A dark object appears above the targeting reticle in an image from the western United States. The mission report was not provided, and parts of the image were redacted.
An image from a military system showed a dark object the operator couldn’t identify. The mission report was not provided, and parts of the original image were redacted.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) submitted a report of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of a still image derived from a U.S. military system in 2025. The original imagery was altered with redactions before being submitted to AARO. An accompanying mission report was not provided. The operator reported that they were unable to positively identify the UAP. The date in the image is incorrect due to system date/time not being set. Narrative Description: The monochrome image displays a grainy texture with a simplified central crosshair. A single dark, irregular-shaped object is visible just above the center of the reticle. This narrative description is provided for informational purposes only. Readers should not interpret any part of this description as reflecting an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination regarding the described event’s validity, nature, or significance.
Photographic evidence — no readable text content. Findings stub is sourced from data/manifest.json only; no document-grounded extraction possible without multimodal image analysis.
An irregular dark object above the targeting marker in a black-and-white image.
The system’s clock had not been set.
The record does not explain why it was not included.
A black-and-white image from a U.S. military system shows an irregular dark object just above the targeting reticle. The operator could not identify it. The incident took place in the western United States toward the end of 2025.
But the object isn’t the only thing that stands out about the image. It was submitted for review without the mission report that accompanied it, and parts of the original were redacted. What remains is a dark blot, without the details that might have provided context.
The FBI sent a report containing a single image to a U.S. office that examines anomalous phenomena. It is a still image, not a video. It was produced by a U.S. military system and shows a marker at the center indicating where the system is aimed.
An irregular dark object appears above the marker. The image description offers no further information. Its size and distance are unknown, as is whether it was moving. The operator reported being unable to identify it with certainty.
The image was supposed to be accompanied by a mission report, a document detailing the mission during which the image was captured. The report was not provided. As a result, the record contains no details about the mission or other information that might help explain what appears in the image.
The original image was also altered before it was submitted for review. Parts were redacted, leaving some of its contents unseen by those who examined it. The record does not explain why those parts were redacted or why the mission report was not included.
The object’s identity, the circumstances surrounding the image’s capture, and the reason the mission report was not provided are all unknown. The date shown in the image is incorrect because the system’s clock had not been set, so it cannot establish when the image was taken. Beyond that, the record offers no conventional explanation for what appears in the image.
All that remains is a single image: a dark blot above the targeting marker, with no context to explain it.