The Pentagon Took GoFast Apart on Camera

On November 19, 2024, AARO director Jon Kosloski appeared before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities and did something his office had rarely done in public: he showed the working. 16

Three cases were laid out. Two were famous. One was not.

**GoFast.** One of the three Navy videos the Pentagon released in 2020, and the one most often cited as showing an object screaming just above the ocean at impossible speed. AARO's reconstruction used the telemetry burned into the frame — angles and ranges — to place the object much higher and much slower than it looks, its apparent velocity a product of parallax as the camera platform moves. 3 This is, notably, the same analysis independent skeptics published years earlier.

**Aguadilla.** In 2013 a Customs and Border Protection aircraft recorded roughly three minutes of infrared footage near Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, showing an object that appears to split in two and enter the ocean. AARO concluded there were two distinct objects airborne near each other the whole time; the apparent split is an artefact of changing sensor view angle, and the apparent speed is again motion parallax. 12

**Mount Etna.** A previously unpublicised 2018 drone video shot above the Sicilian volcano, introduced as an example of the office working cases nobody was watching. 1

The pushback

The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, which has published its own analysis of the Aguadilla footage, disputed AARO's hypothesis and submitted technical questions. AARO responded that it was not prepared to answer them, and might address the points in a future report. 4

An office that resolves a contested case and then declines to take technical questions on the resolution has done half of the job. The half it skipped is the half that produces confidence.

What Kosloski did not claim

He did not tell the subcommittee that everything resolves. His formulation was that a small number of genuinely anomalous objects warrant careful study. 5 Senator Gillibrand, who has driven the oversight framework for this office since 2021, used her opening statement to press on resources and access rather than on aliens. 7

That is the useful register for this file, and it is rarer than it should be: a specific case, a specific reconstruction, a specific objection, on the record. 8