A US military infrared sensor filmed four unidentified objects in synchronized flight over the Persian Gulf region in August 2022. The footage is now public via PURSUE - and officially unexplained after nearly four years.
In late August 2022, a US military sensor platform operating somewhere in CENTCOM’s theater - most likely above the Persian Gulf or one of its approaches - picked up something that didn’t resolve into a known signature. Four thermal contacts moved together across its infrared display in tight, synchronized formation. Then a fifth appeared from a separate direction.
The crew filed a report with AARO - the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon body tasked with investigating unidentified aerial phenomena. The 20-second clip went to a classified server and stayed there for nearly four years.
On May 22, 2026, the footage became public for the first time as part of PURSUE - the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, the Trump administration’s ongoing declassification of government UAP records. It was catalogued as DOW-UAP-PR050 and titled simply: “4 UAP Formation Iran 26 Aug 2022 over water [CALLSIGN].”
The callsign of the recording platform - and with it the precise location, altitude, and speed data - remains classified. What AARO confirmed for the public record: the video is “likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a US military platform operating within the United States Central Command area of responsibility in 2022.” The agency filed the case as unresolved.
The 20-second video, now freely downloadable from DVIDSHUB - the Defense Department’s own media distribution service - shows four distinct infrared signatures entering the sensor’s field of view from the left side of the frame. They transit across the lower portion of the screen, maintaining what AARO’s description calls “coherent spatial spacing” - a consistent geometric relationship throughout the transit. Shortly after, a fifth contact enters from the upper left.
Infrared sensors (also called FLIR, or forward-looking infrared) detect heat rather than visible light. Military platforms use them to track objects in darkness or through atmospheric haze. What they cannot reveal, without additional data, is how fast an object is moving or how high above the surface it sits.
The formation behavior is what draws sustained attention. Objects that maintain a fixed geometric arrangement during flight are not moving randomly - they are either under coordinated control (a drone swarm, a flight of aircraft), mechanically connected, or representing some kind of sensor artifact where a single source appears as multiple contacts. The footage alone does not resolve which.
AARO was direct about the limits of what can be claimed. The office stated its description is “provided for informational purposes only” and cautioned explicitly against reading it as “a factual determination regarding the event’s nature or significance.”
The straightforward answer: 20 seconds of single-sensor infrared footage, without radar cross-references, independent corroboration, or a known object history, is not enough to reach a defensible conclusion.
The most plausible mundane explanation is Iranian military drone activity. Iran operates a substantial drone fleet - including swarm-capable systems used in coordinated exercises - and synchronized maneuvers over its coastal waters in late 2022 were consistent with known Iranian military posture. Synchronized thermal signatures over water near Iranian territory are not inherently mysterious, if the objects were Iranian drones conducting routine training.
But CENTCOM maintains some of the most intensive radar and electronic surveillance of any theater on earth. The fact that no rapid identification was made - and that AARO accepted the case into its active database rather than closing it - suggests the contacts were not positively identified through conventional sensor coverage at the time.
The file is also notable for what is absent: no radar track, no signals intercept, no visual from a pilot. Just the sensor data, alone.
DOW-UAP-PR050 is representative of a broader pattern across the PURSUE releases. The second tranche alone added 51 sensor captures to the public record, drawn from CENTCOM, NORTHCOM, AFRICOM, and INDOPACOM - all four of America’s geographic commands. Spherical orbs, cigar-shaped objects, and multi-object formations appear across multiple theaters and years.
According to a report dated June 5, 2026, signed by AARO Director Jon Kosloski, roughly 40 percent of the more than 2,000 cases in AARO’s active database lack a reasonable conventional explanation and remain unresolved. The Iran formation is one of those cases.
PURSUE was designed to release raw data, not conclusions. The Department of War explicitly invites “private-sector analysis, information and expertise” to help work through the material. The footage has been downloaded and upscaled to 4K by independent researchers. Whether any of them can determine what those four objects were doing over the water in August 2022 remains, for now, an open question.
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