Mystery behind “Pentagon UFO video” appears to have been solved

UFO fascination and theories have grown in the past year as the U.S. government has shared more and more information on what it calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAP.

In June, Pentagon official Sean Kirkpatrick said that the U.S. Defense Department had a database with 800 reports of “anomalous” objects it had recorded over decades.

Many of the reported sightings it has received remain unresolved, owing to technology and circumstances under which these sightings have been caught on film.

Nonetheless, the Pentagon has not been shy in sharing some of the raw footage and media it has, inspiring internet sleuths to dig deeper.

Earlier this year, the director of the Pentagon‘s newly instated All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) presented a Senate Armed Services subcommittee with two declassified videos, one of which, captured by a drone, showed a mysterious orb flying in the Middle East in 2022.

The video, which was subsequently posted widely online, showed what appeared to be a silver-like object passing through the air.

A statement from the AARO said while the object was not displaying anomalous behavior it still had not been identified. The case remained in the AARO’s active archives, meaning they are still holding out for additional information.

“Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution, and I will not close a case that we cannot defend the conclusions of,” Kirkpatrick, director of the AARO, said at the meeting of a Senate subcommittee

“I should also state clearly for the record that in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics.”

Now, it appears that online investigators have managed to deduce what the object recorded in the Middle East was. The report, published by open-source researchers Bellingcat, used multiple online resources and calculations to determine that it may, however, simply have been a balloon.

Bellingcat geolocated the video to an area northeast of the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor, matching features that can be seen in the video versus those used by Google Earth imagery.

From there, it estimated the size of the object, based on the relative dimensions of other buildings and objects, calculating it to be less than 0.43 meters.

The speed of the object, Bellingcat suggested, may have been the result of a parallax illusion, whereby the speed of the drone relative to the object it recorded created the impression that the object was moving when it may not be at all.

Its report illustrates this, suggesting the example “when looking out of a car window trees in the foreground seem to fly by while mountains in the distance barely move.”

It suggests that the speed and altitude of both the drone and the object meant that even though the object appears to move at speed in the video, it is a kind of optical illusion that masks its static or very low speed relative to the drone.

The Bellingcat report includes a parallax calculator that allows readers to test how distance, altitude, speed, and where a camera is focused can alter our sense of what we may be actually seeing.

Based on this data they then suggest there is a strong likelihood that given the likely altitude, size of the object, and other circumstances, it is more than likely that this UAP was a balloon.

It mentions that at the time the video’s recording coincided with a major Islamic holiday which is celebrated with gifts, including balloons.

The detail and rigor behind this open-source investigation are persuasive and fit with the Pentagon’s interpretation that the object “demonstrated no enigmatic technical capabilities.”

Newsweek has contacted Bellingcat and the Pentagon for comment.

As was stated in a recently published Pentagon report, while there have been occasions where UAP had “concerning performance characteristics” such as “high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability” these were connected to a “very small percentage of UAP reports”, with the majority of objects in the sky demonstrating “ordinary characteristics of readily explainable sources.”

A number of sightings, it added, remained “technically unresolved” because of a lack of data. It added that it hoped that with an increase in the quality of data, the unidentified nature of most UAP “will likely resolve to ordinary phenomena and significantly reduce the amount of UAP case submissions.”