GO FAST: the third Pentagon video — and the parallax assessment that reframed it

GO FAST was recorded by an F/A-18F crew from the USS Theodore Roosevelt's air wing during the same January 2015 work-up period off the U.S. East Coast that produced GIMBAL — multiple reconstructions place the two recordings on the same sortie, minutes apart. The ATFLIR clip shows a small, cool return apparently skimming the ocean surface at high speed while the crew celebrates finally achieving a track ('Whoa! Got it — woohoo!'). To The Stars Academy published the video in March 2018; the Department of Defense officially declassified and released it on April 27, 2020, confirming the footage is authentic and the object formally unidentified.

The video's name has outrun its content. The ATFLIR display encodes the data needed to reconstruct the geometry — slant range, altitude, and look-down angle — and independent analyses since 2018 have consistently concluded that the dramatic apparent speed is largely parallax: the camera platform itself was moving at hundreds of knots and looking steeply down, so a slow object well above the water appears to race across the surface. AARO's published analysis of the case reaches the same conclusion, assessing the object as flying at roughly 13,000 feet and drifting near wind speed.

GO FAST's significance in the record is therefore double-edged. It is one of only three UAP videos the Pentagon has formally confirmed authentic, part of the December 2017–April 2020 sequence that opened the modern disclosure era; and it is the canonical demonstration of why raw sensor footage requires geometric context before it supports any conclusion — the reason this archive separates officially released imagery from interpretation on every case file.