Two Worm Shaped Objects Filmed on a Thermal Monocular Over Denver, Colorado (20 August 2026)
A Denver resident scanning the sky with a newly bought thermal monocular recorded four and a half minutes of two elongated warm objects moving over the southwest horizon. The report filed to the structured sighting archive says the sighting happened at noon. The recording device stamped its own clock on every frame, and that clock says 9:53 in the evening, which removes the leading prosaic explanation offered in the discussion thread.
What did witnesses see at Westwood?
On the evening of Thursday 20 August 2026 a resident of Westwood, a neighbourhood in southwest Denver, was testing a newly purchased thermal monocular by scanning the sky. The device is named in the filing as an AGM Global Vision ReachIR. About thirty minutes into the session, according to the reporter's own account, two elongated objects came into the field of view over the sky to the south and southwest of the city, in the direction of the foothills.
The resulting recording runs 4 minutes 32.8 seconds at 720 by 576 pixels. It opens at 2.5x magnification on a colour palette, with a warm ground band across the lower third of the frame and cooler sky above, and a small warm form visible high in the frame. The operator then switches to a greyscale palette and increases magnification to 10x, and from that point the object is the clear subject of the recording. At 10x it reads as an elongated, tapered form, mostly mid grey along its length, with a small and much hotter point at one end that the palette renders in red. The device's laser rangefinder is active throughout and never returns a distance, displaying only a blank reading in yards, which is what a rangefinder does when nothing within its range reflects a return.
The structured filing records two objects, a shape described as "worm like", movement described as hovering, floating around, random and smooth, an observer facing southwest, a duration of four minutes, and a single witness. The reporter gives their own background as scientist and answers the five observables section by marking no wings, no rotors, no exhaust plume, unsure on noise, no sudden extreme acceleration, no extreme speed without signatures, and yes to flight without visible means of lift.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
There is no official narrative of any kind attached to this sighting. No agency has commented on it, no local outlet has covered it, and no NUFORC or MUFON case number is cited in the filing. The only institutional data that bears on the event is meteorological and astronomical, and it had to be pulled independently.
That data does exist and it is precise, because the sighting falls inside a well instrumented city. Denver International Airport files a routine surface observation every hour. The observation timed at 21:53 Mountain Daylight Time on 20 August 2026, which is the same minute the recording device stamps on its opening frames, records wind from 170 degrees at 11 knots, few clouds at 11,000 feet, visibility 10 statute miles and a temperature of 76 degrees Fahrenheit. The observations either side of it, at 20:53 and 22:53, are consistent: light south to south southeasterly winds, a thin scattering of high cloud, and unrestricted visibility. The sky was effectively clear and the air was moving gently from the south.
The United States Naval Observatory gives the solar and lunar circumstances for the site on that date. The Sun set at 19:49 and civil twilight ended at 20:17. The Moon, 56 percent illuminated and waxing gibbous, had risen at 14:55, passed its highest point at 19:26 and did not set until 23:53, so it was above the horizon and descending in the western sky throughout the recording.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The chain of custody here is unusually good for a single witness sighting, and it is worth setting out because it is what makes the case checkable at all.
The report was filed through the structured sighting form at ufosighting.report, where it is entry 12882. It was then posted to r/UFOs by an automated account on the reporter's behalf. The archive states that the submitter, posting as u/Dictate1986 and giving the name Ryan, confirmed the submission from their own Reddit account through a one time link, so the account making the claim is tied to the account that filed it. The archive keeps the uploaded file untouched alongside the Reddit copy, which matters because Reddit re encodes every upload. The untouched original was retrieved and every observation in this case file is taken from that file rather than from the Reddit version.
The single most important thing the witness account gets wrong is the time, and the correction comes from the witness's own equipment. The filing states 20 August 2026 at 12:00 PM Mountain Daylight Time. The monocular burns a clock into the top of every frame it records. That clock reads 09:53 PM on the opening frames, 09:56 PM at two minutes eighteen seconds into the internal recording counter, and 09:57 PM near the end. The three readings advance in step with the recording, which shows the clock is at least internally consistent and that this is one continuous recording rather than assembled fragments.
