United States (exact location undisclosed).Navy training range · an F-18 flies past a sphere

On May 17, 2022, before the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray publicly presented a brief video captured in 2021 from the cockpit of a U.S. Navy fighter jet. It was the same hearing at which Bray showed the USS Russell "incursion" video (↗), the first U.S. congressional public hearing dedicated to unidentified aerial phenomena in over five decades.

The clip, cataloged on DVIDS simply as "Navy 2021 Flyby video," shows a naval aviator passing by an unidentified object in what the official description itself calls a "fleeting pass"; the published clip runs 9 seconds. According to the text accompanying its release, the video "demonstrates the typical speed at which military aircraft may approach an unknown object." The official presentation thus offers it as an illustration of how fast a military aircraft closes on an object in the air, not as documentation of what the object was.

At the hearing, Bray added that the video was recorded from a Navy F-18 operating in a training range, that the object was spherical and looked "somewhat reflective", that it appears in barely one frame as it passes the cockpit, and, in answer to Adam Schiff: "I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is". When Schiff asked whether, besides the pilot, the aircraft's instruments had recorded it, Bray deferred "the multisensor part" to a later session and added that "in this case, we have at least that", the video.

There is no public information on the exact location, the squadron, the date within 2021 or the pilot's statement. The hearing's other video, from the USS Russell, later received an external technical analysis based on camera defocus (the bokeh effect) and an official reclassification as unmanned systems; this clip has no official analysis. On Metabunk it was proposed that it is an out-of-focus shiny balloon.

The video was shown to Congress by the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, who himself said, in answer to Adam Schiff, that he had no explanation for that specific object. But the official text accompanying the release does not say the object is anomalous or that it is an identified drone: it says the video "demonstrates the typical speed" at which a military aircraft approaches an unknown object. That is a statement about the encounter's dynamics, not the object's identity, and reading it as either would go beyond what the source itself states.

The absence of a published analysis is not evidence that the object is more or less anomalous: it may simply reflect that the Navy considered this clip lower priority for public analysis, or that the "fleeting pass" offers few usable frames for a defocus or trajectory analysis.

The conventional reading proposed in public, on Metabunk, is a shiny balloon of the Mylar kind, which sun glint and defocus make look like a sphere; Bray himself, in his opening statement to the subcommittee, listed "mylar balloons and other types of air trash" among what clutters training ranges, without referring to this clip. Other possible conventional readings are air traffic seen at an approach geometry that hampers immediate identification, or a small uncrewed vehicle crossing the flight path. Although a senior naval intelligence official showed it to Congress, without telemetry, coordinates, or a publicly available pilot statement the clip leaves little to verify beyond the image itself.