Earlier this month, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) released on their website their case resolution report on the Go-Fast video: one of the three famous infrared recordings obtained by Navy personnel from 2004 to 2015 (along with the FLIR-1 and the Gimbal) which in 2017 triggered a global renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon, thanks to the article published in the New York Times by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal.
The PDF file (which you can read here) comes as no surprise to anyone who bothered to watch the Senatorial Hearing with AARO’s director Dr. Jon Kosloski last year. At that event—which greatly contrasted with the tone of the previous Congressional hearing with several ‘whistleblowers’—Kosloski showed the Go-Fast video as an example of the rigorous scientific approach employed by his office to ‘resolve’ (read: debunk) UFO reports. In the case of Go-Fast, Kosloski threw a bucket of cold water to all the enthusiasts who regarded the video as strong evidence of an unknown object exhibiting performances far beyond the capabilities of modern aeronautics.
AARO’s secret weapon? Math. Lots and lots of it…
Using trigonometry and computer modelling to account for all possible atmospheric variables at the approximate time of the event (more on that later), AARO’s analysts came to the conclusion that the object shown on screen did not move as fast as what the video’s title implies—according to their estimates, anywhere from 72 to 161 mph relative to the wind, or from 5 to 92 mph once you substract windspeed.
The discordance between these numerical results and the apparent high speed displayed by the UFO in the video is resolved once you take into account the favorite optical illusion of most UFO skeptics: Parallax—the effect caused by the apparent position of the object in contrast to that of the observer. The Go-Fast video was recorded by pilots flying on a FA-18 Super Hornet at a higher altitude (25,000 feet) than that of the object (approximately 13,000 feet per the range number registered by the Navy vessel’s tracking system); but because the plane’s camera is zooming in on the object against the background of the sea below, the resulting illusion is that the object is moving very rapidly and almost brushing the surface of the water—the audio remarks given by the anonymous Navy pilots, showing a lot of excitement by the object (“Look at it go!”) might have also added to the confusion of whoever decided to name this video with such an inadequate title.
Speaking of UFO skeptics, it should be pointed out that Mick West and the amateur analysts of Metabunk came at almost the same conclusions as that of AARO all the way back to 2018, when they were commenting on the questionable way in which Go-Fast and its sibling videos were exploited by Tom DeLonge and Lue Elizondo, in their short-lived TV series Unidentified.
AARO’s and Metabunk’s conclusions do differ in one key element, however: West and his colleagues estimated the object’s speed as just 20 to 40 knots—which would imply it’s just moving with the wind— whereas AARO gave it a speed range slightly above the wind’s. In other words, the object (which everyone agrees is a relatively small spheroid) could not be a simple weather balloon drifting by the air currents as West implies in his explanatory video (far superior and easier to comprehend than AARO’s PDF, credit where credit’s due).
So… anomalous but barely then?
In trying to find more info from the horse’s mouth as it were (or whichever type of equine analogy you’d prefer) I searched on Lue Elizondo’s 2024 book Imminent for more clues with regards to the provenance of the video, or the sort of analysis he and his colleagues conducted on it back when he was still attached to AATIP.
On Chapter 15: USS Roosevelt, Elizondo has only this to say about Go-Fast:
One morning […] our email inbox rewarded us with two videos we received in a bath of data from Fleet Forces Command. Both videos had been taken from the air by pilots in the Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, using the same sort of ATFLIR pod that Commander Fravor’s squadron had used to capture the 2004 Tic Tac video.
The object in one of the videos also resembled a Tic Tac, at least in the sense that it was rounded, smooth, and egg-shaped. But where the 2004 Tic Tac was more than 40 feet long, this object—in the video that would later become famously known as GoFast—was no more than about 18 feet long, tops. That’s smaller than a Piper Cub, an aircraft built for bush pilots and recreational fliers. A Cub is light-weight, about 765 pounds, and flies no faster than 90 miles per hour.
90 mph would be consistent with AARO’s estimate of the object’s speed, but of course that doesn’t explain the object’s lack of apparent lift and propulsion systems (one of Elizondo’s trademarked ‘five observables’). Also worth noticing that, while Metabunk estimated the object to be only 6 feet in size, and AATIP proposed it was three times bigger, AARO does not offer any size estimation in their report.
He goes on to add:
The object moves from the top right to the lower left of the screen. There’s no plume or exhaust, no wings, no propellers. Just a speedy little egg out for a jaunt above the ocean. At the time, no one in DoD or the IC could explain it. After several years of analysis, however, later researchers would claim that the object was going much slower than previously thought. This effect is called a parallax. I still don’t agree with this assessment, since the pilots who witnessed the object flying marveled at its speed.
