The Object That Existed Only in Infrared: DOW-UAP-PR028 Over the Eastern Mediterranean (25 January 2024)
A special operations sensor operator watched a diamond with a straight tail hold a steady course at 434 knots for two minutes. When he switched the camera to visible light the object was not there. When he switched back to infrared he could not find it again.
What did witnesses see at Eastern Mediterranean?
At 0509 Zulu on 25 January 2024, a United States Air Force sensor operator aboard a special operations intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft in transit over the eastern Mediterranean acquired something on a short wave infrared camera that was not visible in any other part of the spectrum.
The mission report he generated survives, and the Department of War has published sixty six seconds of what he was looking at. Both are quoted here from the documents rather than from coverage of them.
The report is a MISREP filed by the 33rd Special Operations Squadron, 27th Special Operations Wing, under Air Force Special Operations Command, tasked to United States Central Command. The aircraft took off from LGLR, which is Larissa in Greece, at 0109Z and did not land back there until 2149Z, a mission of 20 hours and 40 minutes. The observation happened in transit, more than five hours after takeoff and roughly ninety minutes before the aircraft reached its assigned station. The target pod is named: an AN/DAS-4. The weather field reads CLEAR WX. The observer is recorded as a Senior Airman, grade E-4.
The UAP block of the form is where the detail sits. Initial Contact is timed at 250509:00ZJAN24 and the event carries the serial number 250509ZJAN2024-CENTCOM 001. The aircraft was at flight level 250 on a track of 162 degrees doing 176 knots. The object is logged at flight level 200, five thousand feet below the aircraft, on a trajectory of W. Its physical state is recorded as Solid. Its signature is recorded as SWIR WHT. Propulsion means, UNK. Under intelligent control, UNK. The observer's own assessment of it is Benign.
The description field is short and it is the sentence the whole record turns on: "ROUND DIAMOND SHAPE WITH STRAIGHT, NON MANUEVERABLE 'TAIL'". The airman's spelling of manoeuvrable is his and has been left alone.
Under anomalous characteristics he wrote: "MAINTAINED STEADY FLIGHT PATH, INCREASED AND DECREASED ALTITUDE PROFILE, DID NOT CHANGE TRAJECTORY".
And the event narrative, in full: "AT 0509Z, [redacted] OBSERVED 1X UAP WHILE IN TRANSIT. UPON INITIAL OBSERVATION, THE UAP WAS FLYING AT A SPEED OF APPROX 434 KNOTS. THE UAP APPEARED DIAMOND IN SHAPE WITH A NON-MANUEVERING PROBE AT THE BOTTOM. THE UAP ONLY APPEARED ON THE SWIR CAMERA. THE EVENT LASTED APPROX 2 MINUTES ENDING AT 0511Z, WITHOUT ANY OTHER INCIDENT OCCURING."
The released video does something the paperwork cannot, which is show the operator's hands. For the first ten seconds the display is split, electro optical on the right and short wave infrared on the left. At four seconds an area of contrast becomes distinguishable in the right hand frame. At ten seconds the operator abandons the split view and goes full screen on the infrared feed, which is what a sensor operator does when only one modality is working. For the next forty five seconds the object sits near the centre of the field: a small bright blob, no more than a few dozen pixels across at source resolution, with a faint narrow extension trailing directly below it. At fifty six seconds he switches the sensor to visible spectrum and the object is gone against the background. From fifty seven seconds to the end of the clip he switches back to short wave infrared, in black hot polarity, and does not reacquire it.
That last detail is not in the mission report. It is in the Department's own frame by frame description of its own footage, and it is the most testable claim in the file, because it means the operator ran the experiment twice and got the same answer both times.
One correction to the official paperwork, established here from the documents. The Department's release manifest and the DVIDS record for this video both state that the accompanying mission report is DoW-UAP-D7. It is not. DoW-UAP-D7 is a six page, largely image only file concerning an Arabian Gulf event in 2020, whose own text describes an object that "LOOKS LIKE A BALLOON, SIMILAR TO PREVIOUSLY REPORTED UAP FROM 48FW" tracked at 31,000 feet and visually identified in a targeting infrared display. It has nothing to do with Greece, with January 2024 or with short wave infrared. The mission report that actually matches this video is DoW-UAP-D25, published under the filename dow-uap-d25-mission-report-greece-january-2024.pdf, and every quotation above comes from it.
The second correction concerns where this happened. The manifest gives Incident Location as "Greece" and Incident Date as N/A. Larissa is in Greece and the reporting chain runs through it, but the mission report records grid coordinates, and they do not put the object over Greece. The object was first seen at 35SQT44 and last seen at 35SPT63, which resolve to approximately 33.81 north 29.64 east and 34.00 north 28.76 east. That is open water in the eastern Mediterranean, several hundred kilometres southeast of Crete and roughly 190 kilometres south of the Turkish coast. The aircraft itself is logged at 35SQT67, about 33 kilometres from the object's first position. The last coordinate lies about eighty kilometres west of the first, which independently agrees with the trajectory field of W and is the reason the archive trusts the conversion.
