Atlantic Ocean off the US East Coast (reported off Jacksonville, Florida)
Record
Curated case
Assessment
Contested
Evidence strength
NoneWeakModerateStrong
467 case pages by decade; this one falls in 2010s with 32 othersAll cases
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What was reported
An F/A-18 crew from the Theodore Roosevelt strike group recorded an infrared video of a glowing object that appears to rotate while the crew remark on a 'fleet' of objects on their situational display; the Navy authenticated it and released it in 2020 as unidentified. Lt Ryan Graves testified that his squadron saw such objects routinely in 2014-2015, correlated across radar and infrared, including one passing within about 100 feet of an aircraft. Mick West argues the rotation is the camera's de-rotation acting on a distant jet's glare, citing rotation in discrete steps, though he has offered more than one mechanism; the fleet on radar is not in the released footage and is relayed by the crew. Wind and sun-angle reconstructions are also consistent with a balloon.
What officials concluded
Unresolved
DoD (2020): unidentified
Strongest ordinary reading
Glare from a distant aircraft rotated by the camera gimbal, or a balloon; contested
Gimbal's apparent rotation is best explained by an optical artifact tied to the camera's internal de-rotation mechanism, evidenced by background light/dark bands rotating with the object, diffraction-spike-like artifacts, occasional mismatch between the object's and horizon's rotation rate, and the rotation's amount/timing matching exactly what the camera needs to de-rotate while tracking a forward target.
The amount that it rotates and the speed and the time is all exactly the same amount that would be required for the camera to have to rotate to traverse the forward-looking direction.
Gimbal's apparent rotation happens in discrete steps rather than smoothly, which West treats as his strongest ('smoking gun') evidence for a camera/tracking artifact rather than a physically tumbling craft.
The smoking gun for me was that it rotates in steps.
The Gimbal video is ambiguous between two hypotheses: a distant plane roughly 30-35 miles away producing an internal-reflection glare that appears to rotate with the camera, or a closer object moving in an unphysical J-shaped path.
about 30, 35 miles away there could be a plane moving away and to the left and that would create essentially the same visuals... the rotation comes from the camera rotating.
The eyewitness account supporting the 'closer object' reading of Gimbal is secondhand: Ryan Graves is relaying what a pilot told him he remembered, more than a decade after the event.
we have Ryan Graves like giving an account that someone told him of what they remember happening... over 10 years ago now.
The released 'Gimbal' video shows a single rotating object on FLIR, while the pilots' verbal chatter refers to a broader 'fleet' of objects not visible on that sensor; Graves says he saw this discrepancy reflected in radar situational-awareness display data during a debrief of the aircrew involved.
the recording on the at FLIR system shows a single object that rotates ... you hear the pilots refer to a fleet of objects that is not visible on the FLIR system
Beginning in 2014-2015, after radar/IR upgrades, VFA-11 ('Red Rippers') F/A-18 crews off Virginia Beach routinely detected unknown objects, correlated across radar, infrared, and eventually visual identification, described as dark-gray or black cubes inside a clear sphere roughly 5-15 feet in diameter; one such object passed within about 50 feet of an aircraft during a 2014 training mission.
the object described as a dark gray or a black Cube inside of a clear sphere came within 50 feet of the lead aircraft and was estimated to be 5 to 15 feet in diameter
