F/A-18 FLIR footage from the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group (2015). On the cockpit audio the crew say the objects are “all going against the wind”, and as the dark shape turns on the display one says “It’s rotating”. The crew read it as a craft turning in place against a 120-knot wind; Mick West reads the turn as the camera’s: a distant glare fixed to the optics of a targeting pod that rolls while the display keeps the horizon level, so the glare turns on screen with the pod’s roll, not with the object.
Pilot audio (via Elizondo)
“Dude, they’re not drones, bro. There’s a whole fleet of them. … They’re all going against the wind. The wind’s 120 knots west.”
Witnesses
Ryan Graves and other VFA-11 Red Rippers pilots
East Coast wave
The Gimbal footage is part of the sustained wave of US Navy training-range encounters off the East Coast of the United States that Ryan Graves’s VFA-11 pilots reported as near-daily. PURSUE Release 02 adds further East Coast sensor footage from 2019, the same operational pattern that drove the modern disclosure era.
Readings of the clip
Sceptical analysis argues that the object reads as hot rather than cold in the mode shown, and that the faint aura around it is a known camera artefact. Imminent records the same oddity from inside the programme, noting that “the object itself was indicated as being very hot; however, the air surrounding it was very cold” and that this “didn’t make any sense” (p. 149). The two accounts describe the same anomalous reading and part company on what causes it. The site’s Gimbal bench rebuilds the geometry from the targeting pod’s own figures.
Connections
Ryan Graves · Luis Elizondo · Five Observables · Tic Tac Incident · AATIP · PURSUE · USS Theodore Roosevelt · GoFast Incident · Imminent