The Roosevelt / East Coast Encounters

Beginning in 2014, F/A-18 crews flying from Naval Air Station Oceana and the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt reported frequent radar detections of unidentified objects in training airspace off Virginia and later Florida. After a 2014 radar upgrade, the contacts appeared almost daily. Pilots described objects with no visible exhaust holding position in high winds or traveling at fighter speeds for hours. One near-collision prompted a formal aviation safety report. The Gimbal and GoFast videos, recorded in January 2015, came from this period.

Crews of Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11 and others began tracking unknown objects after their jets received the upgraded APG-79 AESA radar in 2014. Initial assumptions of radar error eroded when infrared sensors and, eventually, eyes confirmed objects at the radar coordinates. Lieutenant Ryan Graves has described objects appearing at altitudes up to 30,000 feet, stationary against hurricane-force winds or moving at Mach speeds, with flight durations beyond known drone endurance.

In late 2014, two jets flying in formation passed close to an object one pilot described as a dark cube inside a translucent sphere, close enough that the flight lead submitted a safety report. In January 2015, aircrew recorded the Gimbal and GoFast videos during workups off Florida. Crews continued reporting encounters during the Roosevelt's subsequent deployment.

Graves became the first Navy pilot to discuss the encounters publicly, testified to Congress on July 26, 2023, and founded Americans for Safe Aerospace. Lieutenant Danny Accoin described radar and infrared tracking on the record. Several other pilots spoke anonymously to The New York Times in 2019.

Radar, infrared video, and multiple aircrew visual reports across months, plus the formal safety report. The underlying radar data has not been released. The two released videos are the public tip of what pilots describe as routine detections.

The Navy created new UAP reporting guidelines in 2019, citing repeated incursions into training ranges. The encounters featured in the 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment's discussion of flight-safety concerns. No explanation has been issued.

Skeptics propose the radar upgrade itself generated novel artifacts crews had not seen before, that the videos have prosaic readings (glare and parallax), and that some objects were likely balloons, drones, or clutter interpreted through a new sensor's quirks. Proponents respond that artifacts do not produce correlated radar, infrared, and visual detections, that the cube-in-sphere pass was seen directly at close range, and that the Navy changed its reporting rules because the incursions were real enough to matter. The 2014-2015 wave remains the strongest multi-sensor, multi-witness pattern in the modern military record.