UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 01 · MAY 8, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOW-UAP-D038Range Fouler Debrief, Middle East, May 2020
This Range Fouler debrief records a single contact seen at 20:40Z on May 14, 2020, at night, during an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) tasking. The release titles it “Middle East”; the catalogue places it over the Arabian Gulf, and the form’s coordinate boxes hold incompletely formatted figures. The squadron box is blank, and one contact is listed, with an intermittent track.
What the crew saw
The sensor was set to a mode the form abbreviates as “ULTN,” in “black hot” infrared, when a solid white object flew through the field of view. The crew briefly lost it and reacquired it, then followed it as it appeared to make erratic movements above the water. During the follow they reached 4x zoom on the object, but lost it because the track was poorly placed. The writer adds that the sensor operator was continuously steering the sensor to keep the object in view, and that this shows in the recording, where the waves in the background come in and out of sight.
What “black hot” means here
In black-hot infrared, warmer things appear darker and cooler things lighter, so an object showing white is cooler than its background. The form ticks the “Round” box, marks the contact as moving and enters a contact altitude of 20,000 with the altitude marked constant, but gives no size or speed. That last remark about the waves is the crew’s own warning that camera motion affects how the footage looks. Similar “cold” objects appear in DOW-UAP-D057. On infrared sensors, see FLIR.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released May 8, 2026, quoted in full
This document is a Range Fouler Debrief, a standardized reporting form the U.S. Navy uses to record the circumstances surrounding an unauthorized intrusion into controlled airspace during active military operations or training. These reports contain a narrative description of the observer’s experiences. A U.S. military operator reported observing a “solid white object [fly] through the [field-of-view]. The reporter described the UAP as making erratic [movements] above the water. 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.