The Six Spherical Objects Reported Over the Middle East, 29 July 2025 (PURSUE PR135)
A special operations crew reported six spherical objects changing direction together at 480 miles per hour. The released minute of video does not resolve six of anything, and this page says so.
What did witnesses see at Middle East?
The video released from this encounter runs exactly one minute, and its first four seconds carry no object at all. The final twelve seconds carry none either.
Between those, a group of small bright forms crosses the sensor field of view from top to bottom, and the operator pans to follow them, holding them near the centre of frame from about eleven seconds to about forty seven. The background is a hazy infrared field with no horizon and no fixed reference anywhere in it.
This archive extracted and magnified the frames rather than relying on the caption, and the result is worth stating carefully. At any given moment the footage resolves roughly two to four separate luminous elements, not six. Each element is visibly elongated rather than round, which on a sensor of this kind is motion smear across the integration time and not the shape of the thing. The internal arrangement of the group changes from frame to frame: at twenty six seconds the elements sit in one loose configuration, at thirty two seconds in another, at thirty eight seconds in a third. They are plainly separate bodies rather than one structure carrying lights.
So the count of six comes from the crew, not from the video. The archive could not confirm it from the released material and does not repeat it as a measurement.
More footage and images of this sighting
DOW-UAP-D108, Mission Report, Middle East, 2025, the paired MISREP naming the 65th Special Operations Squadron and dating the encounter to 20:22:32Z on 29 July 2025 View source
What is the official explanation?
The paired mission report, DOW-UAP-D108, is the document this case rests on, and it belongs to a different unit and a different month from the other Middle East video in this release.
It records the operation as Inherent Resolve, the operations center as the 609th, and the major command as Air Force Special Operations Command. The originating squadron is the 65th Special Operations Squadron and the mission wing is the 1st Special Operations Wing. That is a different chain from the Air Combat Command sortie that produced DOW-UAP-PR133, which matters, because the two videos were published under the identical label "Middle East, 2025" and the Department asserts no link between them.
The timeline puts takeoff at 291734:00ZJUL25, on station from 292236:01ZJUL25, landing at 301411:00ZJUL25 and last engine shutdown at 301426:00ZJUL25. Initial contact with the object is logged at 292022:32ZJUL25, so the encounter falls at 20:22:32Z on 29 July 2025, before the aircraft's own recorded on station time, which the form does not reconcile.
The structured UAP fields are fuller than on most of these reports. Maneuverability is recorded as "SEEMED TO BE AGILE, FREQUENTLY CHNAGING DIRECTION", reproducing the form's own typo. The anomalous characteristics field reads "ABLE TO CHANGE DIRECTIONS QUICKLY AND SIMULTANEOUSLY", and that word simultaneously is the most interesting thing in the document, because it is a claim about several bodies turning together rather than about one object manoeuvring. Kinetic altitude is given as FL220, kinetic trajectory as southeast, and kinetic velocity as "48OMPH", typed with a letter O in place of the second zero. Every one of those fields is flagged "Estimated". The friendly aircraft was flying at 120 knots indicated, heading northwest.
Other fields close off lines of enquiry rather than opening them. Observation interrogation of the object: "NO". Observer engagement: "NO". Effects on persons: "NO". Effects on equipment: "NONE". Advanced capabilities or materials: "NO". Propulsion means, intelligent control, radio frequency signatures and event serial number are all "UNKNOWN". The reaction field reads "NONE. FOLLOWED OF OWN ACCORD UNTIL LIST. REPORTED AFTERWARDS", where LIST appears to be a mistyping of LOST. The reporting observer is identified by rank only, Staff Sergeant.
The file was declassified by Major General Richard A. Harrison, U.S. Central Command Chief of Staff, against an original declassification date of 29 July 2050.
Frames of the released footage carry a burned in caption reading "Public disclosure of this information is postponed in accordance with 44 U.S.C. Section 2107 Section 1843, UAP Postponement Code E.O. 13526". That reads like a composite of three unrelated authorities, and when this case was first published the archive deliberately declined to characterise it rather than describe a statute it had not opened. Read at the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, the citation is accurate rather than garbled. Section 1843 is headed "Grounds for Postponement of Public Disclosure of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records", it was enacted as part of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act in the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, and it is set out in the statutory notes to 44 U.S.C. 2107, the National Archives provision on acceptance of records for historical preservation. That is why one caption can carry both numbers at once.
