Oman.Gulf of Oman · a gunship crew sees cold orbs on infrared

On the night of September 8, 2021, a U.S. Special Operations Forces AC-130 gunship (a transport aircraft armed with cannons) was conducting a live-fire exercise over the Gulf of Oman. According to the intelligence report, the aircraft dropped a flare that ignites on contact with water to use as a mock target and began circling it, while the combat systems officer scanned the surroundings with the aircraft's camera, which sees in visible light and in infrared. When the officer pointed the camera in infrared mode back at the flare, they saw two "cold orbs" (colder than the background in the thermal image) about four feet in diameter, between 0 and 20 feet above the water, stationary over the flare for about 15 seconds.

After that the officer pulled the trigger of the 105mm cannon and "immediately", in the slight delay between trigger pull and the cannon's recoil, saw the pair rapidly fly away from the flare and out of the camera's field without changing altitude. The report's summary phrases it cautiously: the objects "appeared to react" to the firing.

Over the rest of the sortie, the crew logged approximately 25 instances in total of these objects, seen in infrared as cold orbs in both white-hot and black-hot mode, which are two ways of displaying the same thermal image. Two of them flew in a loose but coordinated formation, rising and falling "like a wave" while maneuvering around, over and under each other "in a manner similar to how dolphins playfully swim in a pod"; the report adds a source comment: "They knew they were flying together." Others were seen in a formation of three, and others flying erratically and maneuvering aggressively.

The crew tried to save all the footage, but the aircraft's digital video recorder "inexplicably failed" and the data became corrupted; even so, the report attached videos that, in its own words, show the camera slewing smoothly or holding still with "multiple UAPs" darting around the image. Using an onboard calculation tool (TACTOOL), the officer estimated a maximum maneuvering speed of 1,300 miles per hour and a minimum of 250. No means of propulsion was observed.

The report was issued by the intelligence section of Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) on April 27, 2022, with the standard caveat of such reports, "information report, not finally evaluated". It rests on a single source, "Source A", with direct access to what was observed through official duties, and the information was collected in a debriefing on April 7, 2022 at Cannon Air Force Base (New Mexico), seven months after the flight.

In August 2026, the Department of War released the report and, on DVIDS, its military imagery portal, six clips of 2 to 34 seconds, about two minutes in all, two of which largely overlap. According to the release note itself, they are a "secondary capture" recorded with a cellular device from the infrared sensor display of an AC-130J during the flight, not afterwards, but without native sensor data and with loss of fidelity. The descriptions by AARO, the Pentagon office that investigates these phenomena, are mostly limited to "an area of contrast" that stays in the center of the field of view or leaves and re-enters it; in the two overlapping clips they distinguish "a relatively larger area of contrast" and "the relatively smaller area of contrast" leaving and re-entering the frame, which matches the pair described in the report.

The observers were a military crew in a planned exercise, using the aircraft's operational infrared camera; they logged about 25 sightings in a single sortie and an apparent reaction to weapons fire. The full text of the report and part of the video have been released, which allows a comparison between what the source recounted and what the image shows. The document concludes nothing: it neither calls it an anomalous phenomenon nor closes it as explained.

Each piece of data has its limit in the same file. The thermal signature: objects colder than the background, a meter across, skimming the water at night, do not fit well with a drone with a hot engine. The reaction to the firing: the pair left the flare in the interval between trigger pull and recoil, something known only from the April 2022 debriefing and that the report itself phrases as an apparent reaction.

The speeds of 250 to 1,300 mph: they come from a calculation tool applied to objects whose true range is unknown, and that is exactly the situation in which the aircraft's own circling motion inflates apparent speed (parallax), as AARO showed for the Aguadilla case ↗ and the GoFast video; this objection is UAP Codex's own calculation, not the report's or AARO's. The recorder failure did not erase everything: part of the imagery survived as a screen recording, made at the time, though without the sensor data that would allow distances to be reconstructed.

There is no official resolution. The Gulf of Oman is one of the world's busiest and most contested waterways, with constant Iranian naval activity and frequent allied exercises, so domestic, allied or Iranian drones remain a serious hypothesis; so does the conventional explanation (birds, balloons or other passive objects whose apparent motion is exaggerated by parallax), which fits what the file contains. The formation flight the crew described remains unexplained.