U.S. troops reported seeing an unidentified flying object in Middle Eastern skies in late 2024 and another last year, including an incident in which video footage shows “six small spherical objects” rapidly changing direction and moving at nearly 500 mph.
The latest reports of UFOs — officially called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, in military documents — were released Friday as part of a push by the Trump administration to make public a vast trove of previously secret information about mysterious objects in the sky.
The latest batch, the sixth major UAP records release since May, includes dozens of previously unreported incidents.
In the release are reports dating from the 1950s through 2025. Some sightings were logged by local law enforcement, and others involve direct sightings by American service personnel or video footage captured by military cameras.
The recent Mideast incidents appear to have come when the U.S. was engaged in military activity in the region, with strikes against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, strikes on Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and other engagements.
In the first incident, from 2024, a nearly five-minute video released Friday shows a UFO appearing to resemble “a white round orbit … moving as fast as 500 miles per hour,” according to the official description from U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Mideast.
The footage was captured by an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform, the Pentagon said.
Separately, a sensor captured footage last year that showed “six small spherical objects grouped together, and characterized their behavior as ’seem[ingly] agile,’ and ’frequently changing direction,’” the report said.
Those objects were estimated to move at about 480 mph.
Other sightings in Friday’s release include UFO reports from the Mideast in 2022 and 2023, as well as those reported by local law enforcement to the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. That office was established in 2022 to investigate reports of unexplained phenomena across the air, sea, space and land.
Some of the earliest reports released by the Pentagon include more than 200 sightings of “green orbs,” “discs” and “fireballs” reported in Sandia, New Mexico, from 1948 to 1950 by the Air Force and the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program, the post-World War II successor to the Manhattan Project.
The latest reports from the Mideast are sure to fuel questions about whether U.S. military activities abroad, including its war against Iran, are threatened by unexplained objects in the sky.
The AARO has closed hundreds of cases, attributing those seemingly mysterious sightings to balloons, birds or drones.
But hundreds of other incidents remain unexplained.
Some lawmakers and analysts have questioned whether the objects could be planes or drones flown by an adversary such as China or Russia that defy the known laws of physics, though no hard evidence supports that notion.
Even the nation’s top military officers have conceded they don’t have answers to what U.S. military personnel are seeing.
“There is a lot of unexplained aerial phenomena out there. That’s true. And they’ve got pilot reports, there’s various other sensors out there, and some of it is difficult to explain,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Washington Times in an exclusive 2023 interview.
“Most of it, actually, they can explain away by a variety of things, like balloons, for example — the whole Chinese balloon thing [of 2023] comes to mind. They can explain a lot of it, but there is some that’s really kind of weird and unexplainable.”
He denied claims made by some self-described whistleblowers that the U.S. government has recovered alien craft or is in possession of extraterrestrial bodies.
“But I’ve seen nothing to suggest that we, the United States military or the United States government, [have] in fact recovered any sort of vehicle that is not man-made, or made here on earth, or that there’s any kind of remains. … I haven’t seen any of that kind of stuff,” he said.
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