the night-vision camera's triangular aperture. Established by Mick West with direct reproduction; the shape is an optical artifact. The lights themselves are most consistent with aircraft, though specific aircraft have not been identified.
• DISPUTED Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, 25 April 2013. A US Customs and Border Protection aircraft's thermal camera recorded a small light-emitting target crossing an airport environment and out over water, apparently splitting in two. The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies published an analysis concluding the kinematics rule out wind-borne objects. Rubén Lianza and analysts at Metabunk argue the footage is consistent with two tethered sky lanterns, with a nearby wedding as a plausible source and a drift track consistent with the winds. Both sides have published detailed work; neither has produced a decisive artifact.
• DOCUMENTED AARO now publishes case imagery itself. Since 2023, AARO has released video and case material through aaro.mil and in congressional testimony, including footage presented by then-director Sean Kirkpatrick to the Senate Armed Services Committee's emerging threats subcommittee on 19 April 2023 — some of it resolved to conventional aircraft, some left unresolved. This is a meaningful shift: the government is now the publisher rather than the leak victim.
• DOCUMENTED AARO's aggregate results. In its FY2025 Consolidated Annual Report (released July 2026), AARO reported 319 new UAP reports for the period, several hundred case resolutions including a large backlog of satellite-flare cases, and stated that every resolved case was attributed to conventional causes. The corollary matters just as much: cases are also archived for insufficient data, and a residue is retained for further analysis. "Resolved to conventional causes" describes the closed cases, not the whole file.

Pentagon (Susan Gough) statements to media, April–May 2021, as reported by The Debrief. Mick West / Metabunk bokeh reproduction, 2021. Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, Aguadilla report; Lianza sky-lantern analysis. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities hearing, 19 April 2023 (Kirkpatrick oral remarks, PDF). AARO FY2025 Consolidated Annual Report on UAP, July 2026 (aaro.mil).

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• DOCUMENTED To The Stars Academy. TTSA launched a Regulation A+ public offering in September 2017 — the same period in which it became the conduit for the videos — seeking up to $50 million in Class A stock at $5 per share. VICE later reported an accumulated deficit of $37.4 million. The videos were central to the company's public profile. This is a documented financial context, not a demonstration of bad faith, but it belongs on the record.
• DOCUMENTED Christopher Mellon supplied the videos to the New York Times while associated with TTSA. Luis Elizondo, formerly TTSA's director of global security and special programs, published the bestselling Imminent in 2024.
• DOCUMENTED Ryan Graves founded and leads Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit advocacy organisation built around aircrew UAP reporting. His institutional standing depends on the topic remaining unresolved and taken seriously.
• DOCUMENTED Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp released the 2021 Navy footage; both are documentary and media professionals whose output is built on this subject.
• DOCUMENTED Mick West authored Escaping the Rabbit Hole (2018), operates Metabunk, and is supported in part by Patreon and YouTube revenue. His public reputation rests on his debunkings holding up — an incentive structure that is real and pointed in the opposite direction, and should be weighted accordingly.
• DOCUMENTED Chris Lehto runs a monetised YouTube channel substantially built on rebutting West's analyses. Rebuttal is a content category with its own audience economics.
• DOCUMENTED AARO is an office inside the Department of Defense assessing the Department's own sensor data and its own personnel's reports. That is a structural conflict regardless of the integrity of the individuals in it, and it is the strongest general argument for independent access to the raw files.

SEC EDGAR filings for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science; VICE reporting on TTSA finances. Publisher records for Imminent (2024) and Escaping the Rabbit Hole (2018). Americans for Safe Aerospace public materials.

