YouTube science communicator Hank Green stirred up a hornet's nest on Bluesky this week at https://bsky.app/profile/hankgreen.bsky.social/post/3lfdibahtsk26 by posting the cover of Luis Elizondo's book "Imminent" with a Gimbal photo and declaring it "Just so, so ballsy to put an image of something that we 100% know is the heat signature of an airplane on the cover of your book about UFOs." This started the predictable flame war in the responses as well as a Green-bashing thread on /r/ufos.
In a later Bluesky post, Green backed off the assertion, but brings up Mick West's analysis of the rotation: "Look, I apologize for being hyperbolic and also dismissive...but I have never seen anyone make a convincing case that Mick West is wrong here. They ad hominem him, they say that he doesn't understand things...but his case is simple and well-supported. The object doesn't rotate, the gimbal does."
I didn't want to attach my professional account to the issue, so I didn't comment there, but it struck me how so much of the defense of the Gimbal object as anomalous depended on the belief in corroborating evidence (eyewitness accounts, multi-sensor recordings) that doesn't exist, as well as confusion between Ryan Graves and David Fravor and the Gimbal and Tic Tac incidents. I also didn't want to fall into making imprecise claims myself.
I know the cases have been thoroughly discussed in threads here, but I couldn't recall if the Gimbal object had been seen on radar before the sighting. And these threads can be... a lot. I wanted a summary of the current understanding. Wikipedia was less than helpful. When I searched "was gimbal object on radar" I got this dismaying "AI Overview" answer from Google:
The main source for this conclusion seems to be an AOL version of a New York Post story about the Nov. 18, 2024 oversight hearing of AARO. (For some reason the author describes the still images as coming from "infrared radar" and "FLIR radar.") Google also links to a Live Science blog post summarizing the 2019 New York Times story about the three famous Navy UFO videos -- none of which actually say the Gimbal pilots saw their target on radar, let alone "with their own eyes." (The secondary answers for AI Overview were worse and the regular search results below were barely relevant.)
For comparison, I tried the Perplexity AI system. I got a much more nuanced response that I admit seems to fit my prior expectations: "The GIMBAL UFO object was not definitively confirmed to have been seen on radar. While radar detections were reported in some UFO incidents, the search results do not specifically mention radar confirmation for the GIMBAL video." Though its sources turn out to be one 2020 CBC interview with Mick and a blogger's 2021 summary of Mick's "Explained: New Navy UFO Videos." Not particularly definitive.
I read some transcript where Graves more recently claimed to have seen the Gimbal object on the aircraft carrier's radar, but it's not clear if he saw the specific target or just the "fleet of objects" radar returns at the same time and concluded that one of them was what the pilots were looking at. (Given the need for Mick and Peings & von Rennenkampff to try to (separately) recreate the potential flight path and distance of the Gimble object's location relative to the F/A-18 recording it, it seems more likely no one knows definitively that the carrier had it on radar.)
I digress, but it's interesting at the start of 2025:
In a later Bluesky post, Green backed off the assertion, but brings up Mick West's analysis of the rotation: "Look, I apologize for being hyperbolic and also dismissive...but I have never seen anyone make a convincing case that Mick West is wrong here. They ad hominem him, they say that he doesn't understand things...but his case is simple and well-supported. The object doesn't rotate, the gimbal does."
I didn't want to attach my professional account to the issue, so I didn't comment there, but it struck me how so much of the defense of the Gimbal object as anomalous depended on the belief in corroborating evidence (eyewitness accounts, multi-sensor recordings) that doesn't exist, as well as confusion between Ryan Graves and David Fravor and the Gimbal and Tic Tac incidents. I also didn't want to fall into making imprecise claims myself.
I know the cases have been thoroughly discussed in threads here, but I couldn't recall if the Gimbal object had been seen on radar before the sighting. And these threads can be... a lot. I wanted a summary of the current understanding. Wikipedia was less than helpful. When I searched "was gimbal object on radar" I got this dismaying "AI Overview" answer from Google:
The main source for this conclusion seems to be an AOL version of a New York Post story about the Nov. 18, 2024 oversight hearing of AARO. (For some reason the author describes the still images as coming from "infrared radar" and "FLIR radar.") Google also links to a Live Science blog post summarizing the 2019 New York Times story about the three famous Navy UFO videos -- none of which actually say the Gimbal pilots saw their target on radar, let alone "with their own eyes." (The secondary answers for AI Overview were worse and the regular search results below were barely relevant.)
For comparison, I tried the Perplexity AI system. I got a much more nuanced response that I admit seems to fit my prior expectations: "The GIMBAL UFO object was not definitively confirmed to have been seen on radar. While radar detections were reported in some UFO incidents, the search results do not specifically mention radar confirmation for the GIMBAL video." Though its sources turn out to be one 2020 CBC interview with Mick and a blogger's 2021 summary of Mick's "Explained: New Navy UFO Videos." Not particularly definitive.
I read some transcript where Graves more recently claimed to have seen the Gimbal object on the aircraft carrier's radar, but it's not clear if he saw the specific target or just the "fleet of objects" radar returns at the same time and concluded that one of them was what the pilots were looking at. (Given the need for Mick and Peings & von Rennenkampff to try to (separately) recreate the potential flight path and distance of the Gimble object's location relative to the F/A-18 recording it, it seems more likely no one knows definitively that the carrier had it on radar.)
I digress, but it's interesting at the start of 2025:
- How Hank Green slid into claiming 100% certainty without some resource to point to.
- How many believers imagine there's corroborating evidence of the Gimbal target's nature.
- How badly the Google AI Overview system mangles its presentation of even simple facts.
- How hard it remains to find relatively definitive summaries of these cases.
