The Pentagon has released rare declassified footage of an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) spotted in the Middle East last year.
The footage, shown before a congressional committee Wednesday as part of a defence update on UFOs (or, as the Pentagon calls them, UAPs – Unexplained Anomalous Phenomena) shows a small, spherical object that appears to shimmer as it quickly zips above houses and empty fields.
“You’ll see it come through the top of the screen, there it goes,” Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told the Senate Committee on Armed Services.
“This is essentially all the data we have on this event,” he added, saying that where it came from and what it was doing remains a mystery to his team.
The footage was shot on July 12, 2022 from an American MQ-9 Reaper drone.
The hi-tech camera picks up the movement, switching targets from people below to the strange orb.
The video was shown as the Pentagon revealed they reviewing more than 650 UFO incidents. However, Kirkpatrick said there is “no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics.”
“I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as ‘anomalous,'” he said, as reported by ABC.
“The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable sources,” he added.
The more than 650 cases is an increase from an unclassified annual report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in January. The DNI summary said 510 cases were cataloged through Aug. 30, 2022.
Last month, Kirkpatrick and prominent Harvard physicist Avi Loeb, released a draft report outlining the possibility that alien spacecraft may have been able to travel to Earth by carefully examining the physical constraints of how objects travel through space. The report is still under review.