The Truth About the 2017 UAP Videos, Part II

As we covered in our previous article, the first three UAP videos in the 2017-2018 wave, known as FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST, were all eventually admitted by the Pentagon as having been recorded by U.S. navy pilots flying U.S. military planes, in these cases, F/A-18s from U.S. aircraft carriers. 

Despite the Pentagon officially admitting their provenance, however, there has still been plenty of controversy surrounding the videos.These controversies are not just matters of opinion: they suggest that any competent aviator familiar with the system should have known right from the beginning that the objects captured by the sensors were not any kind of anomalous objects, but rather, were easily explained terrestrial objects that the Pentagon could have and should have explained from the very beginning, rather than allowing the situation to fester for years. 

Beginning with the FLIR video, it must be noted that the video itself does not actually represent what the most famous pilot involved in this incident, Commander David Fravor, claims to have seen. His F/A-18 from the USS Nimitz wasn’t the aircraft that recorded the video. That second plane came on the scene around an hour later, and may not have even been in the same location. Even then, the weapons officer who recorded the video, Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, admitted he himself never saw the object with his own eyes, and merely saw what was on the weapons display.

The object being recorded in infra-red was most likely the heat plume surrounding a normal jet aircraft, which will appear to an IR camera to be larger than the object itself, and will somewhat resemble an oval Tic-Tac, except for the fact that it’s extremely hot and very blurry with no discernable outline to its shape.Noted science writer and investigator Mick West showed an example of how such an image looks around a standard aircraft, and also how the “sudden moves” described by many viewers at the end of the video are in fact an artifact of the camera unable to maintain a lock on the object, as the object is heading to the left and the tracking plane is heading to the right.

This event in 2004 cannot have been the first time an F/A-18 with a FLIR camera had recorded such an incident while tracking traditional aircraft. For both the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon to remain silent about what is clearly an easily explainable occurrence suggests that either or both organizations deliberately wanted to maintain confusion about the incident. Even more alarming, it appears this confusion was deliberately sustained in order to appear to support Commander Fravor’s earlier account. 

The second video released, the GIMBAL video, is named for the rotating mount for the infra-red camera below the host aircraft, in this instance, an F/A-18 flying from the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Florida. Again, Mick West explains that the apparent “turning upside down” movement of the object is from the Gimbal mount itself turning upside down when its plane-host is pointing far enough away from the object that the Gimbal can no longer keep its original observation focus on the object. Note that this makes the object appear to invert while keeping the horizon at its original aspect. West later explained how you can easily duplicate the rotate-non-rotate effect on your own cell phone.

It’s also clear that the “spike” elements that appear to the relative top and bottom of the object are an artifact of the camera receiving more information (heat from the object’s jet engine) than it can process. The same spikey effect happens when a telescope takes in more energy from a nearby star than it can process, thus creating the well-known eight-point star effect. 

Again, these elements have to have been common to any flight officer familiar with the F/A-18 and its Gimbal-mounted FLIR system. It is almost impossible that no one from either the Navy or the Pentagon was aware of these as being simple artifacts of the system. Again, we have to conclude that both the Navy and the Pentagon deliberately pretended they did not know that these were standard elements inherent in the manner in which the system operates. 

The third video, the GOFAST video, is the shortest of the three, and has now been explained with a prosaic explanation even by the Pentagon itself. The apparent speed of the object against the background ocean was caused by parallax. As Pentagon spokesperson Jon Kosloski, director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), explained it in November, 2024:

“Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis, using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet,” Kosloski said. “As the platform (with the sensors) is flying and capturing the object, if it is closer to the platform at a higher altitude, a trick of the eye called ‘parallax’ makes it look like the object is moving much faster.”

Since the 2017 and 2018 release of these first three Pentagon UAP videos, several more recordings have been released. Two of these in particular got nearly as much attention as the first three. They’ve been nicknamed the Splashdown video, and the Triangles video. Both were supposedly filmed in July of 2019, and both were released to only one source: Jeremy Corbell, who has been a filmmaker specializing in UFOs  for many years. 

Despite the interest they generated when they were first released, both of these videos also have easily explained reasons behind their creations, which we’ll explore in our next article.These two, however, are a bit different. While in keeping with the first three released videos, the Pentagon at first would not admit these were official videos, though later they did admit they were filmed by U.S. military personnel. But the manner in which these two later videos were filmed were very different from the first three.