The Yemen Orb and the Hellfire Missile (2024)
A short, grainy clip of black and white targeting video, played on a screen in a Congressional hearing room on 9 September 2025, shows a U.S. Air Force Reaper drone firing a Hellfire missile at a small sphere skimming the water off Yemen in October 2024. The missile hits. The sphere keeps flying. The Pentagon has not explained it.
What did witnesses see at Off the coast of Yemen (Red Sea / Gulf of Aden)?
The footage runs only a few seconds and is shot in the grainy black and white of a military targeting pod. The camera, mounted on a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone, holds on a small dark object skimming low over open water. A heads-up display frames the scene with telemetry brackets and a compass reading. The object is roughly spherical and shows no wake, no contrail and no obvious exhaust. It is moving fast, faster than the slow drift of a balloon, and tracking it takes a steady hand on the sensor.
Then a second Reaper, off camera, fires an AGM-114 Hellfire missile at it. The missile streaks in and strikes. Debris sprays out. And the object keeps going. In the words of the congressman who later played the clip, "It kept going, and it looked like the debris was taken with it." The sphere does not tumble out of the sky the way a struck aircraft would; it continues along its path as fragments scatter and trail behind it.
The incident is dated 30 October 2024 and is placed off the coast of Yemen, in the same airspace where U.S. forces were then flying near daily missions against Houthi forces who were threatening shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The military has never confirmed the encounter, identified the object, or explained why a Hellfire was authorized against it.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
There is no official explanation of the object. What exists is the disclosure record.
The footage surfaced publicly on 9 September 2025, when it was played during a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform titled "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection," held by the committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida. Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri introduced the video, saying it had been provided to him by an anonymous whistleblower. On his own account afterward he summarized the engagement bluntly: "Greenlight given to engage, missile appears to be ineffective."
The clip was shown during questioning that also involved Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee. Luna framed the central question for the room as a matter of national security: why, she asked, had one of the United States' most advanced precision weapons appeared to bounce off its target. The Pentagon declined to comment on the footage when contacted by CBS News, and as of the hearing no branch of the Department of War had identified the object or confirmed the strike.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The Yemen footage has no named eyewitness in the public record; it is sensor video without an attached aircrew statement. What the 9 September 2025 hearing did put on the record, under oath, was a slate of military witnesses whose own accounts set the context the committee placed the clip into.
Jeffrey Nuccetelli, a U.S. Air Force veteran of sixteen years and a former security forces officer, described investigating a large glowing "red square" object reported near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California between 2003 and 2005, and other objects he likened to "flying buildings." "What we saw changed our lives," he told the committee, "the way we think about everything. It was incredibly profound."
Senior Chief Alexandro Wiggins, an active duty U.S. Navy sailor with twenty three years of service and the first active duty Navy official to testify publicly on the subject, described a 2023 encounter aboard the USS Jackson in which "a self luminous Tic Tac shaped" object emerged from the ocean. "Sailors need to know," he said, "that reporting UAP encounters will not harm their careers."
Dylan Borland, another Air Force veteran giving his first public testimony, described an alleged encounter at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in 2012 and said that after he reported it "my professional career was deliberately obstructed, and I have endured sustained reprisals from government agencies." The veteran UAP journalist George Knapp argued that official secrecy had already failed: "The secret is out. I mean, how many videos of UAP have there been?" Joe Spielberger of the Project On Government Oversight appeared as the minority witness, focused on whistleblower protections.
Outside the hearing room, Luis Elizondo, the former Pentagon intelligence official who once ran the Defense Department's UAP program, said of the Yemen clip: "We've never seen a Hellfire missile hit a target and bounce off."
Is the Yemen Orb and the Hellfire Missile (2024) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the mundane reading. Skeptical analysts who examined the footage frame by frame argued that very little about it actually requires the exotic. The most detailed public breakdown, on the analysis forum Metabunk, made the case that the clip is a missile interception seen through the parallax of a moving drone: the object and the tracking Reaper are travelling in roughly the same direction, so after the missile strikes, what looks like the object shrugging off the hit is largely the camera's own motion, while the object itself loses power, goes ballistic and falls away, light and no longer aerodynamic, its debris carried along the same vector. On this reading the missile did damage the object; it simply did not produce the fireball a viewer expects.
The astrophysicist Avi Loeb offered a prosaic identification to go with it. The object's size, speed and behavior, he noted, are consistent with the Samad type attack drones the Houthis were flying in exactly that airspace at exactly that time. A Hellfire that scrapes a few fragments without detonating is consistent with a glancing hit or a warhead that failed to fuze against a small, light airframe. None of this requires anything beyond a known adversary drone and an imperfect shot.
Pass two, if it is not that. The features that keep the case open are the ones the prosaic reading has to wave at rather than close. A spherical, featureless object with no wings, no tail, no exhaust and no obvious means of propulsion does not match the silhouette of a Samad drone, which is a recognizable winged airframe. Officials with direct knowledge of weapons effects, Elizondo among them, found the survival of a direct or near direct Hellfire strike genuinely anomalous rather than routine. And the government's own posture is conspicuous: faced with footage of a U.S. drone firing a live missile at an unidentified object in a combat theater, the Department of War did not explain it, identify it, or deny it; it declined to comment. Under this archive's methodology, an apparatus that meets a case with silence rather than a quick prosaic closure is treated as a measure of how unresolved the case is, not as evidence against it.
No official narrative identifies the Yemen object, and the competing civilian readings, a Houthi drone on one side and a genuinely anomalous craft on the other, remain unsettled on the available footage. The case is filed as Unknown.
Sources
- oversight.house.gov/hearing/restoring-public-trust-through-uap-transparency-and-whistleblower-protection/
- www.cbsnews.com/news/video-house-ufo-hearing-us-missile-strikes-unidentified-object/
- www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shown-house-uap-hearing-appears-show-missile-fired-object-yemen-rcna230199
- www.vice.com/en/article/the-u-s-military-shot-a-ufo-with-a-hellfire-missile-it-dodged-it/
- www.iflscience.com/thats-a-hellfire-missile-smacking-into-that-ufo-strange-video-emerges-from-us-uap-hearing-80759
- www.metabunk.org/threads/uap-hearing-new-video-yemen-orb.14427/
- www.wionews.com/trending/hellfire-missile-hit-a-ufo-over-yemen-scientist-suggests-what-it-really-was-not-alien-but-1757649203582
- defensescoop.com/2025/09/09/military-whistleblowers-share-new-evidence-alleged-uap-ufo-hearing/
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in Yemen
