The White Round Object Tracked Over the Middle East, 29 October 2025 (PURSUE PR133)
The Department of War published the video as "Middle East, 2025". Its own paired mission report gives the date to the minute, names the operation, and names the squadron.
What did witnesses see at Middle East?
A sensor operator watched a small white object for nine minutes and never identified it. The video released from that encounter runs four minutes and fifty eight seconds.
The footage is infrared, shot from a sensor aboard an American military platform, and for most of its length it shows a featureless grey field with one compact bright form near the centre. The object is round, sharply bounded and noticeably brighter than everything around it. It holds that appearance through repeated changes of magnification, which is worth saying plainly, because a great many "orb" videos dissolve into a smear the moment the sensor zooms. This one does not.
The Department's own frame by frame description, published alongside the file, is unusually candid about what the sensor is doing rather than what the object is doing. It records the operator decreasing magnification, increasing it again, adjusting panning speed, losing the object off the bottom edge, reacquiring it from the left, and at 2 minutes 29 seconds activating an auto tracking reticle that "does not establish a lock on the area of contrast". The auto tracker disengages, the sensor stops panning, and the object leaves frame again on the right. Whatever the object was, the platform's own automatic tracker would not hold it.
That description closes with a disclaimer the Department attaches to every such record, stating that the text is informational only and should not be read as an analytical judgment or a factual determination about the event.
More footage and images of this sighting
DOW-UAP-D107, Mission Report, Middle East, 2025, the paired MISREP that dates the encounter to 01:41Z on 29 October 2025 View source
What is the official explanation?
The paired document is the whole reason this case can be dated at all, and it is worth setting out what it contains.
DOW-UAP-D107 is a Mission Report, the standard form American air units file after a sortie. It carries a full text layer, so it can be read directly rather than reconstructed from a summary. It states that the mission was flown under Operation Inherent Resolve, tasked through the 609th Air Operations Center, under Air Combat Command and U.S. Central Command. The originating unit is given as the 11th Attack Squadron and the mission wing as the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing. Both are Reaper units, which places the footage on a remotely piloted aircraft rather than a crewed one.
The timeline is precise. Takeoff at 281953:00ZOCT25, on station from 290025:00ZOCT25, off station at 291222:00ZOCT25, landing at 291605:00ZOCT25 and last engine shutdown at 291615:00ZOCT25. The UAP section records initial contact at 290141:00ZOCT25 and the Department's acquisition of the material four minutes later at 290145:00ZOCT25. That fixes the encounter at 01:41Z on 29 October 2025.
The report's free text section describes the sighting in the operator's own register: "FROM 290141:00ZOCT2025 TO 290150:00ZOCT25, OBSERVED A UAP ON FEED WHILE ON TGT", the observer "STATED IT LOOKED LIKE A WHITE ROUND ORBIT", and "OBSERVED UAP MOVING AS FAST AS 500MPH" before losing it. The structured fields add that the friendly aircraft was at approximately 22,500 feet, that the object's physical state was assessed as "Solid", that there were no effects on persons, and that the event type was logged as a "UAP Incident". The observer is identified only by rank, Airman First Class. The mission itself was an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance tasking against smuggling and against what the form calls ISIS and the Iranian Threat Network, filed under a violent extremist organisation campaign plan.
The file was declassified by Major General Richard A. Harrison, U.S. Central Command Chief of Staff, on 8 June 2026, against an original declassification date of 28 October 2050. The release therefore came roughly twenty four years early, which matches the pattern already seen across the Central Command records in earlier tranches.
Nowhere does the Department offer an explanation. The record is filed as unresolved.
What did the witnesses think it was?
There is one witness and the archive does not know their name. What it has instead is the form they filled in, which is in some ways better than a recollection, because it was written close to the event and it separates what was measured from what was guessed.
The form is explicit that almost everything is estimated. The accuracy fields for first position, last position, altitude, velocity and trajectory are all marked "Estimated", and the Department attaches a standing caveat to the document stating that the descriptive and estimative language reflects "the reporter's subjective interpretation at the time of the event" and should not be treated as a conclusive indication of any intrinsic feature or performance characteristic. The 500 miles per hour figure is the operator's impression, not a tracked measurement, and the paperwork says so.
Two fields are conspicuously blank rather than answered. "UAP Under Intelligent Control" is empty, as is "Observation Interrogation of UAP", the field that records whether any sensor was actively used to interrogate the object. On other Central Command reports in this archive that second field is answered with a flat "NO". Here it is simply not filled in, so the archive cannot say whether an interrogation was attempted and unrecorded or not attempted at all.
Is the White Round Object Tracked Over the Middle East, 29 October 2025 (PURSUE PR133) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, how this could be mundane.
The strongest prosaic candidate is the ordinary one for infrared sensor footage: a distant object of no great size whose apparent speed is a product of parallax between a moving aircraft and a background the operator cannot range. The report offers no range to the object and no measured altitude for it, so there is no way to convert the reported 500 miles per hour into anything. At an unknown distance that figure is not a speed at all. Balloons, other aircraft, and debris all remain live, and the theatre was an active one with a great deal of air traffic.
Two details cut against a simple lens or sensor artefact. The object holds its round, bounded appearance through several changes of magnification, which an internal reflection generally does not, and the auto tracker's failure to lock is a behaviour of the tracker rather than of the scene. Against that, the object is small in frame for most of the recording and the archive cannot measure it independently, because the Department's release carries no scale bar, no range readout and no metadata block. The digital overlay that appears at 1 minute 43 seconds is identified in the Department's own text as a graphical element of the sensor system rather than a change in the environment, and readers should not mistake it for a reaction by the object.
A note on what is hidden. The released frames carry rectangular black masks applied by the All domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and in several frames those masks sit close to the tracked object. The masks remove the sensor's own data readouts, which is exactly where range, altitude and heading would have been displayed. The single most useful analytical field in this footage has been redacted from the imagery, and that is a limit on every conclusion below.
Pass two, if it is what the operator described.
Then a solid, round, self luminous object was under observation for nine minutes at close to 22,500 feet in a controlled military airspace, moving fast enough that a trained sensor operator reached for 500 miles per hour as a description, and the platform's automatic tracker could not hold it. The Department has had the file since October 2025, declassified it twenty four years early, and published it without an explanation.
The archive tiers this Unknown. There is no official narrative to weigh, the prosaic candidates cannot be excluded on the released material, and the one measurement that would settle it has been masked out of the frames.
One correction to the public record belongs here. The Department's own release manifest describes this video as footage "from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2024". The mission report it points to is dated October 2025 throughout, as are the record's title and the manifest's own Incident Date column. The "2024" in the blurb is an error in the summary, not a second event.
Sources
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1023396/dow-uap-pr133-unresolved-uap-report-middle-east-2025
- www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/sept-18/release-06/assets/DOW-UAP-D107_Mission-Report-Middle-East-2025.pdf
- www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv?release=6
- www.war.gov/UFO/
- www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-uap-pentagon-6th-release/
- www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/pentagon-ufo-files-sixth-release/
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