The Go-Fast video is a 34-second infrared recording showing an unidentified aerial object moving low over water. It entered public circulation in March 2018, when the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA) posted it to its website, dubbing it the “Go-Fast” video.1 As originally posted, the footage carried no details of when, where, or by whom it had been shot, beyond that it had been captured by a United States Navy (USN) FA-18 Super Hornet using the jet’s Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) targeting pod.2 On the recording, the object appears as a white oval shape moving at apparent high speed from the top right to the lower left of the frame, flying very low over the water.3 According to the book In Plain Sight, the object’s claimed high speed has been disputed by some.4
Further context on the video’s origin came later. Christopher K. Mellon’s story in the Washington Post revealed that the footage had been filmed off the east coast of the United States, part of the 2014-2015 US East Coast Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) encounters.5 Joseph Gradisher, speaking for the Navy, said that the service had not publicly released characterisations, descriptions, hypotheses, or conclusions regarding the objects captured in the Tic Tac, Gimbal video, and Go-Fast footage.6 The United States Department of Defense (DoD) itself released the Go-Fast video, dated 2015, via the To The Stars Academy vault website on 2018-03-09.7
Pilot David Fravor, who took part in the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter, said he personally knows the pilot who filmed both the Go-Fast video and the Gimbal video, and that the two recordings were shot by the same person.89 Fravor also said that at least 60 people saw the unidentified objects associated with the two videos on radar off the coast near USA, Washington, Whidbey Island.10
Luis Elizondo has offered detailed characterisation of the object in the footage: he said it resembled a Tic Tac shape, rounded, smooth and egg-shaped, but was no more than about 5.5 metres long, compared to the more than 12-metre length of the object filmed in the 2004 Tic Tac encounter,11 and that it was smaller than a Piper Cub aircraft.12 He said the object showed no plume of exhaust, no wings, and no propellers,13 and that at the time of recording, no one in the Department of Defense or the intelligence community could explain it.14 Elizondo said that after several years of analysis, some later researchers attributed the object’s apparent speed to a parallax effect, but that he disagreed with this assessment because the pilots who witnessed the object marvelled at its speed.15
Elizondo said that he and his colleagues planned to use both the Go-Fast video and the Gimbal video to reinforce OPLAN Interloper.16 He said he attended a meeting with senior Navy officials, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) representatives, and a National Security Agency (NSA) representative at which both videos were shown.17 He later selected the Go-Fast video, the Gimbal video, and the FLIR1 video (also known as the 2004 Tic Tac video) as the three Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) videos he submitted for declassification, on the grounds that their low resolution would hasten approval.18 He described all three on a single Department of Defense (DoD) Form 1910, the form the DoD uses to request declassification of documents and multimedia content.19 The Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review officially stamped Elizondo’s form “UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION”, approving unrestricted public release of all three videos.20
The Go-Fast video is frequently discussed alongside the Gimbal video and the Tic Tac footage as part of the broader release of Navy Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) material that followed the December 2017 New York Times reporting on the Pentagon’s UAP investigations, and it remains cited in connection with the Department of Defense (DoD) Threat Scenario’ briefing slide.