GIMBAL: the Navy's rotating-object video, still unresolved

On January 21, 2015, during work-ups off the U.S. East Coast, the weapons systems officer of an F/A-18F Super Hornet assigned to the USS Theodore Roosevelt's carrier air wing tracked an object on the aircraft's AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR targeting pod. The infrared return shows a lens-shaped object with no visible exhaust plume that appears to rotate against the direction of flight. The cockpit audio captures the crew's reaction: a report of 'a whole fleet of them' on the situational-awareness display, the observation that the objects were 'all going against the wind — the wind's a hundred and twenty knots to the west,' and the exclamation 'look at that thing, it's rotating.'

The clip was first published on December 16, 2017, by the New York Times and To The Stars Academy alongside the 2004 FLIR1 video, and the Department of Defense officially declassified and released it on April 27, 2020, confirming its authenticity and stating that the phenomena depicted remain 'unidentified.'

Interpretation of GIMBAL is genuinely contested. Skeptical analyses attribute the apparent rotation to rotating glare in the ATFLIR's gimbal optics as the pod tracks across the aircraft's nose — the mechanism the video's informal name evokes. Aircrew involved, and analysts who weight the reported situational-awareness radar returns of an accompanying formation, dispute the glare-only reading. AARO has published no case resolution for GIMBAL, leaving it the most prominent officially-released U.S. military UAP video without a government explanation.