Two CENTCOM Infrared Records From the Middle East, 2023 (PURSUE PR136 and PR149)
Two short infrared clips, thirty three seconds and fifty one seconds, filed by U.S. Central Command from somewhere in the Middle East in 2023 and published by the Department of War on 7 August 2026 as unresolved. One looks down on mountains. One looks out over open sea, past a passing cargo ship, at a small circular shape held in the reticle. The government publishes no month, no coordinates, no platform and no witness, and the two clips are almost certainly not the same event.
What did witnesses see at Middle East?
Start with the thing this page has to admit first. These are two separate video records, published by the Department of War under one indistinguishable label: "Middle East, 2023". No month, no day, no coordinates, no platform, no unit. They are almost certainly not the same event, because one clip looks down on rugged mountainous land and the other looks out across open water. The archive cannot tell you whether they are two incidents, two sensors trained on one incident, or two unrelated reports batched into the same release. Putting them on one page is an editorial decision forced on us by the government's own granularity, not a claim that the two clips belong together.
UAP Globe downloaded both public domain files from the Department's own content delivery network and stepped through them frame by frame. DOW-UAP-PR136 runs 33.17 seconds at 1280 by 720. It is a monochrome infrared view looking down on arid, mountainous terrain, with visible ridgelines, drainage channels and valley floors filling most of the frame. Heavy black redaction blocks cover the telemetry and data burn-in around all four edges throughout, so no heading, altitude, time or range is readable anywhere on screen. Small pale green symbology and a central crosshair reticle remain. In the opening seconds a bright white rounded shape intrudes at the right edge and returns later, matching the Department's statement that a component of the platform passes in front of the sensor. The zoom level changes during the clip. What is tracked is a small area of contrast against the ground, and against that broken terrain it is genuinely hard to hold with the eye.
DOW-UAP-PR149 runs 51.5 seconds at 1920 by 1028 and is a completely different scene. It is maritime, shot in white hot infrared polarity, meaning warmer surfaces render brighter. In the opening seconds a merchant cargo ship is clearly visible on the water, rendered bright white, with a raised superstructure at one end and a row of cargo cranes or derricks along an open deck. That vessel is an ordinary commercial ship and it is not the reported object. The sensor then moves off the ship onto open water. From roughly ten seconds onward the thing tracked is a small, compact, roughly circular shape with a dark rim and a brighter centre, only a few tens of pixels across at native resolution, holding position near the reticle over open sea. Purple symbology overlays the frame, including a north indicator marked N, corner brackets and a crosshair, alongside more black redaction blocks.
One correction is worth recording, because it is an easy mistake and this archive made it before catching itself. At low resolution the diffuse bright patch of sun or sky glint on the sea surface reads convincingly as the object. It is not. It is water. The tracked object is the small dark rimmed circular shape near the reticle. On the object itself there is no visible structure, no wings, no exhaust plume and no scale reference of any kind.
More footage and images of this sighting
DVIDS record for DOW-UAP-PR136, carrying the Department’s verbatim frame by frame description and the VIRIN 230101-D-D0360-2888. View source
DVIDS record for DOW-UAP-PR149, carrying the Department’s verbatim frame by frame description and the VIRIN 230101-D-D0360-7117. View source
What is the official explanation?
Both records were published on 7 August 2026 in the fifth PURSUE tranche, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. The Department's press release that day, attributed to Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell, says it is publishing "the fifth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) files" and will "release additional files on a rolling basis". The Department's manifest confirms the tranche: 41 records dated 8/7/26, comprising 22 PDFs, 16 videos and 3 images, credited to the Department of War (19), the FBI (17), the CIA (2), the Department of State (2) and the Executive Office of the President (1). Across all five tranches it holds 375 rows.
The PR136 description reads in full: "The United States Central Command submitted a report of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of 30 seconds of video footage from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2023. Video description: 00:00-00:08: The sensor pans to track an area of contrast, keeping it generally centered within the frame. The sensor is partially occluded by a component of the platform passing in front of it, obscuring the background. 00:09-00:33: The sensor zooms in on the area of contrast. A reticle briefly surrounds the area of contrast. The sensor is occluded by a component of the platform, obscuring the display. 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."
PR149: "The United States Central Command submitted a report of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of 51 seconds of video footage from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2023. Video description: 00:00-00:04: An area of contrast transits the frame from the bottom right edge to the lower left edge of the sensor field-of-view. 00:05-00:51: The sensor pans to track the area of contrast, keeping it generally within the center of the frame. 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."