Its opening words place it alongside the classification order rather than inside it. Postponement is available "In addition to the relevant authorities in Executive Order 13526", and only where the original classification authority determines there is clear and convincing evidence of one of four grounds: a threat to the military defense, intelligence operations or conduct of foreign relations of the United States grave enough to outweigh the public interest in disclosure and which would reveal an intelligence agent whose identity currently requires protection, a source or method currently in use, or another matter whose disclosure would demonstrably and substantially impair national security; a disclosure that would violate the Privacy Act of 1974; an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy so substantial that it outweighs the public interest; or a disclosure that would compromise a currently protected understanding of confidentiality between a federal agent and a cooperating individual or a foreign government. A "UAP Postponement Code" stamped on a released frame is therefore a pointer to which of those statutory grounds was invoked, not a separate or informal secrecy regime. The same subtitle cuts the other way too: it states that no unidentified anomalous phenomena record created by a person or entity outside the federal government may be withheld, redacted, postponed for public disclosure or reclassified, aside from names and identities. On this record the notice appears on frames of PR135.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The crew's account and the released video do not disagree so much as fail to meet. The crew reported six objects; the footage resolves two to four elements at a time. Neither observation refutes the other, because the crew watched a live feed at whatever magnification they were using, while the public has sixty seconds of compressed video with the sensor's data readouts masked out.
What the crew is firm about is behaviour rather than count. They describe a group that was agile, that changed direction frequently, and that changed direction simultaneously. They also record, without apparent alarm, that the objects did not react to being observed and were simply followed until contact was lost. The tone of the paperwork throughout is of a routine filing, not of an emergency.
The estimate of 480 miles per hour deserves the same treatment as the 500 in the October record. It is an unranged visual impression by an operator watching a screen, flagged "Estimated" on the form, and the Department's own standing caveat says the estimative language reflects the reporter's subjective interpretation at the time. It is testimony about an impression, not an instrument reading.
Is the Six Spherical Objects Reported Over the Middle East, 29 July 2025 (PURSUE PR135) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, how this could be mundane.
A loose group of small, separate, similarly bright bodies at around 22,000 feet, seen from an aircraft at 120 knots, has several ordinary candidates. Birds are the first, and the flocking behaviour would explain the one detail the crew found most striking, several bodies changing direction at the same moment, which is what a flock does and what independently piloted craft do not. Against birds, the reported altitude of FL220 is high, though the altitude is an estimate by an observer with no range to the objects, and an underestimate of range would inflate it.
Balloons in a cluster, debris carried aloft, and other aircraft at a different range are all live. So is the possibility that the group was much closer and much slower than it appeared, which would make both the altitude and the 480 miles per hour meaningless at once. The archive cannot separate these, and the reason is the same one that limits every case in this release: the sensor's range, altitude and heading readouts have been masked out of the published frames by the All domain Anomaly Resolution Office, so there is no way to recover a distance.
The elongation of each element is not evidence of anything exotic. It is what a moving point source does on an integrating infrared sensor, and it is visible on the ordinary background features in the same frames.
Pass two, if the crew's description is accurate.
Then six solid bodies flew as a coordinated group at roughly 22,000 feet, turning together and quickly, fast enough that an experienced operator reached for 480 miles per hour, and did not respond to being watched. The Department has logged it as a UAP Incident, declassified it twenty five years early, and published it with no explanation attached.
The archive tiers this Unknown. There is no official narrative to weigh, the prosaic candidates survive on the released material, and the one figure the coverage has repeated most often, the count of six, is the crew's and not the camera's.
A note on the Department's own paperwork, because it bears on how much weight the manifest can carry. The release manifest's summary line for the paired document DOW-UAP-D109, which belongs to an entirely different encounter in 2022, reproduces this report's text almost word for word, including the "seem[ingle]" typo. The Department appears to have pasted this record's blurb into that one. The underlying documents are different; the summaries are not.
UPDATE, 7 October 2026: a named team has now measured the footage and reached a specific identification.
A preprint by Jacob Haqq-Misra of Blue Marble Space, with Ravi Kopparapu of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Richard Cloete and Omer Eldadi of the Galileo Project at Harvard, Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and Avi Loeb, titled "Six objects reported at 480 mph in a declassified military infrared video show brightness flicker at bird wingbeat rates", argues that the six objects are a small flock of birds much closer to the aircraft than the crew assumed.
