USS Theodore Roosevelt UAP incidents

The USS Theodore Roosevelt UAP incidents were a series of radar, infrared and visual encounters between U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet aircrews and unidentified anomalous phenomena off the U.S. East Coast, reported almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015 by pilots of Strike Fighter Squadron 11, the "Red Rippers," training out of Naval Air Station Oceana and off the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. The pilots reported objects with no visible engine or infrared exhaust plume that could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds; in late 2014 one passed between two jets and was described as a cube inside a sphere, and two of the encounters were recorded by an ATFLIR targeting pod as the Gimbal video and the Go Fast video.

The encounters reached the public in December 2017 with the release of the two videos, and in 2019 named pilots described them to The New York Times. With the 2004 Nimitz UAP incident they are one of the two Navy cases behind the Pentagon UFO videos, which the Pentagon formally released in April 2020. The sightings were reported to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, whose former director Luis Elizondo called them "a striking series of incidents." Ryan Graves, who left the Navy and founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, testified under oath about them at the 2023 UAP Congressional Hearing in July 2023.

In 2019 no one in the Defense Department was saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasized that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. A Navy spokesman said some cases could have been commercial drones; the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Leon Golub said an extraterrestrial cause "is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations," among them bugs in the imaging code, atmospheric effects and neurological overload at high speed; and NASA's independent study team, citing AARO's presentation, found that the apparent anomalous behavior in the GoFast video can often be explained by the motion of the sensor platform.

Radar upgrade and early contacts

Graves says the contacts began after his squadron returned from deployment and had its jets' radar upgraded: with a much more powerful radar, pilots picked up objects in their working area that the older radar had not shown. The objects were stationary, or moved at around 250 to 350 knots, and sometimes went supersonic heading east, and were seen only over water. The Times reports that as one jet after another received the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects and at first ignored what they took for false tracks. Graves says they first assumed radar errors, then correlated the tracks with infrared sensors and found their missile seekers locking onto the objects, but when they flew to within about 500 feet and looked, "there'd be nothing there." Lieutenant Danny Accoin told the Times that his missile locked on an object and his infrared camera picked it up — "I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit" — but that he "could not pick it up visually." The pilots speculated that the objects belonged to a classified drone program.

The late-2014 near miss

In late 2014 a squadron mate returned to Virginia Beach "with a look of shock on his face" and told Graves, "I almost hit one of those things": he and his wingman had been flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit, and it looked to the pilot like a sphere encasing a cube. Graves testified that the object, "described as a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere," came within 50 feet of the lead aircraft in warning area Whiskey 72, 10 miles off Virginia Beach, estimated at 5 to 15 feet in diameter, after which the mission commander ended the flight. The squadron filed an aviation safety report, but, Graves testified, there was "no official acknowledgement of the incident and no further mechanism to report the sightings." He says the squadron then learned of four other near misses in the previous month that pilots had been too uncomfortable to report; the pilots concluded the objects were not a classified drone program, since officials would know fighters were training in the area and would not send drones into their path, and "it turned from a potentially classified drone program to a safety issue." Graves testified that the encounters became so frequent that aircrews discussed the risk of UAP in their pre-flight briefings.

Workup aboard the carrier

In 2015 the squadron left for a pre-deployment workup aboard the Theodore Roosevelt off Jacksonville, Florida, where, Graves says, "there were a lot of objects down there as well. They either followed us down there or they were already there." He describes many visual sightings, of spheres and elongated spheres "more tic tac shape," and says the exercise nearly had to be shut down because of multiple near misses. The video the Navy later released as Gimbal was recorded off Jacksonville on 20 January 2015.

The crew approached the contacts to within six to eight miles but, because it was night, could not see the objects and recorded in infrared. Graves says that in addition to the Gimbal object there was a formation of four to six objects flying in a wedge, and that when the formation turned the Gimbal object continued straight, then reversed direction "as if it like pinged off a wall," a vertical U-turn within about 500 feet, where an F-18 needs 4,000 to 6,000 feet. A pilot on the Gimbal recording refers to a fleet of objects, but no imagery of a fleet was released. Graves says the Go Fast crew saw four objects in line abreast about a mile apart, and that Gimbal and Go Fast happened "within minutes of each other."

The Theodore Roosevelt left Florida for the Persian Gulf in March 2015, and the pilots said the incidents tapered off after they left the United States.

Navy response

The Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher said in 2019 that new guidance for reporting unexplained aerial phenomena was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents, and that in some cases "we don't know who's doing this, we don't have enough data to track this." The sightings were reported to AATIP, which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior Roosevelt officers. In April 2019 Gradisher said the Navy was "updating and formalizing" its process for reporting unauthorized and unidentified aircraft entering military-controlled ranges.

Disclosure

Graves has said that, seeing the Gimbal and Go Fast videos on the front page of The New York Times in December 2017, he took it as "a cry for help," and that the videos reached the paper through work done partly with Elizondo and Christopher Mellon. The Times published the Gimbal and Nimitz videos on 16 December 2017, and The Washington Post published the Go Fast video. On 26 May 2019 the Times published an account built on interviews with Graves, Accoin and three other pilots of the squadron who declined to be named. The Pentagon formally released the three videos on 27 April 2020. Graves recalled the encounters on 60 Minutes in May 2021, saying they occurred "every day for at least a couple years." Keith Kloor, a journalism professor, called the coverage of the videos "a curious narrative that appears to be driven by thinly-sourced and slanted reporting," adding that "cursory attention has been given to the most likely, prosaic explanations." Elizondo has said the three released videos are the least compelling in the government's possession.

Open questions

References

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This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Pentagon UFO videos", as of an unknown date, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.