The Four UAP Formation Over Water Near Iran (PURSUE PR050)
On 26 August 2022 an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform recorded four bright objects moving together across the sky over water in the Central Command region near Iran, with a fifth object entering the frame moments later. The Department of War published the clip in 2026 as part of the PURSUE declassification. The official caption describes only what the sensor saw and offers no identification.
What did witnesses see at Over water?
The footage runs about ten seconds. For the first few seconds, four distinct areas of contrast transit the sensor field of view together, entering from the lower third of the left side of the screen and exiting near the center of the bottom of the frame. A moment later a fifth area of contrast enters from the top left corner. The objects appear as bright blobs trailing motion smear, a common look for warm or reflective point sources moving across an infrared imager. The background is open water seen from altitude. The frame carries a targeting reticle and the usual fields of sensor data, several of which were blacked out before release.
The clip is silent and carries no narration. Nothing in the released file states an altitude, a range, a speed, or a size for the objects, and there is no second sensor or witness account attached to it in the release.
What is the official explanation?
The clip was released by the U.S. Department of War through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), the declassification effort that began in May 2026. It appears in the second tranche, published on 22 May 2026, and is catalogued by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) as DOW-UAP-PR050, titled "4 UAP Formation Iran 26 Aug 2022 over water [CALLSIGN]." The release metadata states that the footage is likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform operating within the Central Command area of responsibility in 2022, and that the file was uploaded to a classified network in June 2024 before its public release.
AARO's public catalogue presents the clip without a resolution. The office did not attribute the objects to drones, aircraft, balloons, birds, or sensor artifacts, and the released material contains no conclusion. In the language the office uses for cases it has not closed, the objects remain unidentified on the available data. The renewed press attention in June 2026, around the third PURSUE release, brought this earlier clip back into wide circulation as one of the formation cases in the files.
What did the witnesses think it was?
There is no civilian witness to this event. The only record is the sensor file itself and the short caption the government attached to it. That makes the provenance unusually clean compared with a phone clip from a crowd: the chain runs from a military platform's imager, to a classified network in June 2024, to the AARO catalogue and the DVIDS public release in 2026. It also makes the case unusually thin in another way, because everything a viewer would want to know, the platform, the sensor mode, the range, and the callsign, is exactly what was withheld or redacted.
Independent researchers who archive the PURSUE files have logged the clip under its PR050 identifier and described it the same way the caption does: four objects moving together through an infrared view over water in the Central Command region, then a fifth entering from the top left. No analyst has published a resolved identification of the objects at the time of writing.
Is the Four UAP Formation Over Water Near Iran (PURSUE PR050) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the mundane reading. Infrared formation clips have well known ordinary explanations, and a careful file does not skip them. Several warm or reflective objects crossing a thermal imager in a loose line can be a flight of birds, a cluster of balloons, debris, or distant aircraft, and an infrared sensor strips away the color and detail that would normally separate those possibilities, leaving only bright blobs with motion smear. Parallax from a moving platform can make objects at different distances appear to travel together. The bright trailing look is what a thermal camera does to almost any small warm point that moves, so it is not by itself evidence of anything exotic. Because the release withholds range, altitude, and speed, none of these candidates can be ruled out from the clip alone, and none can be confirmed either.
Pass two, if it is not that. What keeps the case open is the combination the file does show: multiple objects holding a formation as they cross the field, in a sensitive military theater, recorded by a calibrated military sensor rather than a phone, and then carried far enough up the classification chain to be withheld for years before release. The government's own resolution office published it without an explanation, which under this archive's method is the relevant fact: when the apparatus declines to close a case it had every reason to close, that silence is logged as part of the evidence rather than read as a quiet debunk. The objects are unidentified on the data that exists.
The case is filed as Unknown. No official narrative resolves it, the prosaic candidates remain live but unproven, and the exotic reading rests only on the formation behavior and the provenance. It is held to that standard and not overstated.
Sources
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1007706/dow-uap-pr050-4-uap-formation-iran-26-aug-2022-over-water-callsign
- www.war.gov/UFO/
- www.aaro.mil/UAP-Cases/Official-UAP-Imagery/
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in Iran