• "Go Fast" Case Resolution Report and Methodology AARO / DoD, 6 Feb 2025 · PDF — altitude, wind and speed findings
• AARO UAP Case Resolution Reports (index) AARO / DoD, ongoing · every published case resolution
• FY2025 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena AARO / DoD, July 2026 · PDF — 319 new reports, case counts
• Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos US DoD, 27 Apr 2020 · the official three-video release
• Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena ODNI, 25 Jun 2021 · PDF — the first intelligence assessment
• Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency House Oversight, 26 Jul 2023 · PDF — full printed hearing transcript
• House Oversight hearing page (Fravor, Graves, Grusch) US House Oversight, 26 Jul 2023 · witness statements and video
• Congress.gov record of the 26 July 2023 UAP hearing Library of Congress, 2023 · searchable hearing text
• The Mission, Activities, Oversight, and Budget of AARO Senate Armed Services ETC subcommittee, 19 Apr 2023 · Kirkpatrick hearing
• Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, oral remarks to SASC ETC AARO / US Senate, 19 Apr 2023 · PDF of prepared testimony
• Knuth, Powell & Reali, "Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles" Entropy 21(10):939, 2019 · DOI — the kinematics paper (free full text)
• 2013 Aguadilla Puerto Rico UAP Incident: A Detailed Analysis Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies · report, radar data, rebuttals
• Aguadilla Infrared Footage of 'UFOs' — Probably Hot Air Wedding Lanterns Metabunk · the Lianza lantern hypothesis, discussed
• "GO FAST" Footage from Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy. Bird? Balloon? Metabunk, from Mar 2018 · original altitude/parallax working
• A Gimbal Glare Explainer Metabunk (Mick West) · the rotating-glare argument set out
• Gimbal Glare, Rotation, Clouds, and Angles Metabunk, from Dec 2025 · continuing derotation debate
• Metabunk Gimbal Simulator Mick West · interactive tool reproducing the clip
• F-16 Pilot Chris Lehto analyses Gimbal footage Metabunk · Lehto's counterargument and the replies
• ATFLIR Technician Jeremy Snow discusses Gimbal, FLIR1, and GoFast Metabunk · pod hardware and derotation, from a technician
• "Pyramid" UFOs in Night Vision Footage are Bokeh Metabunk, 2021 · the USS Russell reproduction
• Explained: The Navy UFO Videos Metabunk, from Apr 2020 · overview thread for all three
• Flir1, Go Fast, Gimbal — Navy Releases New Information: Official Dates Metabunk · Navy-confirmed recording dates and locations
• U.S. Navy Confirms Videos Depict 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' The Black Vault, Sept 2019 · Gradisher's statement in full
• Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program New York Times, 16 Dec 2017 · paywalled; the original publication
• 'Tic Tac' UFO Video: Q&A With Navy Pilot Chad Underwood New York Magazine / Intelligencer, Dec 2019 · the cameraman speaks
• Pentagon Confirms Leaked Video Showing "Transmedium" UFO is Authentic The Debrief, 2021 · Susan Gough on the USS Omaha clip
• Broken AARO: Questions Mount Over 'Go Fast' UFO Investigation Liberation Times, 20 Nov 2024 · Ryan Graves's criticism of AARO
• GO FAST — the third video release from To The Stars Academy To The Stars Academy, Mar 2018 · the original TTSA publication
• SEC EDGAR filings, To The Stars (CIK 0001710274) US SEC, 2017–present · Reg A+ offering circulars and annual reports
• Tom DeLonge's UFO Organization Has a $37.4 Million Deficit VICE, Oct 2018 · the reporting on TTSA's SEC filings
• Americans for Safe Aerospace ASA · Ryan Graves's nonprofit, aircrew reporting channel
• Escaping the Rabbit Hole (Mick West, 2018) Skyhorse Publishing · publisher record for the book
• Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs (Luis Elizondo, 2024) HarperCollins / William Morrow · publisher record
• Raytheon AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR product literature; US Navy NAVAIR platform documentation no stable public URL found — RTX has no live ATFLIR product page
• Dave Falch's ATFLIR de-rotation commentary no stable public URL found — reproduced only inside the Metabunk threads above
• Bruce Maccabee's independent ~100-knot GoFast estimate no stable public URL found — appears within the Metabunk GoFast thread
• USS Princeton AN/SPY-1 radar tapes, track files and sensor logs never released — no document exists in the public record
• Original uncompressed FLIR1 / Gimbal / GoFast files and their metadata never released — AARO states the GoFast original is no longer available
• Rubén Lianza's own sky-lantern report no stable public URL confirmed — see the Metabunk Aguadilla thread instead
• Jeremy Corbell / George Knapp's original 2021 USS Omaha and USS Russell releases no stable original-publisher URL found — see The Debrief link above

Links verified August 2026. Unlinked items in this section are ones for which no stable public URL could be confirmed.

Images are public domain or freely licensed; each carries its credit and licence, and links to its source record. Served from this site rather than hotlinked.