United States.USS Theodore Roosevelt (Gimbal/GoFast)

Between the summer of 2014 and March 2015, while the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier air wing trained in the Atlantic warning areas off the U.S. East Coast —between Virginia and Florida— F/A-18 Super Hornet crews began logging unidentified objects almost daily. The operational trigger, according to the pilots, was the upgrade of the Super Hornets' APG-79 AESA radars: after the update, crews began systematically seeing contacts that earlier might have been dismissed as noise or artifacts. The contacts appeared simultaneously on radar, on the ATFLIR infrared sensor and, in some cases, to the pilots' eyes. The objects showed no control surfaces, wings or visible exhaust, and held station against 100-knot-plus winds or accelerated beyond what the crews could match; some remained aloft for hours, incompatible with the endurance of any known aircraft of that size.

Lieutenant Ryan Graves, of squadron VFA-11 'Red Rippers', was one of the pilots who systematically reported the contacts and filed formal flight-safety complaints, after a squadron-mate passed so close to one of the objects that he filed a mid-air collision hazard report; the object was described as 'a cube inside a transparent sphere', in Warning Area W-72. From these same sorties came two recordings that would later go public: GIMBAL —filmed on 20 January 2015 off Jacksonville, Florida, showing an object rotating above the clouds as the crew, audible on the recording, remarks on 'a whole fleet' of objects on radar and notes it is moving against the wind— and GOFAST, showing an object moving fast at low altitude over the ocean.

On 16 December 2017, The New York Times revealed the Pentagon's AATIP program and published the FLIR (Nimitz) and GIMBAL (Roosevelt) videos; GOFAST circulated shortly after. The Department of Defense officially confirmed the authenticity of all three videos in April 2020. In July 2023, Graves —by then retired and founder of the organization Americans for Safe Aerospace— testified under oath before the House Oversight subcommittee about these encounters and about the absence of a functioning reporting channel for pilots, which for years discouraged the logging of sightings for fear of professional stigma.

Roosevelt is the Atlantic counterpart of Nimitz: persistent military contacts, confirmed by multiple independent sensors, recurring almost daily for months with no resolution. Unlike an isolated sighting, the recurrence makes the case a documented flight-safety problem, not an anecdote. Two of its recordings —Gimbal and GoFast— became, alongside the Nimitz FLIR, the public window that detonated the modern disclosure era. Graves's testimony also exposes the structural failure of the reporting system: pilots seeing objects daily with no formal channel to log them. The case fed directly into the June 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment, which catalogued 144 government-origin UAP reports between 2004 and 2021 and acknowledged that most 'probably do represent physical objects' that remain unexplained, without attributing them to any power or to non-human technology.

Analytical honesty requires separating the robust from the disputed. The robust part is the sustained multi-sensor recurrence and the flight-safety problem: that does not hinge on the interpretation of any single frame. The disputed part is the evidential force of the two videos. On GOFAST, several analysts (including skeptic-communicator Mick West) have shown that the camera geometry and the triangulation of the HUD data are consistent with a small, relatively slow object at low altitude, not extraordinary speed — the impression of great velocity would be a parallax effect against the sea. On GIMBAL, the object's striking rotation may stem partly from the stabilization mechanism of the ATFLIR sensor itself (the gimbal that gives the video its name) rather than from a maneuver by the object. The pilots and other analysts counter that these readings do not explain the behavior observed by eye nor the stationary persistence against strong wind. None of these objections refutes the case as a whole, but they do prevent treating the videos alone as conclusive proof: the weight of Roosevelt rests on the pattern — hundreds of encounters, independent sensors, qualified witnesses — more than on any individual recording.