More footage and images of this sighting
DoW-UAP-D25, the USCENTCOM mission report for this event, declassified 24 October 2025 (the document the release manifest misidentifies as DoW-UAP-D7) View source
DVIDS record for DOW-UAP-PR028, carrying the Department's own frame by frame description of the footage View source
What is the official explanation?
The video was published by the Department of War as DOW-UAP-PR028, "Unresolved UAP Report, Greece, January 2024", in the first PURSUE tranche of 8 May 2026, and mirrored to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service as record 1006073. PURSUE is the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, the rolling declassification programme established under an executive order signed by President Trump in January 2026.
The Department's own summary of the record reads: "The United States Central Command submitted a report of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of one minute and five seconds of video footage captured via multiple sensor modalities aboard a U.S. military platform in 2024. An accompanying mission report, DoW-UAP-D7, described the UAP as 'diamond-shaped' and moving at approximately 434 knots. The observer also reported that the UAP was only detectable via short-wave infrared (SWIR) sensor."
Its frame by frame description of the object is worth setting beside the airman's, because the two agencies of the same government reached for different metaphors for the same shape. The airman wrote round diamond with a straight tail. The Department wrote that the area of contrast "visually resembles an inverted teardrop with a vertically linear trailing mass suspended below". The Department appends to every such description a standing caveat: "This video 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."
The mission report was classified SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY with an original declassification date of 25 January 2049. It was declassified early, on 24 October 2025, by Major General Richard A. Harrison, Chief of Staff of United States Central Command, under mandatory declassification review numbers USCENTCOM MDR 25-0100 through 25-0103 and Joint Staff reference JS-250710-TM8S, and stamped "Approved for Release to AARO" on 28 October 2025. The archive notes that a document originally marked for a twenty five year hold was opened twenty four years early specifically so that a UAP disclosure programme could publish it.
The redactions are extensive and consistent. The aircraft type, tail number and callsign are withheld under exemption (b)(1)1.4a and 1.4g, the operation name is withheld, and all personal identifiers are withheld under exemption (b)(6). What is not withheld is the squadron, the wing, the command, the base, the sensor pod, the coordinates, the altitudes, the speeds and the observer's own words, which is a materially more informative release than the FBI interview forms in later tranches.
On the substance, no agency has offered an identification. The record is published as unresolved, the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office has issued no case resolution for it, and the file itself records that no interrogation of the object was attempted: the field "Observation Interrogation of UAP (yes/no; if yes list sensor(s) and returns)" reads NO, and "Observer Engagement of UAP" reads NONE. Nobody pointed a radar at it or tried to challenge it. It was watched, written up, and filed.
What did the witnesses think it was?
There is one witness and he is identified only by rank. He is a Senior Airman, an E-4, working a sensor on a special operations reconnaissance aircraft on the fifth hour of what became a twenty hour mission. He is not a pilot who glanced out of a window. Operating a multi spectral targeting pod is his trade, and the pod he was using, the AN/DAS-4, is a Raytheon multi sensor turret whose whole purpose is to give an operator several ways of looking at the same thing.
That matters for how his testimony should be weighed, because the central claim of this case is a claim about sensors rather than about an object. He is not saying he saw something strange. He is saying that a thing which registered clearly in one band of the infrared spectrum was absent in another band and absent in visible light, and that he checked. A witness in a field who says a light vanished is describing a perception. A sensor operator who says an object appeared on the short wave infrared channel and on no other channel is describing an instrument result, and instrument results are the kind of thing that can be argued with on technical grounds.
His own read on it was conservative in every field where the form let him be conservative. Maneuverability observations: NONE. Response to observer actions: NONE. Advanced capabilities or materials: NO. Under intelligent control: UNK. Assessment of UAP: Benign. Effects on persons, equipment, aircraft: none, none, none. He recorded a speed, an altitude, a heading and a shape, noted that it climbed and descended without turning, and then wrote that the event ended "WITHOUT ANY OTHER INCIDENT OCCURING". A man building a story does not fill in UNK.
What he thought it was is not in the file, and the form does not ask. There is no interview, no follow up statement, and no indication that he was ever spoken to again about it. Two further people are recorded in the chain, an Airman First Class as the point of contact and a Senior Airman doing quality control, both names withheld, which tells you the report passed through the ordinary reporting machinery rather than being escalated as anything special.
There are no third party observers. The field is explicit: "Third-party Observers and/or Reporters: NONE". No other aircraft reported it, no ship reported it, and because the position is open water some three hundred kilometres from the nearest inhabited coast, there was nobody underneath it.
Is the Object That Existed Only in Infrared: DOW-UAP-PR028 Over the Eastern Mediterranean (25 January 2024) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one: how could this be entirely ordinary, and here the ordinary explanation is unusually strong and has to be put first and honestly.
