In recent years, whenever you see a story on UFOs, it almost invariably includes images from the “Gimbal video,” a blurry monochrome clip of what vaguely looks like a flying saucer. Gimbal has rapidly become the dominant icon of the UFO/UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). Just keystroke “UFO” into a Google image search and a quarter of the results will be a frame from Gimbal.
The video first came to the public’s attention in December 2017, in a New York Times article1 authored by Helene Cooper (who covers the Pentagon for the Times), Ralph Blumenthal (who authored a biography of John Mack, a psychiatrist who studied those who claimed to be alien-abductees), and Leslie Kean (author of a bestselling UFO book). The online version of the story was headed by an embedded version of the video described as “an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object.”
This now-ubiquitous video is indeed interesting. It shows the view from the targeting pod on the F/A-18, which I’ll refer to as “the jet.” It’s thermal camera footage, so it is filming something that’s very hot in the middle of the screen, which I’ll refer to as “the object.” The object is roughly the shape of a classic flying saucer and appears to be flying rapidly to the left, just above the clouds. It seems as if it is surrounded by a bubble of cold air—termed “the aura.”
For the first 20 seconds of the video, not a lot is going on. But around 23 seconds weird things start to happen. There’s a little bump of the camera, and the object rotates a little counterclockwise. This happens three more times. During a particularly long rotation, one of the pilots in the plane says, incredulously, “look at that thing! It’s rotating!” The object continues to rotate until it’s past vertical, and inexplicably appears to slow down to a near stop.
If this were simply a video some guy took in his backyard, then it wouldn’t have received much attention outside of the UFO community. But Gimbal was radically different to anything the media had ever seen before. Here was a video not only being showcased by the New York Times, but also directly attributed to the Department of Defense. It became, therefore, nothing less than
the holy grail of UFO videos, an “official” video of an actual UFO; not simply some dot in the sky, but an actual flying saucer defying the laws of aerodynamics. UFOlogists were understandably elated, believing that at long last they had definitive evidence of alien visitation.
It’s Complicated
UFOs are often described as “unidentified” because conventional explanations—Identified Flying Objects—are sometimes difficult to pin down. Usually this is simply because the data are insufficient, but sometimes it’s because the analysis required is difficult and complex to perform, and even harder to understand. Even when the data set is adequately analyzed, sufficient ambiguities remain so that we cannot provide a convincingly definitive, mundane answer, thus leaving open the possibility of some unconventional explanation, which usually means “aliens.”
Skeptics recognize this problem as a form of the “God of the gaps” argument for the existence of God. Science has not answered every question about the universe, and many mysteries remain to be solved. Those mysteries, though shrinking in number, are taken by those “seeking something more” as evidence of something beyond science, i.e., God. And if not “God”, well, at least “Aliens.”
There are many questions we can attempt to answer about the Gimbal video. How big is the object? How far away is it? How fast is it moving? What is it? Why is it there? Who—if anyone (or anything) is on board? These are difficult questions to answer because of the lack of information. We might theorize it’s a misidentif
