UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 01 · MAY 8, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOW-UAP-D003Mission Report, Arabian Gulf, 2020
This is a Mission Report, or MISREP — the standard form a U.S. aircrew completes after a sortie — from 2020, titled for the Arabian Gulf. Most of it is blacked out under national-security exemptions, but the released pages still show the layout of the form and a few lines of free text describing a brief UAP event.
What survives the redactions
The report came from an Air Force unit under AFCENT, the air component of U.S. Central Command, and was classified SECRET with a declassification date in 2048. Its activity is listed as ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), and the sighting was made through a sensor’s field of view rather than by eye.
The GENTEXT puts the event at about 1736Z (Zulu, the military name for UTC): one object at 17:36:22, two side by side at 17:36:30 and a last one at 17:36:49, four in all within half a minute. AARO’s summary describes the sighting as a “line of dots followed by a trailing dot.” Cloud cover, the crew wrote, stopped them from following the objects or getting a clear view. In the UAP section, the box asking about advanced capabilities or materials is marked “NO”; most other fields, from altitude and speed to propulsion, are blank or redacted.
Reading a MISREP
The weather line still holds unedited template text, “WEATHER WAS (NOT) A FACTOR,” left exactly as the form’s template words it. The UAP block, with fields for payload, signatures and “intelligent control,” shows what crews are asked to record, even when, as here, most of it goes unanswered. Another Arabian Gulf report from the same release is DOW-UAP-D004.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released May 8, 2026, quoted in full
This document is a Mission Report (MISREP), a standardized reporting form the U.S. Military uses to record the circumstances surrounding its operations. U.S. military services often use MISREPs to report Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) to AARO. The GENTEXT, or “general text” section of these reports often contains important qualitative, contextual information, distinguishing it from the more quantitative, or numerical, data found elsewhere in the report. A U.S. military operator reported observing a “line of dots followed by a trailing dot.” All descriptive and estimative language contained in this report reflects the reporter’s subjective interpretation at the time of the event. Such characterizations should not be interpreted as a conclusive indication of the presence or absence of any intrinsic object features or performance characteristics.