CENTCOM Spheres on IR: Six Objects, ~480 mph

Updates

1. September 21, 2026 Update

   Primary confirm: DOW-UAP-PR135 remains posted on DVIDS (~1 min IR; mission report D108 describes six spheres, “agile,” operator-estimated ~480 mph). Caption is still informational only. Secondary press continues to paraphrase batch 6; no new DoD adjudication found since the 18 Sep post.

   Sources DVIDS DOW-UAP-PR135 · EarthSky PURSUE batch-6 summary

2. October 12, 2026 Update

   A team of six researchers has put a specific, testable explanation on the record. On 6 Oct 2026 they posted a preprint to arXiv, the open physics server: Jacob Haqq-Misra (Blue Marble Space), Ravi Kopparapu (NASA Goddard), Richard Cloete, Omer Eldadi and Avi Loeb of Harvard's Galileo Project, and Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society. They measured each of the six objects' brightness frame by frame over a five-second stretch near the end of the clip. Every object pulses steadily at its own rate, between 7.1 and 7.9 times per second and out of step with the others, and its apparent size pulses along with it. Constant-brightness dots the team planted in the video and re-encoded the same way did not pick up the flicker, which they take to rule out compression and the sensor. A flapping wing changes how much of a bird faces the camera, and the team found flying animals in the Galileo Project's own ground-based infrared cameras near Las Vegas pulsing at 3.4 to 10 times per second. The six objects' rates sit inside published wingbeat ranges for birds in cruising flight. On speed, the paper points out that the mission report (D108, which it dates to a 29 July 2025 sighting) marks 480 mph as an estimate and records no laser range. Without a range, the targeting system can only measure where the line of sight meets the ground, so an aircraft flying almost straight at a near-stationary object reads a high ground speed. By the authors' geometry, an object at roughly 60 to 80 percent of the aircraft's height would produce the 480 mph figure. They add that the group's 'simultaneous' turns can come from the sensor swinging while it tracked them. Their conclusion is a small flock of birds, much closer to the aircraft than the crew assumed. Caveats: this is a preprint submitted to Scientific Reports and not yet peer reviewed. The aircraft's altitude is redacted, so the height is a band of solutions rather than a measurement. And a wingbeat rate alone can't name a species. We have not re-run the analysis. The Department of War and AARO have not responded. Status stays open, since the government still lists the clip as unresolved, but there is now a quantitative prosaic reading that the authors say the unredacted sensor and platform data could confirm or refute.

   Sources Haqq-Misra, Kopparapu, Cloete, Eldadi, Shermer & Loeb, 'Six objects reported at 480 mph in a declassified military infrared video show brightness flicker at bird wingbeat rates,' arXiv:2610.08692 (v1 submitted 6 Oct 2026; v2 7 Oct 2026; preprint, not peer reviewed): https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08692 · DVIDS DOW-UAP-PR135 / mission report DOW-UAP-D108 (as analyzed in the preprint)