Their method is the part worth attention, because it works on exactly the thing this case lacks. A flapping wing changes the area the bird presents to the camera, modulating its infrared brightness at the wingbeat frequency, and that frequency does not depend on how far away the bird is. So it can be measured even though the release redacts every number that would give a range. Measuring each object frame by frame, they find all six brightening and dimming steadily between 7.11 and 7.85 times per second, each at its own rate and out of step with the others, with phases between 30 and 170 degrees apart. The same beat appears independently in each object's pixel area and in its fitted width, and for every object the three agree to within 0.13 beats per second. Objects planted into the video with constant brightness do not produce the effect, which rules out compression and the sensor, and a beat generated by the video itself would appear at one frequency and one phase in all six.
Applied to infrared recordings from the Galileo Project's ground-based camera array near Las Vegas, the same analysis finds flying animals beating at 3.4 to 10.0 times per second. On the speed, they show that a nearly stationary object at 60 to 80 per cent of the aircraft's height reproduces the reported 480 miles per hour, because a speed derived from airborne imagery without a range describes the ground rather than the object, which is the same error already resolved in the Navy "Go Fast" case.
Two things in the paper correct this archive's earlier text. The first is the object count: this case previously recorded that magnified frames resolved "roughly two to four separate luminous elements, not six", and the paper tracks six throughout, labelled A to F, which should be taken as superseding the earlier reading. The second is the platform. The paper infers an MQ-9 Reaper from three details in the mission report, that the 65th Special Operations Squadron operates the type, that a single aircraft flew for 20.6 hours with takeoff at 1734Z on 29 July and landing at 1411Z on 30 July, and that 120 knots is a normal MQ-9 cruise speed. If that is right there was no crew aboard, and the observers were operating the aircraft remotely.
Two further details sharpen the picture. The contact time of 2022Z is 23:22 in local time, 4.7 hours after sunset, with the Moon 25 per cent illuminated and set at 21:26, so the sky was dark. And the paper proposes a location: the report's location fields are redacted, but the first ten seconds of video show a small low island carrying a lattice tower and a building, which the authors say closely resembles Qaruh Island off Kuwait in the northern Persian Gulf, at 28.82 degrees north and 48.78 degrees east.
Now the honest part, because the paper is more careful than the coverage of it.
On the location, the authors write that they "consider this a possible but unconfirmed identification of the site". Loeb's own essay summarising the paper drops that hedge and states flatly that "the specific location of the video footage is Qaruh Island near Kuwait". The paper is right and the summary is not, so this case does not move its coordinates.
On the birds, the paper contains a tension its summary omits entirely. The seabirds that actually breed around Qaruh beat their wings more slowly than the objects flicker: the two terns measured by Bruderer and colleagues beat at 3.3 and 4.5 hertz, gulls at 2.7 to 3.8, and the great cormorant at 5.1, against a measured 7.11 to 7.85. The authors resolve this two ways rather than one. Either each wingbeat produces two nearly equal brightenings, which halves the true rate to 3.6 to 4.0 hertz and fits a tern, or the objects are birds that genuinely beat at 6.6 to 8.5 hertz, such as ducks, grebes and waders, with tracking radar in southern Israel having recorded large numbers of nocturnal migrant waders and waterfowl. So the result is not "the local breeding colony" but one of two readings, and the paper says so.
The authors also state their own limits, including that the speed or altitude estimates may simply have been recorded incorrectly, that knowing the aircraft's altitude would resolve it, and in their abstract that "releasing the redacted sensor and platform data would provide information that could refute these hypotheses."
How this archive weighs it. This is method-shown analysis by named researchers at identifiable institutions, with controls, a comparison dataset and stated limits, which is the standard this archive asks for and rarely gets. It is also a preprint hosted as a PDF on a co-author's university web page rather than a peer-reviewed paper or an arXiv posting, so it has not yet been through external review. The bird hypothesis was already the leading prosaic candidate in this file's first pass, on the flocking behaviour alone, and the flicker measurement is substantially stronger evidence for it than anything available before. It does not become the official narrative, because there is none, and the tier stays Unknown pending either peer review or the release of the redacted telemetry that the authors themselves say could refute them.
Sources
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1023397/dow-uap-pr135-unresolved-uap-report-middle-east-2025
- www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/sept-18/release-06/assets/DOW-UAP-D108_Mission-Report-Middle-East-2025.pdf
- www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv?release=6
- www.war.gov/UFO/
- www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-uap-pentagon-6th-release/
- uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title44-section2107&num=0&edition=prelim
- lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/JHM.pdf
- avi-loeb.medium.com/the-six-infrared-dots-in-a-declassified-uap-video-is-a-flock-of-birds-3a0a38f33ca7
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in Undisclosed