Who are the ‘later researchers’ Elizondo doesn’t agree with in regard to Go-Fast? Is he referring to other analysts within the DoD who reviewed AATIP’s performance after he quit to join TTSA (his book was published prior to Kosloski’s hearing) or, as I strongly suspect, is he simply referring to West and Metabunk?
But here I must return back to AARO’s PDF for a moment, and the thing I found to be the most interesting thing about their lengthy analysis:
AARO analyzed the publicly available 34-second FLIR video, because the original file and its accompanying metadata are no longer available [emphasis mine]. The video display provided sufficient information to assess the object’s altitude and range of possible speeds.
For years—no, DECADES—ufologists and Disclosure advocates have complained about the government’s opaqueness, and their reluctance to share whatever UFO hard data they supposedly hold from public view; because they’ve always assumed that whatever meager video evidence they manage to get by their own meager means as private citizens, it pales in comparison with the crystal-clear, lengthy videos the Pentagon or the alphabet-soup agencies must be keeping in their secret vaults.
But now, here comes the official UFO government office, with enough power and leverage in the land (or so they claim) to obtain whatever data they may need to assess the reality of the phenomenon… and they end up using the same crappy public evidence as the amateur analysts online?? SRSLY?!
To add insult to injury, it is also painfully evident AARO never bothered to contact and interview the pilots who filmed the video in the first place. I’m just a lowly UFO scholar here folks, with barely any notion of trigonometry left in me, after I graduated from high school and stopped flexing those rusty brain muscles a long time ago (I did graduate 3rd of my class so I was good at Math once, trust me) but even I feel getting more info from the primary witnesses might be kind of useful, ya know?
Yes, it’s been ten years, but maybe these aviators still remember the incident and could fill in valuable blanks on the case; like the exact location of the encounter (which remains unaccounted on AARO’s analysis) and how they lost sight of the object by the end of their mission—how long did they keep track of the object? Did it change trajectory, fly away at high speed or sink into the ocean, perhaps? Were there other objects in the vicinity?
Even Elizondo doesn’t seem to have fared any better, either. Hell, reading his book one fails to learn who had the bright idea of naming the video as “Go-Fast”! Was it him, or the anonymous source who supposedly handed the videos to Chris Mellon, before the showed them to Kean and Blumenthal to get them on board with the campaign to reveal AATIP through the NYT, according to the patchy story told to us so far? We may never know…
Of the three black-and-white videos that DeLonge and TTSA peddled ad-nauseam once they were leaked in 2017, back when they were forcing their watermark on them as if they owned them (7 years later To the Stars is nothing more than a gloomy merch store) Go-Fast was always the least interesting of the three. Yes, a straight trajectory at low speed is not something particularly exciting in a UFO video, yet that doesn’t really give AARO permission to disregard it either—consider for instance the classic Mariana UFO footage of 1950, which should still be considered genuine evidence of UFO activity;
How would AARO react if someone showed them video evidence like this today? Would they conclude that the objects “did not demonstrate anomalous performance characteristics” just like they did with Go-Fast, and move on?
When it comes to UFO events, context is very important. And in the case of Go-Fast, AARO conveniently omits mentioning to the reader of their report how the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt had been plagued by UFO activity for months, ever since they started conducting exercises on the East coast in late 2014 (in fact, according to Ryan Graves, the activity continued even after the vessel was deployed to the Persian gulf). Pilots were nervous about these incursions, and angry with the higher-ups because they feared no-one was doing anything to prevent an hypothetical air collision with one of these UFOs—which might account for the excitement of the pilots recording Go-Fast now that they finally ‘got’ one of them, if only on camera.
Now, a decade later, it doesn’t really feel like those in charge of analyzing these events have changed much in their attitude. The usual tactics of disregarding the usefulness of pilots’ recollection of anomalous events are still applied; with skeptics’ insistence that, when it comes to ‘extraordinary events’, the testimony of trained observers charged with piloting equipment worth tens of millions of dollars is no better than that of an illiterate farmhand.
…Unless those trained observers get a chance to raise their hand in front of Congress and provide sworn testimony for the American people, like Commander David Fravor did in 2023, alongside Graves and Dave Grusch. Probably the reason why AARO hasn’t yet offered a ‘resolution’ to the 2004 FLIR-1 video (a.k.a. the Tic Tac) which relies more on the account of a Navy Top Gun, than a fuzzy cropped video showing some strange pixels on the screen.
If or when AARO decides to tackle the Tic Tac and challenge Fravor’s word, I fear there’s not enough Math in the world to cover up for that kind of PR nightmare.
