The Pentagon UAP Videos

On April 27, 2020, the Department of Defense released three videos of unidentified aerial phenomena recorded by US Navy pilots. The release was official. The videos are available on defense.gov. They show objects that the department acknowledged it could not identify and that it confirmed were genuine recordings from military sensor systems.

The objects in the videos behave in ways that no known aircraft can. This is not an interpretation. It is the assessment of the pilots who recorded them, the analysts who reviewed the footage, and the government body established to investigate UAP. The objects have not been identified in the years since the videos were released.

The FLIR video was recorded on November 14, 2004, during a training exercise off the coast of San Diego. Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight were flying F/A-18F Super Hornets when the USS Princeton's radar operators directed them toward an unidentified contact. The contact had been appearing on radar intermittently for two weeks, descending from 80,000 feet to approximately 20,000 feet before disappearing.

Fravor describes what he saw when he reached the location. A white object approximately 40 feet long, shaped like a Tic-Tac, no wings, no visible propulsion, hovering over a disturbance in the ocean surface. When he attempted to intercept, the object mirrored his movements and then accelerated away. He lost visual contact. Within seconds, the Princeton's radar showed the object had relocated to a pre-briefed rendezvous point 60 miles away. The travel time, if accurate, implies a velocity of approximately 4,200 miles per hour from a standing start with no detectable acceleration signature.

A second flight of F/A-18s encountered the object shortly after and recorded the FLIR video. The video shows the object on infrared. It shows no heat signature consistent with a jet engine. It shows the object maintaining stable flight with no control surfaces visible and no exhaust plume. It shows the object rotating in place. When the targeting system briefly locks, the object breaks the lock and repositions.

The GIMBAL video was recorded in January 2015 by an F/A-18 pilot off the US East Coast. It shows an object moving against the wind at significant altitude. The object has no visible wings or propulsion. During the recording, the object rotates continuously in place while maintaining forward flight. The pilots' audio commentary captures their real-time assessment: they cannot explain what they are seeing.

The name GIMBAL refers to a question raised during analysis of the video. The rotation visible could theoretically be an artifact of the infrared camera's gimbal system rather than actual rotation of the object. Analysts who have examined the footage in detail have reached conflicting conclusions on this point. The broader question of what the object is and how it is flying has not been resolved regardless of the rotation question.

The GOFAST video was recorded in February 2015 during the same Theodore Roosevelt deployment as GIMBAL. It shows an object moving at very low altitude over the ocean surface. The apparent speed is significant. Analysts who calculated the object's velocity based on the camera's altitude, angle, and movement have produced estimates ranging from a few hundred miles per hour to significantly higher depending on assumptions about the object's actual altitude above the surface.

The object shows no wake on the ocean surface beneath it. At the speeds suggested by the analysis, an object moving at low altitude over water would be expected to produce a visible disturbance. The absence of a wake is unexplained. The object's propulsion, if it has any in the conventional sense, is not visible in the infrared footage.

The videos had circulated in the public domain before the official release. They were published by To The Stars Academy in 2017. What the April 2020 release added was official government authentication. The Department of Defense confirmed that the videos were genuine recordings from military sensor systems and that the objects depicted had not been identified.

That authentication matters because it removes the possibility of dismissing the footage as fabricated. The government confirmed the videos are real. The government confirmed the objects are unidentified. The government established a task force to investigate. The task force's preliminary report found 143 of 144 reviewed cases unexplained. The objects in these three videos are among those cases.

The objects in the three videos share characteristics that pilots, analysts, and the UAP Task Force have noted as anomalous. They operate without visible propulsion systems. They show no infrared signature consistent with jet or rocket engines. They demonstrate rapid acceleration without transitional phases. They operate in restricted military airspace without transponders or filed flight plans. They appear on multiple simultaneous sensor types, eliminating single-sensor malfunction as an explanation.

No known human aircraft in 2004, 2015, or currently demonstrates all of these characteristics simultaneously. The objects are not explained by adversary technology in any publicly available assessment. They are not explained by atmospheric phenomena. They are not explained by sensor malfunction. They are not explained by misidentification of known aircraft. The Department of Defense's own assessment says they are unidentified. That assessment has not changed.

The videos are on defense.gov. They are official government records. The objects are confirmed as genuine. The objects are confirmed as unidentified. The characteristics the objects display have no accepted explanation in publicly available physics or engineering. The government created a task force, held congressional hearings, passed disclosure legislation, and received whistleblower testimony about recovery programs. The three videos are where the current phase of official acknowledgment began.