That is the entire official record. PR136 carries VIRIN 230101-D-D0360-2888 and DVIDS ID 1017796, PR149 carries VIRIN 230101-D-D0360-7117 and DVIDS ID 1017799, both DVIDS pages give the location as "(UNDISCLOSED LOCATION)", and both credit the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. In the manifest both rows read Agency "Department of War", Incident Date "2023", Incident Location "Middle East", Redaction "TRUE", and both the Video Pairing and PDF Pairing columns are empty. Those columns are how the Department signals that several records document one event and how it links a video to a mission report, so empty pairings mean these clips are tied neither to each other nor to any declassified document. There is no aircrew report behind them.
CENTCOM's own description of its area of responsibility says it "spans more than 4 million square miles" and that "the 21 nations of the AOR" stretch "from Northeast Africa across the Middle East to Central and South Asia". That is all the geographic precision the record supports. AARO, directed by Dr. Jon Kosloski, reports to Congress under section 3373 of Title 50, United States Code, a requirement created by the FY2023 Intelligence Authorization Act. What "unresolved" means is stated plainly on the PURSUE site: "The materials archived here are unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena. This can occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of sufficient data." AARO's FY2025 annual report echoes it, defining its "Active Archive" as "a repository of cases lacking sufficient data to facilitate a comprehensive analysis", reopened "should additional data of sufficient quality become available", and warning that "a lack of timely and actionable sensor data continues to constrain AARO's ability to resolve cases". A separate AARO video posted to DVIDS on 9 May 2025, covering different Middle East infrared footage from 2023, adds the office's own caution against over-reading that silence: "Viewers should not interpret the absence of a formal assessment as suggestive of anomalous characteristics."
No outlet has covered PR136 or PR149 specifically. CBS News and the wire story carried on CP24 concentrated on the six Gulf of Oman gunship videos from 2021, on a 2025 Middle East clip showing an object over a populated area, and on 2026 footage from the western United States. The widely repeated "mysterious orb over the Middle East" stories from this tranche describe the 2025 records, not these two. Those 2025 records and the Gulf of Oman videos are cased separately here as companion files and must not be conflated with these.
What did the witnesses think it was?
There are no witnesses in this case, and everything else follows from that.
There is no pilot statement, no sensor operator narrative and no aircrew mission report, and the Department's own manifest confirms the last of those, since the PDF pairing column is empty for both records. There is no ground observer, no radar track, no second sensor, no imagery from another angle, no intelligence assessment and no observer assessment field of the sort that appeared with some earlier PURSUE videos. Nobody has come forward publicly to say they were flying the platform or watching the screen. What exists is two video files and two captions written by the government describing what a camera did.
This archive normally opens a case with what people saw and then weighs their vantage point, their consistency and their motives. None of that machinery can run here. The only observer on the record is a lens, and the only account of the event is a description of the lens.
That absence is expensive, and it is worth naming what is lost. A crew statement would establish whether anyone aboard saw the object with the naked eye, which is the fastest way to separate a real object from a sensor artifact. It would give a rough range and bearing, which is what fixes size and speed. It would say whether the object was tracked on radar, whether it reacted to the platform, and whether the crew thought anything unusual had happened at all. It would give a date. Without any of it, the two most basic questions about both clips, how big and how far, have no answer, and everything downstream of them is guesswork. What the absence does not do is prove anything: a missing witness statement is a hole in the record, not a hidden fact.
Is the Two CENTCOM Infrared Records From the Middle East, 2023 (PURSUE PR136 and PR149) real? The two-pass assessment
PASS ONE: how could this be entirely ordinary?
Apparent motion first. Both clips come from a moving platform with a gimballed sensor that pans, zooms and tracks, so almost none of the motion on screen can be assigned to the object rather than to the aircraft and the gimbal. In PR136 the sensor pans to keep the contrast centred, then zooms, while part of the platform swings across the field of view twice. In PR149 it pans to hold the shape near the centre for forty six of the fifty one seconds. An object held in a tracking reticle looks stationary no matter what it is doing, and a static object looks like it is moving when the platform moves past it. Parallax alone can produce most of what is visible.
Shape next. A small unresolved point source on an infrared sensor does not show you its own shape. It shows you the sensor's point spread function, its bloom, its focus state and its compression. The dark rim and brighter centre in PR149 is a signature of the optics and the display, not a description of an object. That is the core of the argument civilian analysts have made about earlier Navy infrared releases: Mick West published a detailed analysis of the Gimbal video on Metabunk in March 2022, built on a purpose-made three dimensional simulator, arguing the object is "probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates". This archive covers that argument on its own gimbal case. West has not analysed PR136 or PR149 and nothing here should be read as if he had, but the mechanism he demonstrated is general.