An aeroplane at flight level 200 doing 434 knots on a steady westerly heading is not anomalous. It is traffic. Four hundred and thirty four knots is a normal cruise speed for a business jet or a narrowbody airliner, twenty thousand feet is a normal altitude, and a straight track that does not change is what airways traffic does. The eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus carries substantial civil traffic on routes between Europe and the Levant and the Gulf. On speed, altitude, heading and behaviour alone, the single most likely thing the airman was watching is an aircraft.
The shape supports that reading rather than undermining it. A diamond or inverted teardrop with a straight, non manoeuvring linear mass trailing directly below it is a reasonable description of a jet aircraft with a contrail, seen from above and behind at a shallow angle in infrared. The airman called the trailing feature a "probe at the bottom" and explicitly noted that it did not manoeuvre, which is precisely how a contrail behaves relative to its source: the object turns, the trail does not follow immediately. At twenty thousand feet contrail formation is less common than in the mid thirties but is not unusual in the right humidity.
The one genuinely odd element, the short wave infrared exclusivity, also has a technical reading. Short wave infrared occupies roughly 0.9 to 1.7 microns and behaves in some respects more like visible light than like thermal infrared: it responds to reflected illumination and passes through haze that scatters visible wavelengths. At 0509Z in late January over the eastern Mediterranean, local time is around 0709 and the sun is close to or just below the horizon at the object's altitude. An object at flight level 200 lit by a sun that has risen for it but not for the observing aircraft, or seen through a haze layer, can plausibly be a strong short wave infrared reflector while being lost against a bright or hazy background in the visible channel. Contrail ice crystals in particular are efficient scatterers in this band. The archive cannot test that reading, because the Department has published neither the sensor model and settings nor the raw imagery, but it is a real optical mechanism and not an ad hoc excuse.
What pass one cannot fully absorb is the black hot failure. If the object were a warm aircraft with a contrail, a switch to black hot short wave infrared should have found it again, and the Department's own description records that the operator switched back and "does not reacquire the area of contrast". Losing a target in the visible channel is expected. Losing it in the same infrared band that had held it steadily for forty five seconds is harder to account for, and the honest answer is that the released clip is too short and too compressed for anyone outside the government to tell whether that is a real property of the object or an artifact of gain, polarity and the eight seconds of footage left after the switch.
Secondary prosaic candidates are weaker but should be logged. A high altitude balloon cannot do 434 knots. A satellite is not at flight level 200 and is not tracked as a solid at that range. Sensor artifacts of the fixed pattern or dead pixel kind do not move against the background at a consistent heading and do not carry a trailing structure. A missile or drone is possible on speed and altitude but would not ordinarily hold a straight unremarkable course for two minutes and then be logged by the crew as benign.
Pass two: what resists. The value of this record is not the object, which may well be a jet. It is that the United States government has published a specific, coordinate stamped, instrument based report in which a trained sensor operator states that a solid object at a measured altitude and speed registered in one spectral band and in no other, and that when he tested the finding by changing modality twice he could not get it back. That is a falsifiable claim about the physics of an observation, which is rarer in this subject than any amount of eyewitness testimony.
The document is also unusually clean by the standards of the corpus. Where most PURSUE video records carry a placeholder date, an N/A location and no paperwork, this one carries a mission report with a real date, a real time to the minute, an event serial number, grid coordinates for the object's first and last positions, both aircraft and object altitudes, the sensor pod, the squadron and the observer's rank. The archive was able to check its own coordinate conversion against the independently recorded trajectory field and have the two agree. Almost nothing else in this subject can be audited that way.
Against all of it, weigh the following plainly. Nobody interrogated the object. No radar return was sought or recorded. The kinetic velocity field, which would have given a measured rather than an estimated speed, was left blank. Every distance and altitude in the file is marked Estimated. The observer himself assessed the thing as benign and did not think it needed anything further. And the released footage is sixty six seconds of a two minute event, compressed, with the heads up display blacked out, so the numbers a viewer would most want to read have been removed from the only imagery there is.
The tier is Unknown. There is no official narrative to dispute, because the Department publishes the record as unresolved and no agency has advanced an identification. No named analyst has published a method shown identification of this object either, which is what a Disputed tier would require. An aircraft with a contrail is the strongest prosaic reconstruction and this file does not defeat it, but a reconstruction is not a determination, and the one measurement that would settle it, whether the thing could be reacquired in the band that had been holding it, went the wrong way for the ordinary answer.
Sources
- web.archive.org/web/20260508141141/https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/dow-uap-d25-mission-report-greece-january-2024.pdf
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1006073/dow-uap-pr28-unresolved-uap-report-greece-january-2024
- web.archive.org/web/20260508030642id_/https://www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv?release=5
- web.archive.org/web/20260508142026/https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/dow-uap-d7-mission-report-arabian-gulf-2020.pdf
- www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-pentagon-videos-documents/
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