PURSUE PR108: The "Tic-Tac" Infrared Track Over the Western United States (2020)
A U.S. military infrared pod locks onto a small bright blob over the western United States in 2020, tracks it for a minute, then loses it off the left edge of the frame. NORTHCOM sent it to AARO, which published it in July 2026 as DOW-UAP-PR108 and pointedly declined to say what it was. Coverage calls it Tic-Tac shaped. The government calls it only an area of contrast.
What did witnesses see at Western United States?
The file is 1 minute 34 seconds of monochrome infrared footage from a sensor aboard a U.S. military platform. AARO's own frame-by-frame caption describes it plainly. The first fifteen seconds carry no content. From 00:16 to 00:19 the footage flashes between normal operation and a black screen several times as the sensor changes display modes, then goes blank again through 00:27. At 00:28 the sensor zooms in and pans to track an area of contrast, keeping it generally within the center of the frame.
From 00:34 to 00:57 an auto-tracking reticle surrounds the area of contrast as the sensor continues to hold it against the background. Between 00:58 and 01:10 the sensor adjusts its zoom level and contrast settings several times. From 01:11 to 01:34 the area of contrast leaves the sensor field-of-view to the left of the frame, the sensor again adjusts zoom and contrast, and the clip ends on no content.
What is visible is a small, bright, roughly rounded or elongated thermal blob that the aircraft's targeting system locks onto and follows. That elongated hot signature is the entire basis for the Tic-Tac label attached by later coverage. What is not visible is anything AARO's caption is willing to name: no scale, no range, no altitude, no speed, no wings, no exhaust plume, no structure. AARO records only an area of contrast, never an object, a craft, or a shape. The released clip is a portion of a longer submission; AARO states the underlying report consisted of 2 minutes and 16 seconds of footage.
What is the official explanation?
Provenance is unusually clean for this class. U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) submitted the report to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which published it in the Fourth UAP Data Release under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). It carries the label DOW-UAP-PR108, VIRIN 200101-D-D0360-2689, and DVIDS video ID 1014106. The date-taken field reads 01.01.2020, which is a year-only placeholder; no exact date, coordinates, platform type, or unit is disclosed. It was published as part of the 40-file fourth tranche at war.gov/UFO on 10 July 2026. AARO applied no tier, no identification, and no analytic narrative, which is why it is filed here as Unknown.
AARO attaches its standard disclaimer to the caption and it is worth quoting in full: "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." In other words the government is describing pixels, not endorsing a phenomenon.
Outside the government, analysts have offered prosaic candidates for objects of this kind, and those reads are inference, not official finding. Writing on the same fourth release, The Debrief's Micah Hanks notes that recent DOW infrared clips can be produced by sensor artifacts, and that several UAP videos in this batch clearly show inflatable objects with dangling payloads beneath obvious balloons. Avi Loeb, chair of the White House UAP Science Advisory Council, has publicly said there is no conclusive evidence any object in this release is of non-human origin. None of those observers claim to have resolved PR108 specifically.
What did the witnesses think it was?
There is no named human witness. The only observer is the sensor and whatever crew was operating it, and neither is identified in the release. The account is machine testimony: an auto-tracking reticle acquiring and holding a warm point against a cooler background, plus manual zoom and contrast changes made by an operator who is never quoted.
That limits what the clip can support. It shows that a real thermal contrast existed, that the targeting system treated it as trackable, and that it eventually drifted out of frame to the left. It does not establish that the contrast was solid, large, fast, or close, and it carries no radar, no second sensor, no pilot narration, and no ground correlation. The Tic-Tac impression rests entirely on the shape of a low-resolution infrared blob.
Is the PURSUE PR108: The "Tic-Tac" Infrared Track Over the Western United States (2020) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the prosaic read. Everything actually in the file is consistent with a mundane source seen through a long-range infrared targeting pod. A distant aircraft, a drone, a balloon or aerostat, or even a sensor and refraction artifact can all present as a small bright blob that an auto-tracker will lock and follow, and the constant zoom and contrast fiddling is exactly what you see when an operator is straining a pod against a low-contrast target at range. Analysts covering this same release lean hard on that reality, pointing to inflatables and sensor artifacts as the usual answers for footage this thin. With no range, scale, or kinematics in the frame, the leading candidate is an ordinary object at an unhelpful distance.
Pass two, why it still matters. The elongated, featureless white profile genuinely does resemble the 2004 USS Nimitz Tic-Tac infrared imagery, and that resemblance is exactly how The Debrief framed the file, calling it notable for its similarity to the famous 2004 footage while stressing that apart from that superficial similarity the footage provides little additional context. The honest handling is to treat that as a shape descriptor, not a claim of shared origin. A rounded or capsule-like thermal blob is one of the most common ways any warm object renders on infrared, and morphological resemblance to the Nimitz case, already archived here as nimitz-tictac, is not evidence they are the same phenomenon. What earns PR108 a place in the record is provenance rather than spectacle: a NORTHCOM report, over the U.S. homeland, that a military auto-tracker treated as a valid target and that AARO chose to publish without resolving.
The verdict is Unknown. AARO did not identify the object, offered no analytic judgment, and released only a caption of what the sensor did. The prosaic candidates are plausible but unproven, the anomalous framing rests on the shape of a blurry blob, and the file itself contains nothing that decides between them. It stays Unknown because that is precisely how the government left it.
Sources
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1014106/dow-uap-pr108-unresolved-uap-report-western-united-states-2020
- www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4539898/department-of-war-publishes-fourth-release-of-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena/
- avi-loeb.medium.com/highlights-from-the-fourth-uap-data-release-by-the-u-s-government-105a9b2561c7
- thedebrief.org/pentagon-releases-new-batch-of-uap-videos-and-historical-files-but-clarity-remains-elusive/
- www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/pentagon-ufo-files-fourth-release/
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