Pacific Ocean (exact location undisclosed).Pacific Ocean · five recordings of one event with lights

At some point in 2019, over the Pacific Ocean, a single event involving lights was recorded in two ways. Someone used a hand-held device to film the screen of an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform; this is what AARO calls a "secondary capture," which loses quality compared with the original image and may add blur or flicker. An infrared sensor builds its image from the heat of what it points at. In addition, a U.S. service member used a hand-held device, in low light, to record two clips that the records do not describe as recordings of a screen. The records do not say which branch that service member belonged to or whether the platform was the Navy's.

The first three clips (PR123, 1 minute 4 seconds; PR124, 53 seconds; and PR125, 28 seconds) are those recordings of the sensor's screen. In all three, a single area of contrast, a patch lighter or darker than the background, stays mostly in the center as the sensor tracks it and zooms in, and at times blends into the background. The other two (PR126, 2 minutes 32 seconds, and PR127, 2 minutes 29 seconds) are direct recordings in low light. In PR126, the camera "brings two apparent light sources into frame" from the upper left corner and, as it pans, "repeatedly brings several apparent light sources into and out of the frame." In PR127, the camera follows "an apparent light source," with four short stretches of no content in the first minute, and tracks it without a break from 1:02 to the end.

The Navy's Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) handed the five files in 2022 to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon office that studies these phenomena. AARO notes that "the footage contained within DOW-UAP-PR123 through DOW-UAP-PR127 was captured contemporaneously," and says no more; that they were recorded at the same time indicates that they record the same event, not separate observations.

None includes coordinates, the platform or written testimony from the observer. All five records repeat the same warning: "This media was digitally altered before being reported to AARO, and is presented as it was received." AARO does not say what the alteration consisted of. The videos were published on August 7, 2026, on DVIDS, the Defense Department's public media archive, as part of the fifth release of the PURSUE program.

The material reached AARO directly from the Navy's UAPTF in 2022 not through a later discovery on a classified network while answering a request from Congress, like the roughly 50 videos of the second release, many of which lack a substantiated chain of custody according to AARO itself. Each of these five records says where the material came from.

Because all five clips were captured at the same time and three are recordings of the screen of a single sensor, they are not five independent observations but one event seen through two channels: the sensor and the hand-held camera, which shows "several apparent light sources," plural, moving as the camera chases them. That repetition proves nothing about the nature of the lights.

No published source, neither the five DVIDS records nor later coverage of the release, proposes an identification for these lights. The conventional possibilities for several lights over the ocean in low light, such as the navigation lights of distant aircraft or ships, or flares, have not been compared with these recordings by anyone, and without flight data, coordinates or a mission report they cannot be tested.

AARO also states the material arrived digitally altered, without saying how, so it is not known which part of what the clips show is original.