A commenter in the Reddit thread noticed the discrepancy and asked which was correct. Another asked the reporter directly whether 12 PM really meant noon. Neither question was answered in the thread. The most economical reading is a form entry error of the kind the 12 AM and 12 PM convention invites constantly, and the recording itself should be preferred over a field typed afterwards. On that reading the event took place at about 21:53 to 21:58 on the evening of 20 August 2026.
The other witness detail worth flagging is what the five observables answers actually are. "No wings" and "no rotors" are not measurements. They are the reporter's reading of a small, low resolution thermal target at 10x digital magnification, which is precisely the condition under which wings become impossible to resolve.
Is the Two Worm Shaped Objects Filmed on a Thermal Monocular Over Denver, Colorado (20 August 2026) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, how this could be ordinary.
The correction to the time is not a detail, it is the whole of pass one, because it destroys the explanation the thread settled on and it strengthens another.
The most upvoted prosaic reading in the discussion was solar balloons. That commenter was explicit about the reasoning: if the time is noon, and the palette shows the objects as hotter than their surroundings, then the objects are hot, and hot air floats. Solar balloons are long black plastic tubes that fill with air, are heated by direct sunlight, and rise. They are a genuinely good answer to a daytime thermal sighting of drifting elongated warm objects, and they have produced exactly this kind of footage before.
They cannot be the answer here. The Sun set at 19:49 and civil twilight ended at 20:17. The recording begins at 21:53, one hour and thirty six minutes after the end of civil twilight and more than two hours after sunset. A solar balloon has no heat source after dark, cools rapidly, and descends. There was no sunlight anywhere on that sky.
The same correction removes paragliders, which a resident of the foothills proposed on the grounds that paragliders at distance move much like this. Nobody was flying a paraglider over the Denver foothills at ten at night.
What the corrected time strengthens is birds and bats. Two commenters raised birds, one specifically suggesting circling birds made strange by a low resolution shaky thermal camera. On a thermal sensor at 10x digital zoom a bird presents as a small elongated warm form with an uneven heat distribution, typically hottest at the head and breast, which is a fair description of the tapered grey shape with one hot red point that this footage shows. The behaviour recorded in the filing, hovering, floating around, random, smooth, is a reasonable description of foraging flight. Common nighthawks are abundant in Colorado in August, forage in open air well after dark, and fly with an erratic, buoyant, direction changing motion. Bats do the same. Neither is excluded by anything in the footage, and the near total absence of resolvable structure means neither can be positively confirmed either.
Two smaller points cut against reading too much into the file. The laser rangefinder never returned a distance, so there is no measured range, no measured size and no measured speed anywhere in this case, and the "a few miles" and "larger than a basketball at arm's length" entries on the form are estimates by eye through a magnified thermal display. And the file itself is not a raw camera original: its container was written by Lavf57.71.100, a libavformat build, and the archive flags it as exported by editing software. Its remaining metadata tags are consistent with device firmware output rather than with hand editing, and nothing in the imagery suggests manipulation, but the honest description is a device export rather than an untouched sensor file.
Pass two, if this is not birds.
Very little can be said, and that is the correct conclusion rather than a disappointing one. The recording resolves two warm, elongated, slow moving objects with no resolvable structure, no measured range and no acoustic information. Nothing in it demonstrates flight without visible means of lift, despite the form answer, because at this resolution no means of lift of any kind would be visible. The value of the case is not that it shows something exotic. It is that it is a well documented, verifiably dated, precisely located thermal recording whose own instrument corrected the report filed about it, and whose leading prosaic explanation was eliminated by that correction rather than by argument.
No official narrative exists, so the tier is Unknown. If a second Denver recording from the same evening surfaces, this case becomes considerably more interesting; as it stands it is one witness, one instrument, and one honest set of limits.
Sources
- ufosighting.report/sighting/12882/worm-like-objects-captured-hovering-above-denver-aug-20-2026
- www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1vyygi9/worm_like_objects_captured_hovering_above_denver/
- aa.usno.navy.mil/api/rstt/oneday?date=2026-08-20&coords=39.70,-105.03&tz=-6
- mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/request/download.phtml?network=CO_ASOS
- www.agmglobalvision.com/
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