Gulf of America (exact location undisclosed).Gulf of America · an object flickers on infrared video

In 2019, an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform recorded 8 seconds of video over the Gulf of America. The U.S. Air Force sent the recording, as a report of an unidentified phenomenon, to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon office that studies these cases. The coordinates and the platform were not released; the DVIDS record gives the date taken as January 1, 2019, the same date encoded in its identifier (VIRIN), and the location only as "Gulf of America." AARO cataloged the video as DOW-UAP-PR115 and posted it on DVIDS, the Pentagon's video distribution service, on July 10, 2026, in the fourth PURSUE release of documents, in the public domain and under the title "DOW-UAP-PR115, Unresolved UAP Report, Gulf of America, 2019": an unresolved report.

The official description that comes with the video is brief. At seconds 1 and 2, an area of contrast is visible near the center of the image, partly hidden by the data the sensor overlays on its display. Between seconds 3 and 6, the sensor zooms in and pans to track it, and the area of contrast flickers on the screen. At seconds 7 and 8, nothing is visible. The description itself warns that it is informational only and must not be read as an analytical judgment or as a conclusion about the validity or nature of the event.

The video also shows something the description does not mention. The sensor points down at the sea surface: the swell is visible, with a north arrow in the upper left corner, and the overlaid data are covered by black rectangles. Between seconds 1 and 4, a dark mass that looks like low cloud or a smoke plume crosses the lower right of the image. At normal resolution, the area of contrast next to the tracking reticle (the marks the operator uses to follow the object) is barely visible; around second 6 a small dark spot appears next to it. In the last second the image saturates to white, which is the stretch the description lists as "no content"; then, for a fraction of a second, it shows a gray, cloud-like background and ends in black.

AARO added a technical note to the video under the heading "AARO Comment": "Infrared sensor systems capture information within a specific range of electromagnetic wavelengths. When a tracked source's temperature is similar to that of the surrounding environment, it can visually blend into the background or appear to flicker due to dynamic contrast adjustments applied by the system's auto-gain control filters."

An infrared sensor measures the heat things give off, not visible light, and auto-gain control filters adjust the image contrast according to what the sensor sees at each moment. The comment describes how an infrared sensor behaves when an object's temperature sits close to the limit of what the equipment can tell apart from the background. It does not mention this object or say what the heat source was, and the case remains cataloged as unresolved.

AARO explained in writing, alongside the video itself, that an object flickering on an infrared camera can be an effect of the sensor: when a tracked source's temperature is similar to that of its surroundings, the automatic gain control filters, which apply dynamic contrast adjustments, can make it blend into the background or appear to flicker.

Without that comment, the video only shows an area of contrast that flickers while the sensor tracks it. The comment offers a possible mechanism for the flicker, but does not confirm that it is the one at work here.

The dark mass that crosses the image appears in neither the official description nor the comment, and nothing released links it to the area of contrast. No coordinates, platform or mission report were released.