The Hellfire Orb

Background

In late 2024 the waters off Yemen were an active combat zone. Since late 2023 Iran-backed Houthi forces had been attacking commercial shipping and Western warships, and U.S. ships and aircraft were regularly shooting down Houthi missiles and drones. MQ-9 Reaper drones were heavily involved in these operations, and the Houthis claimed to have shot down many of them.

The video surfaced nearly a year later, on September 9, 2025, at a hearing titled ‘Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection’. It was held by the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. The witnesses included Navy Senior Chief Alexandro Wiggins, Air Force veterans Jeffrey Nuccetelli and Dylan Borland, journalist George Knapp, and Joe Spielberger of the Project On Government Oversight.

What was reported

Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri played a clip of about 50 seconds that he said came from a whistleblower and was undergoing independent review. He said it was recorded on October 30, 2024, by an MQ-9 tracking an ‘orb’ off the coast of Yemen, and that a second MQ-9, not seen in the footage, fired a Hellfire missile at it. He did not say how he had obtained the video.

The footage appears to show the missile reaching the object and sending fragments tumbling. The object seems to keep going, and the missile appears to glance away. Burlison said it ‘looked like the debris was taken with it’. He said he was not going to speculate on what the object was, but asked why Congress was being ‘blocked’ from such information. Knapp described the missile as ‘smacking into that UFO’. Asked by Luna whether the video frightened them, all the panelists except Knapp said it did.

Official response

The Pentagon declined to engage. A U.S. defense official told ABC News and The War Zone that ‘we do not have anything to provide on this,’ and a Defense Department spokesperson told ABC, ‘I have nothing for you.’ Pentagon officials told CBS News they had no comment. No agency has publicly confirmed the clip’s authenticity, date or location.

Since the hearing, the wider disclosure picture has changed. In February 2026 President Trump said he had ordered agencies to identify and release government files on UFOs. Beginning on May 8, 2026, the Pentagon posted batches of files at war.gov/UFO under an effort called PURSUE, with a sixth batch released on September 18. As of October 2026 we found no public AARO or Pentagon analysis of the Yemen clip, and news coverage of the releases had not identified it among the published files.

Explanations and debate

Analysts have proposed several ordinary readings. The War Zone noted that on-screen symbology suggested one drone was laser-designating the target for the other. It found the footage broadly consistent with an improvised attempt to down a cruise missile or one-way attack drone, which would mean the missile struck without its warhead going off. Mick West and others on Metabunk argued that parallax from the moving camera exaggerates the object’s speed, and that the debris looks like it was falling ballistically. Some forum members suggested a balloon. West also questioned whether the weapon was a Hellfire at all, while others thought the identification fairly likely.

Others find those readings unconvincing. Former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo told CBS News that a Hellfire usually leaves little of its target, and that he had never seen one hit something and bounce off. Burlison and Luna presented the clip mainly as evidence that Congress was not being given access to military UAP footage, without claiming to know what the object was.

Why it still matters

The clip became one of the most-shared UAP videos of the decade, and it renewed congressional pressure for access to military sensor data. It also highlighted a then little-known detail: Reaper drones were apparently being used against airborne targets. Until the original, uncompressed footage and the drones’ data are examined in public, the clip is likely to remain a test case for how far a short, unofficial video can be trusted.