Official · Video · Department of War
A Military Camera Tries to Track Patches Crossing the Screen
A patch entered the corner of the frame. The camera turned toward it, then away.
Released to the public May 22, 20262 min readALIENS editorial
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A patch entered the corner of the frame. The camera turned toward it, then away.
In a 2020 video, patches that looked different from their surroundings crossed the frame. A military camera tried to track them, but the official record does not identify them.
Patches that look different from their surroundings and cross the frame. The camera turns toward them and tries to track them.
No. The official record does not determine what they were or what they mean.
A patch that looked different from its surroundings entered the upper-right corner of the frame. A camera aboard a military aircraft turned toward it, then away. That is how an official record describes the video.
The video does not identify what appears in it. But it captures the camera repeatedly trying to track patches crossing the frame. The record, released to the public by the U.S. Department of War, describes what can be seen, not what caused it.
The video runs for nearly five minutes. According to the official description, a patch that looked different from its surroundings entered the frame from the upper right. The camera turned toward it, then away.
Later, another patch appeared at the bottom of the frame and moved toward the center. The record calls these patches “contrast areas”: parts of the image that look different from what surrounds them. The term describes their appearance, not what they are.
Later in the video, several patches cross the frame, including from the upper right toward the lower left. After some of them pass, the camera switches to another mode and tries to track them. The description does not say whether it succeeds.
The camera is infrared, detecting heat rather than just visible light. The record assesses that the video was probably captured by such a sensor aboard a U.S. military aircraft operating in the Middle East. The user who uploaded it placed it on a classified computer network, a restricted network not open to the public, in October 2020.
It is not known what the patches crossing the frame were, and the record does not determine their nature or significance. The video’s provenance is also not fully established: it is thought to have come from a sensor aboard a military aircraft, but there is no complete record of how it was stored and transferred.
On screen, the camera turns toward one patch, then away. It keeps searching, but the record does not reveal what it saw.