UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 01 · MAY 8, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOW-UAP-D060Mission Report, Arabian Gulf, August 2020
This mission report (MISREP) covers a sortie that took off from OKAS, Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, at 0337Z on August 8, 2020. The originating unit is the 482nd Attack Squadron, and the crew was supporting NAVCENT, the US Navy’s Middle East command, by scanning the Arabian Gulf for Iranian navy and Revolutionary Guard navy vessels, drone activity and movements outside ports. The file reached the release as an image-only scan, so it has to be read page by page.
The UAP entry
The sighting gets one observation line. At 0726Z the crew saw one UAP through full-motion video (FMV); the activity is described simply as “TRANSITTING,” and the free text adds that there was no impact to the mission. The observed position is a grid reference with its precise digits redacted, and the line gives no altitude, heading or speed for either the aircraft or the object. There is no description of shape or size.
The rest of the sortie
Other entries show what an ordinary day on this mission looked like. At 1250Z Iranian air defense hailed the aircraft on the guard frequency, an emergency radio channel; the tone is logged as “professional,” and the crew gave the standard response with no impact. The surveillance section’s weather block says dense cloud cover intermittently impacted FMV collection, which matters for a sighting made on video, although the weather line attached to the observation itself says weather was not a factor. The aircraft landed back at Ali Al Salem after 21 hours and 8 minutes. The report offers no assessment of what the transiting object was.
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 one UAP. The report describes the UAP as “transiting” and notes it had “no impact to mission.” The report also states that “dense cloud coverage intermittently impacted FMV collection.” 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.