Oriente Medio, área CENTCOM (país exacto no revelado; plataforma y liberación son de EE.UU.).An eight-pointed star with unequal-length arms

At some point in 2013, an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform recorded one minute and 46 seconds of footage within U.S. Central Command's (CENTCOM) area of responsibility, covering the Middle East and Central Asia. The Command formally submitted the report to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), catalogued as DOW-UAP-PR38. It is, along with the Robertson Panel case and a handful of historical archive files, one of the few videos in this corpus whose original event predates its release by more than a decade.

The original reporter left no oral or written description of the observation — a detail AARO explicitly notes in the video's record. Everything publicly known about this file is the visual reading the office itself performed on the footage while processing it for release, more than a decade after the event.

That timestamped visual description is the most geometrically specific AARO has produced for any video in this batch: the contrast pattern 'resembles an eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length' — that is, four longer points and four shorter ones, alternating, rather than a regular star. At second 10, the sensor narrows its field of view to zoom in on the area of contrast. Between seconds 11 and 29, the pattern moves within the frame, leaving a visible trail behind it. At second 30, it exits the field of view through the bottom right corner. Following what AARO describes as 'an apparent cut' in the footage —that is, an edit, not an uninterrupted continuity— the pattern reappears and generally remains within frame until finally exiting through the top left corner at 1:44.

The material was released in PURSUE's first drop (May 8, 2026), with no coordinates, no platform identification, and no exact date within 2013.

This file combines two uncommon traits in the corpus: the geometric specificity of the official description —'eight points, alternating length' is a level of morphological detail AARO rarely offers for a simple 'area of contrast'— and an almost total void of human context, since not even the original reporter left a word about what they saw. It is the inverse combination to the 28-year aviator's testimony (↗): there, the witness supplied interpretation the video didn't fully support; here, the video offers a detailed visual pattern with no witness to interpret it.

An 'apparent cut' midway through the footage —acknowledged by AARO itself, not an external inference— is also a methodologically relevant detail: it means what is released is not necessarily a continuous unedited take, but a product that went through some editing or compilation process before reaching the archive. Without knowing who made that cut or why, it cannot be ruled out that part of the pattern's apparently sustained behavior —moving, disappearing, reappearing with similar orientation— is an artifact of the edit rather than a single object in continuous flight.

The simplest prosaic reading for a multi-point radial contrast pattern in infrared is an optical diffraction artifact from the sensor itself —the same phenomenon that in 'Star-shaped object over the Yellow Sea' (↗) explains the 'spikes' radiating from a point heat source— compounded here by the optical zoom the sensor itself applies at second 10, a procedure that can introduce or accentuate diffraction artifacts. The visible trail during movement is consistent with either a moving sensor artifact or a real object moving with a lagging heat source. Without telemetry or a second sensor confirming the geometry, neither reading can be confirmed or ruled out with what is available.