The Gimbal Briefing File
What The Black Vault Pulled Out of the System
Formerly SECRET-level emails don’t arrive easily. Under U.S. government standards, SECRET applies to information whose unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security. John Greenewald of The Black Vault spent approximately three years pursuing a set of these records before receiving them in partially declassified form, publishing the documents alongside his written analysis on April 7, 2022. The producing agency is not identified in the available material. What arrived: government emails, formerly marked SECRET, released with heavy redactions throughout.
What the Gimbal Video Is, and Where It Comes From
In January 2015, an aircrew from the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group was operating off the East Coast near Jacksonville, Florida, in military training airspace. During that operation, the Weapons Systems Officer (WSO), flying in the rear seat of an F/A-18F Super Hornet, filmed an unidentified aerial object using the aircraft’s AN/ASQ-228 ATFLIR targeting pod. The resulting 34-second clip became known as the Gimbal video.
The footage entered public view on December 16, 2017, when the New York Times published it as part of a report on AATIP (the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a Pentagon initiative funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2007 to 2012 at a reported cost of $22 million). That article was written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. The Pentagon later characterized the 2017 publication as an unauthorized distribution. The Department of Defense issued an official public release of the Gimbal footage on April 27, 2020, through the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), stating that the phenomena depicted “remain characterized as ‘unidentified.'” By September 2019, the Navy had formally acknowledged through spokesman Joseph Gradisher that the footage depicted “unidentified aerial phenomena” and that the nature and origin of what was recorded remained undetermined.
The 2019 Senate Staffers and a Reported Briefing
Among the released materials is a Navy email documenting a classified congressional briefing scheduled for May 7, 2019. The email identifies the briefer as Jay Stratton, identified in the document as a Defense Intelligence Senior Level (DISL) officer at the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Nimitz Operational Intelligence Center. Recipients included staff from the offices of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and House staff. The Navy’s Office of Legislative Affairs organized the session.
A peer-reviewed paper published in June 2023, written by Yannick Peings and Marik von Rennenkampff and presented at the AIAA AVIATION Forum (arXiv:2306.08773), separately states that Senate Armed Services Committee professional staff members interviewed the WSO who filmed the Gimbal footage. Greenewald’s analysis connects these threads and concludes that the paper trail points toward the Gimbal WSO having appeared before Senate staffers in 2019. He presents this as an inference drawn from the documents, not as a direct statement within them. The WSO’s name does not appear in any released version of the material.
The Gap in the Middle of the File
The redactions are substantial. The WSO’s identity is withheld throughout, and the content of any briefing the WSO may have delivered is not visible in what was released. Whether the individual who appeared before Senate staff is definitively the same officer who filmed the Gimbal footage cannot be confirmed from the available record. A background paper on UAPs referenced in the emails as having been circulated internally to Vice Admiral DeWolfe Miller and other Navy personnel was withheld in full from the FOIA release. As of July 2025, the Navy had confirmed that 498 pages related to the broader records effort were withheld entirely. An unredacted version of the core emails has not been released.
The Footage, the Debate, and What the Emails Don’t Touch
Since December 2017, public interpretation of the Gimbal clip has divided between two positions: that the footage represents something genuinely anomalous, or that the object is a distant conventional aircraft and the visual effects, including the apparent 90-degree rotation near the end, are artifacts produced by the ATFLIR pod’s internal derotation mechanism.
Researcher Ian Goddard advanced the derotation artifact explanation in early 2018. Peings and von Rennenkampff formalized it in their 2023 paper, proposing that the object is infrared glare from a conventional jet’s exhaust viewed from approximately 30 nautical miles (55.6 kilometers) away, tail-on. The specific problem with that hypothesis, which the same paper acknowledges, is the range figure. The aircrew reported the object at roughly 10 nautical miles (18.5 kilometers). At that distance, no wings and no conventional propulsion signature are visible, and radar records indicated a stable track described as not a false return. The crew-reported range and the glare hypothesis’s assumed range are mutually exclusive. The record does not resolve which is correct. The emails released to The Black Vault do not engage this question at all.
Five Questions the Record Leaves Unanswered
The WSO’s identity is withheld in full throughout every released document. The content of the 2019 briefing to Senate staffers is not visible in the released material, the documents establish that a briefing occurred or was planned, but do not reproduce its substance. Whether the officer who briefed Senate staffers and the officer who filmed the Gimbal footage are the same person remains, per the available record, an inference. No document in the released set describes any follow-up action or reaction from the Senate staffers who attended. And the 498 pages withheld in full, confirmed by the Navy as of July 2025, remain entirely unknown from the public record.