AARO has shown the same failure modes in its own published work. Its 2025 mission brief attributes an apparent atmospheric wake behind a 2023 South Asia object, filmed by a forward looking infrared sensor aboard an MQ-9 Reaper, to video compression artifacts, assessing the object as a commercial aircraft on a known flight path. In a western United States case it puts apparent changes in an object's shape down to "visual artifacts attributable to sensor autofocus" and finds the objects were far more distant than the pilot had estimated. It assessed the 2018 Mt. Etna object, filmed in infrared by a UAS over the Mediterranean, as a balloon that had drifted roughly 170 kilometres on the wind. And on Go Fast it recorded that "high confidence analysis of the UAP's exact position was not possible given a lack of precise positional data from the observing Navy aircraft". That last line is this case in miniature.
The prosaic candidates are all live. Balloons are the standing favourite: AARO says it "continues to resolve many UAP-related events as balloons of various kinds", from party balloons to large research balloons with tethered payloads, and a balloon over water is exactly a small compact shape holding roughly still while the platform moves past. Small drones are abundant across the CENTCOM area of responsibility. Birds account for a share of low, small, warm contrasts. Distant conventional aircraft are plausible in both. Over the mountainous ground in PR136 a thermal contrast could as easily be a terrain feature, a vehicle or a hot rock face as anything airborne, and the ground fills most of that frame.
The PR149 ship needs careful handling. Its presence establishes that the clip was shot over a shipping area by a platform conducting maritime surveillance, routine CENTCOM activity across trafficked waterways in the region, and that makes an ordinary explanation more available rather than less. It licenses nothing further. This archive will not name the body of water, identify the vessel, or claim any connection between the ship and the object, because nothing in the record supports any of that.
The central evidentiary problem blocks a strong conclusion in either direction. There is no range, no altitude, no bearing, no airspeed and no scale reference in either clip, and the telemetry that would have carried all of it is blacked out in every frame. The object's true size and speed are unknown, and unknowable from this material. Matt Novak at Gizmodo made the general point when he wrote that many of these videos have a Where's Waldo quality and depict just a small dot floating by, and Micah Hanks at The Debrief, on the fourth tranche, noted the videos leave much to the imagination and suggested that an unusual object shape in one of them could itself be a sensor artifact.
PASS TWO: what resists that? Three things, all procedural rather than physical. Both reports were filed by U.S. Central Command to AARO by people inside the system, so someone in an operational chain judged this footage worth reporting. AARO did not resolve either one: it resolved 114 of 319 reports in its FY2025 period and assessed every resolved case as attributable to prosaic objects such as balloons, satellites, birds, aircraft and unmanned systems, and these were not among them. And both survived a declassification review and were published under the heading "Unresolved UAP Report", a deliberate official statement rather than a filing accident.
This archive's rule is that an official apparatus debunk is evidence a case needed closing, not a mark against it. The mirror of that rule has to be applied honestly. Official non-resolution is not evidence of anything extraordinary either, and both the Department and AARO say so themselves. AARO's own 2025 mission brief carries a Middle East orb case from 2022, recorded by an electro-optical sensor aboard an MQ-9 in this same region, held in the Active Archive under the caption "poor data quality prevents conclusive attribution" while noting the object "did not appear to demonstrate anomalous performance characteristics". That is the most likely shape of the truth here as well.
TIER. An official record exists, filed by a combatant command, submitted to AARO, and still officially unexplained. That is real. Against it, the material is short, contextless, redacted sensor video with no scale reference, no witness and no paired document, and no named analyst has advanced an evidenced counter-explanation for these two specific clips. A disputed tier would require exactly that, and it does not exist. Unknown is the honest tier: no official narrative resolves it, and the case stands on two pieces of footage that are not good enough to carry anyone's conclusion, including ours.
Sources
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1017796/dow-uap-pr136-unresolved-uap-report-middle-east-2023
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1017799/dow-uap-pr149-unresolved-uap-report-middle-east-2023
- d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/video/2608/DOD_111887413/DOD_111887413.mp4
- d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/video/2608/DOD_111887426/DOD_111887426.mp4
- www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv?release=5
- www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4565994/department-of-war-publishes-fifth-release-of-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-f/
- www.war.gov/UFO/
- www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/FY25%20UAP%20Annual%20Report/AARO_FY2025_Consolidated_Annual_Report_on_UAP.pdf
- www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/AARO_Mission_Brief_2025.pdf
- www.centcom.mil/AREA-OF-RESPONSIBILITY/
- www.dvidshub.net/video/961723/unresolved-uap-report-middle-east-2023
- www.metabunk.org/threads/gimbal-ufo-a-new-analysis.12333/
- www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-pentagon-5th-release-documents-videos/
- www.cp24.com/news/world/2026/08/08/pentagon-releases-the-fifth-batch-of-ufo-files-complete-with-video-footage-and-witness-accounts/
- thedebrief.org/pentagon-releases-new-batch-of-uap-videos-and-historical-files-but-clarity-remains-elusive/
- gizmodo.com/can-you-find-the-ufos-in-these-newly-released-pentagon-videos-2000756275
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in Undisclosed
