For nearly five minutes, the blob blurs, leaves the frame, and reappears.
A military sensor tracked a blob over the Arabian Gulf as it blurred, disappeared, and returned. When the sensor switched imaging modes, the blob appeared elsewhere on the screen.
DOW-UAP-PR42: a 4 minute 53 second declassified infrared sensor clip from a U.S. military platform, submitted by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) as an unresolved UAP report. The manifest places the incident in the Arabian Gulf / Middle East theater in 2020. The reporter provided no oral or written description of the observation. Across the six sampled keyframes the footage is a single continuous IR sensor view with persistent classification/HUD redactions (a heavy black bar across the top-center where the classification banner and likely platform/sensor identifiers would be, plus solid black blocks masking the four corner data fields and the sidebar telemetry columns). Imagery is monochrome thermal/EO, dominated by a near-uniform sky/cloud or sea-haze background; visible features include a center crosshair reticle, four corner tracking gate brackets, and a small blue 'N' north indicator that drifts position frame-to-frame as the sensor pans. The temporal arc shows: an early cloud/cluttered-background phase (around 1:24 of the published video, our frame_02) where the area of contrast is hard to pick out, transitioning to a mostly featureless smooth-gradient field (frames 03-05) consistent with the DVIDS description of an erratic sensor pan with the object held roughly center-frame, and a late-stage frame_06 that shows what appears to be a modality switch with a faint elongated dark sliver/dash adjacent to a small bright pinpoint just right of the reticle.
CENTCOM-submitted unresolved UAP report (DOW-UAP-PR42) consisting of 4 minutes 53 seconds of infrared-sensor video. DVIDS narrative: 00:00-00:12 area of contrast enters sensor FOV from bottom-left and is tracked in lower-left quadrant; 00:13-00:40 contrast intermittently disappears and reappears against background; 00:41 sensor narrows FOV (zoom-in); 00:42-00:52 area of contrast exits via top-left and the sensor pans up-and-left; 00:53-02:09 erratic sensor pan with the contrast in a fixed position left-of-center and slightly below center; 02:09-02:29 sensor switches imaging modalities and the contrast reappears right-of-center and slightly above center; 02:30-04:53 sensor switches modality again and contrast returns to its prior left/below-center position. The reporter provided no oral or written description.
Arabian Gulf, Middle East
Middle East
Unspecified U.S. military platform with infrared sensor
sensor
Heavy solid-black bar across the top-center of the sensor frame in every keyframe, masking what would conventionally be a classification banner / platform-system identification line at the top of a U.S. military FLIR/IR sensor display.
Likely reason: Classification / source-and-method protection (likely sensor type, platform tail / unit identifier, and classification caveat).
Solid-black rectangular blocks covering the four corner data fields and the entire left and right sidebar telemetry columns (where typical sensor displays show coordinates, slant range, sensor azimuth/elevation, time, FOV, mode, laser status, etc.).
Likely reason: Redaction of geocoordinates, time-of-day, sensor mode/range, and platform-identifying telemetry; consistent with AARO release pattern for CENTCOM IR clips.
This is the largest video in the corpus by file size (~275 MB, 1920x1080 H.264, 30 fps, ~7.5 Mbps, 293 s) but only six keyframes were sampled (~42 s spacing), so the keyframes cannot resolve the four sensor-modality transitions described in the DVIDS narrative. The object itself is a sub-pixel-scale pinpoint in every sampled frame; analytical claims about morphology should defer to the DVIDS verbatim description, not to keyframe inspection. All HUD/banner redactions are consistent across the entire clip — same template as other DOW-UAP-PRxx CENTCOM/COCOM submissions. Pair this record with 099-dvids-1006159 (PR43) and other PR-series videos when aggregating the AARO unresolved-case timeline.
A sensor that creates images based on heat.
No. The video describes a change in imaging mode and the blob’s position on the screen, but does not explain what caused it.
A blob entered the lower-left corner of the frame. A sensor aboard a U.S. military vessel tracked it over the Arabian Gulf.
For nearly five minutes, the blob blurred and seemed to disappear. It also left the frame while the sensor kept moving. Later, the sensor switched imaging modes, and the blob appeared elsewhere on the screen.
The video was recorded in 2020 with an infrared sensor, which creates images based on heat. At the start, the blob entered the frame, and the sensor moved to follow it, keeping it in roughly the same part of the screen.
A few moments later, the blob lost its shape against the background. It seemed to disappear, then returned and blurred again. The sensor moved closer, but the blob left the frame through the top.
The sensor continued moving up and to the left. It then moved irregularly, while the blob appeared to stay in roughly the same place in the frame. The video does not identify the blob.
Later, the sensor switched to a different imaging mode. The blob now appeared to the right of the center of the frame, slightly above it. The sensor then switched modes again, and the blob reappeared where it had been seen earlier.
An imaging mode determines how the sensor displays an image. Switching modes can make the image look different. So a change in the blob’s position on the screen does not prove that the blob itself moved. But the video does not explain whether the change in imaging mode caused the blob to look different in this case.
The video runs for nearly five minutes: the blob blurs, leaves the frame, and returns in different places. The record describes what appears in the video, but whoever submitted it provided no spoken or written description.
It is not known what produced the blob or why it seemed to disappear. The record does not identify what the video shows or what it means.
On screen, the same blob keeps returning, but its origin remains out of frame.