The Baghdad Power Plant Disc Photo
A sharp daylight photo of a thin metallic disc hanging near the smokestacks of a Baghdad power station, attributed to an anonymous US soldier and circulated at the height of the Iraq War. The image is crisp and the backstory is vapor: no name, no negative, no original upload that anyone has ever traced past a single 2007 blog post.
What did witnesses see at Route Jackson corridor?
The photograph shows a small lens-shaped disc in a hazy sky above power lines, with three tall concrete smokestacks behind it, the center stack venting heavy black smoke over an industrial complex fringed by palm trees and low rooftops. The scene matches the oil-fired power stations of southern Baghdad, and the claimed location, Route Jackson, is the main highway corridor through the Dora district, which is dominated by the Al Dora power plant. The earliest traceable appearance is a post on the Canadian site ufosightings.ca dated March 12, 2007, which stated the photo surfaced on the internet today and claimed it was taken by a US soldier in May 2006 along Route Jackson in southern Baghdad, that the soldier never noticed the object when he shot the frame, and that he was now AWOL from the military. At least three additional frames or crops circulated through the UFO Evidence catalog, which logged the case as Baghdad, Iraq, May 2006.
What is the official explanation?
No official involvement of any kind has ever surfaced. No US military unit, no investigation, no FOIA record and no AARO or Pentagon imagery release has ever referenced this photo, which is notable for an image supposedly taken by a serving soldier in an active war zone. The official apparatus simply never touched it.
What did the witnesses think it was?
There is no witness. The photographer has never been identified, never came forward, and exists only as the third-hand claim of a US soldier, now AWOL, in the original 2007 posting, a detail that conveniently forecloses any follow-up. UFO Evidence, which preserved the fullest early record, attached an editor's note stating plainly that no original source was given for the photograph. Commenters on the original ufosightings.ca thread in March and April 2007 were already split, with one arguing the disc was pasted in and another noting the compression artifacts around the disc match those around the smokestack tops, which is the entire forensic debate in miniature and it has never advanced past that point.
Is the Baghdad Power Plant Disc Photo real? The two-pass assessment
First pass, what the photo has going for it: it is a clean, high-detail daylight image, the setting is real and identifiable (a triple-stack oil-fired station on the southern Baghdad skyline consistent with the Al Dora plant on Route Jackson), the object sits plausibly in the scene's haze, and an early commenter examining it at pixel level found the artifacting around the disc consistent with the rest of the image rather than an obvious paste-in. The 2006-2007 window also produced a steady stream of serviceman UAP reports from Iraq. Second pass, what it lacks: everything else. Provenance dead-ends at a March 12, 2007 blog post, ten months after the claimed capture. There is no named photographer, no camera data, no original-resolution file, no unit, no corroborating witness, and the AWOL-soldier framing is unfalsifiable by design. No named analyst has ever published a methodical authentication or a methodical debunk of this specific image; the skeptical readings (hoax, thrown object, digital insert) are assertions, exactly as the pro readings are. With nothing to test and no one to question, the photo cannot be promoted and cannot be discredited. Verdict: an evocative wartime image with untraceable origins. Unknown is the only defensible tier.
Sources
- web.archive.org/web/20070418163357/http://ufosightings.ca/2007/ufo-sighting-photographed-baghdad
- www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/middleeast/Photo424.htm
- www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/region/middleeast.htm
- www.gem.wiki/Al_Dora_power_plant
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in Iraq
