FLIR1, Gimbal and GoFast: What the Pentagon Actually Released

Three short Navy videos changed the public conversation about UFOs. FLIR1, Gimbal and GoFast were genuine military recordings, officially released in April 2020 after earlier public circulation. That established their provenance. It did not establish that three alien vehicles had been filmed, and subsequent analysis has changed what can responsibly be said about one of them.

Three recording histories

FLIR1 derives from November 2004 and the Nimitz encounter context. Gimbal and GoFast were recorded in January 2015. The dates matter: footage publicized in 2017 was not necessarily filmed that year, and the three clips do not record one continuous incident.

The New York Times’s investigation of 16 December 2017 reported a Pentagon UFO-related effort and $22 million in funding. Navy footage accompanied the major publicity wave. FLIR1 and Gimbal became internationally familiar in that period; GoFast’s public rollout followed in March 2018.

The reporting reopened legitimate questions about military encounters, reporting channels and what officials had studied. It also helped fuse distinct propositions: a funded program existed, a recording came from the Navy, and the object behaved impossibly. Evidence for the first two does not automatically prove the third.

The wording of the official release

Navy acknowledgment preceded the Pentagon’s 27 April 2020 release. The statement called the material “three unclassified Navy videos.” Officials said their review found no disclosure of sensitive capabilities or systems and no interference with subsequent investigations of military airspace incursions.

The statement retained an unidentified characterization at that time. It did not announce extraterrestrial origin. Calling the action simply a release of “top secret alien footage” discards the source’s more careful wording. The archive’s release-date field therefore records official authorization, not an invented removal of a TOP SECRET marking.

A military targeting display can be authentic while its target remains ambiguous. Infrared contrast, glare, camera motion, field of view and tracking behaviour all affect what appears on screen. Authentic pixels still need interpretation.

FLIR1: an apparent departure

FLIR1 shows a low-resolution infrared target under observation. The apparent departure near the end must be distinguished from loss of tracking or camera behaviour. Independent analyst Mick West has proposed a distant aircraft interpretation. That is an identified analyst’s hypothesis, not an official case closure.

It is also a hypothesis about this clip. FLIR1 was recorded on a later sortie than Fravor’s closer visual encounter. Explaining the image would not, on its own, reconstruct what the earlier observers saw. The inverse mistake is to use their testimony to declare every apparent motion in this later clip extraordinary.

Gimbal: what is rotating?

Gimbal’s striking feature is an image that appears to rotate while the crew discusses contacts and wind. West argues that infrared glare, combined with the sensor’s gimbal and image-derotation behaviour, can produce that rotation without the physical object rotating in the same way.

The competing interpretation is rotation of an unusual craft. The short clip alone does not demonstrate that its bright silhouette accurately reproduces the object’s shape. Nor does it resolve every contact discussed by the crew. Full telemetry and correlation with other sensors would be more useful than treating a compressed image as a technical drawing.

GoFast: performance without identification

AARO’s February 2025 assessment materially updates this case. It assessed with high confidence that GoFast showed no anomalous performance. Its reconstructed altitude was about 13,000 feet, not just above the ocean surface. Rapid apparent travel over the water was attributed to motion parallax from the moving observing aircraft.

The report estimated ground speed between 72 and 161 miles per hour across modeled headings, with wind-compensated speeds approximately 5–92 miles per hour. No simulation placed the object travelling against the wind. Those ranges are modeled findings, not a single exact velocity extracted without assumptions.

Crucially, AARO could not definitively identify the object. A performance assessment is not an identification as a balloon, bird or particular device. Calling GoFast wholly unanalyzed is outdated; calling it officially identified as a balloon overstates the result.

What the clips changed

The release made genuine Navy imagery accessible and put military reporting under wider scrutiny. Its value does not depend on all three objects being exotic. These recordings show why provenance, appearance, performance and identity are separate questions.

The defensible conclusion is neither “three confirmed alien craft” nor “three identical solved cases.” GoFast has a substantive conventional performance assessment. FLIR1 and Gimbal retain distinct interpretive questions in the cited public record. Our monitor illustration is an editorial reconstruction, not the actual footage or additional sensor evidence.