United States.Anchorage jellyfish · a visitor films an object with dangling arms

On the night of Monday, June 15, 2026, Sara Jane Osborn and her husband, Pete, were in Anchorage on business. As she told the Daily Mail, they were driving along Sixth Avenue when she saw a vivid rainbow and began photographing it through the open car window. Her husband pulled into an empty parking lot so she could shoot without traffic in front of her. In Alaska in mid-June the sky is still bright at that hour: the sun was about 6 degrees above the horizon, to the northwest.

At around 10:13 p.m. she saw a dark shape above the distant trees. "I was annoyed, because I was like, is that a mosquito?" she recalled. She described it as black and silver, with dangling appendages that seemed to move independently as the object turned from side to side. She first took several photos in quick succession and then recorded video. On the audio she can be heard saying, with pauses: "It looks like a friggen alien," "I don't like it," "It's moving very weirdly," "What is it?"

By her account, the object was in view for about three minutes and vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. Her first thought was that it was a kite. She said she knew the colorful kites flown in Anchorage's parks, but the trees were moving in the breeze and the object seemed to her to move differently. The couple searched a nearby park for anyone flying or packing up a kite, and then drove toward Arctic Valley to see it from another angle; in all they searched for about 30 minutes. They found nothing, and no one else who had seen it. Pete estimated the object was within about three miles (about 5 km), and both noticed that an aircraft passing by looked far smaller.

Osborn posted the video to her Facebook page at 10:24 p.m., eleven minutes after the time she gives for the sighting, with the caption "WHAT IS IT?!! Downtown Anchorage, Alaska..." It runs 57 seconds, was shot with the phone held vertically, and has its audio. In the last seconds the camera drops and shows, across the street, a building with a state government sign reading "Alaska Geologic…" Corbell identifies it as the Alaska Geologic Materials Center, the state repository for geological samples, at 3651 Penland Parkway in the east of the city, not downtown as the caption says.

The video drew little attention until November, when UFO accounts reposted it. On November 10 the Daily Mail spread it with an interview with Osborn, presenting it as an object hovering in the direction of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, home to F-22 fighters. Osborn suggested that perhaps "only God and the government" knew what it was, and added: "Because it was there, and then it wasn't. I can't deny that it happened."

The case shows how a genuine, well-dated video can turn into something else as it goes viral. The original exists, is timestamped eleven minutes after the sighting, and keeps the witness's audio, so it is not a composite or an animation. What changed in November was the framing: Osborn's caption said "downtown Anchorage," the November coverage spoke of a military base, and no source places the object over that base.

The night's data fit an object tied to the ground. The weather station at Merrill Field, the nearest airfield, recorded a west wind of 11 knots (about 20 km/h) at 9:53 p.m., and the international airport a west wind of 8 knots and distant showers to the east, the rain that explains the rainbow. An hour later the airport still had a west wind of 11 knots, while at Merrill Field it had dropped to 4. The camera faced east, toward the Chugach Mountains, so a kite flown from a nearby park would have been in front of it, downwind of whoever held it. In the video the object changes shape and swings its arms, but in the stretch Corbell tracked frame by frame, from 0:08 to 0:44, it sways and returns within a small patch of the slope, instead of drifting off with the wind as a loose balloon would.

Jeremy Corbell, the filmmaker who released the Iraq "jellyfish" video in 2024, analyzed this clip and concluded it is most likely an octopus-shaped show kite. By his analysis, the object shakes in step with the mountain, which rules out a layer added in editing, and its arms behave like fabric tails in a gusty wind. From the position of the rainbow, he estimates the camera faced about 90 degrees and places the kite over the north edge of Russian Jack Springs Park, 1.2 to 2 km away; none of these distances, neither his nor Pete's, was measured. He also rejects the claim that it was a 3D animation.

Osborn holds the opposite view: she said "it was very clearly not a kite in its movements." No one has come forward as the owner, and without knowing the distance, its apparent size next to the aircraft says nothing about its real size. It is different from the Iraq case ↗ Iraq: there the object was captured by a military sensor; here there is a single witness with her phone.