GIMBAL.
“On January 21, 2015, a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet operating from the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group off the East Coast of the United States recorded thermal imagery of an unidentified object during a training mission.”
The cockpit audio captured during the encounter includes Navy aviators audibly reacting to the object: "There's a whole fleet of them, look on the SA"; "They're all going against the wind. The wind's 120 knots out of the west." The objects' apparent rotation against a 120-knot headwind and their lack of visible aerodynamic surfaces or exhaust have been central to subsequent analysis. The encounter took place in a Warning Area used routinely for Navy carrier qualifications and training.
The footage was first released to the public in December 2017 by To The Stars Academy, and was officially declassified and released by the US Department of Defense on April 27, 2020, alongside the FLIR1 (Tic-Tac) and GOFAST videos. The Pentagon's release statement, issued by Sue Gough on behalf of the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, stated that the videos showed "unexplained aerial phenomena" and that they were being released "to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real."
The GIMBAL video is one of the three principal Pentagon-released UAP videos and has been a central reference point in subsequent congressional UAP hearings. Skeptical analyses, including by Mick West of Metabunk, have argued that the rotation may be an ATFLIR gimbal artefact (hence the video's nickname) rather than a real object rotation, and that the "fleet" may be other Navy aircraft. Pro-case analysts, including Ryan Graves, who flew Super Hornets from the same air wing, have argued that the cockpit audio context is inconsistent with a gimbal-only explanation.