What happened
One of the 51 military sensor videos in PURSUE Release 02, published on 22 May 2026, is a 20-second infrared clip catalogued as DOW-UAP-PR050. It was recorded on 26 August 2022 over water near Iran, in US Central Command's area, by a platform whose callsign is redacted. It shows four separate heat contrasts moving together over the sea in a tight, coordinated formation; near the end of the clip a fifth enters from the upper left corner. Commentators singled it out from the batch: Il Sole 24 Ore described it as four objects flying in coordination off the Iranian coast, and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb discussed it in an interview with DW. Like everything in the archive, it was published as an unresolved case, with a short caption and no analysis or conventional explanation from AARO.
The official explanation
The Pentagon has offered no explanation. Infrared video reduces objects to patches of contrast, and without range data their real size, altitude and speed cannot be fixed, so birds, drones, small boats or distant aircraft could all produce similar images. Loeb himself, asked on DW whether the objects might be Iranian drones, drone boats or surveillance assets, agreed that they could be, and said the footage was not good enough to support firm conclusions. Coordinated movement is also what a group of uncrewed vehicles under common control would show.
The anomalous case
Four objects holding formation, then joined by a fifth, is not how balloons or debris behave, and the US military, which recorded and retained the clip, did not identify them. Loeb argued that the objects appear to pass between air and water without slowing as much as known vehicles would, which he called the intriguing part given that water is roughly a thousand times denser than air, and he said the Pentagon's unfamiliarity with them is significant in itself: either a foreign power is flying something US analysts do not recognize, or the objects are something else. Coordinated objects moving between sea and sky echo earlier transmedium reports such as the 2013 Aguadilla video, and here the sensor belonged to the US military itself.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- PURSUE Release 02 (22 May 2026), WAR.GOV/UFO official, war.gov
- DOW-UAP-PR050: 4 UAP Formation, Iran, 26 Aug 2022, over water (PURSUE Release 02) video, war.gov
Sources
- United States UFO files Wikipedia
- UFO: Pentagon publishes second tranche of files Il Sole 24 Ore
- Analysis of the second batch of UFO files released by the Pentagon Avi Loeb (Medium)
- Pentagon UFO files second batch: all 51 videos, NASA audio and the intelligence officer who was 'speechless' TodayWhy
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.