UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 01 · MAY 8, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOW-UAP-D010Mission Report, Middle East, May 2022
This MISREP comes from a U.S. Air Force intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) sortie on 6 May 2022 under Operation Inherent Resolve, the campaign against the Islamic State, in Iraq. Declassified by U.S. Central Command in October 2025, it is unusually complete: the full sortie timeline survives, with the aircraft type and base redacted.
The mission and the sightings
Shortly after takeoff, control was handed over from the launch and recovery element; the aircraft then reached its tasking and spent the day on target development, its orders being to report personnel, vehicles, weapons, footpaths, communications equipment and occupied buildings. It also collected signals intelligence.
From 1514Z to 1934Z the crew saw five UAP fly across the full-motion video (FMV) screen. The first, at 1514Z, matched the visual profile of a possible missile crossing the field of view. The other four, seen over the following hours, “fit closer to the profile of possible birds,” in the report’s words. The weather note adds that dust hindered most of the ground imagery. The aircraft returned to base and landed shortly after midnight.
Context
Here the crew themselves offered a conventional identification for every object. A five-second infrared clip that goes with this report is DOW-UAP-PR019. The point-of-contact entries show the report came from an Air Force unit within the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, routed through the 609th Combined Air Operations Center.
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 “5x UAP fly across the screen.” The report continues by describing one of those observations as a “possible missile” and the remaining four as “possible birds.” 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.