INDOPACOM area of responsibility (exact location undisclosed).Western Pacific · a sensor tracks three objects in formation

In 2023, an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform recorded one minute and 59 seconds of video within the area of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), which covers the Pacific and East Asia. An infrared sensor builds its image from the heat of what it points at. The command sent the video to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon office that studies these phenomena, which cataloged it as DOW-UAP-PR47. Whoever recorded it left no spoken or written description of what they saw.

AARO's official visual description is brief but precise on one point: for nearly the full two minutes, "the sensor tracks three distinct areas of contrast, maintaining their positions generally within the center of the frame. The areas of contrast appear to maintain a fixed position and orientation relative to one another." An area of contrast is a patch lighter or darker than the background; here there are three of them. The description mentions no crossing, separating or change of arrangement at any point in the recording. Like every description in the series, it warns that it is not an analytical judgment or a determination about the nature of the event.

The war.gov data index currently gives Japan as the location of the recording. Metabunk is a skeptical forum run by Mick West, where members look for ordinary explanations of UFO photos and videos. In May 2026, in a thread of that forum on another video from the same release (PR46), a participant read "South China Sea" in that same field and said he did not know how much to trust it, because in other records it gave locations that did not match. Beyond that there is no further information: no coordinates, no platform, no exact date within 2023, no mission report and no crew statement.

DVIDS, the Defense Department's public media archive, lists January 1, 2023 as the date taken, as it does for other videos in the series whose records state only the year. The video was published on DVIDS under the title "Unresolved UAP Report, INDOPACOM, 2023," as part of the first release of the PURSUE program, on May 8, 2026.

What the sensor recorded is a fixed arrangement: three patches keeping the same position and the same orientation relative to one another for nearly two minutes without any break, present for practically the entire recording. Everything known about the event comes from the video and AARO's timestamped description, because whoever recorded it left no testimony. That description says what can be seen in the image, not what the person operating the sensor thought they saw.

That the sensor tracks the three patches means it turns to keep them in the center of the frame. The video therefore shows how they sit relative to one another, but not whether the group was moving relative to the sea or the ground, in which direction or how fast, and AARO's description does not say either.

No source proposes what they were: AARO only describes them, and no analysis of this video has been published on Metabunk or elsewhere. By our own reasoning, not AARO's, three patches in fixed formation could be a group of drones or uncrewed aircraft flying in coordination, seen from so far away that the sensor cannot make out each craft, only its heat. Stars, planets or satellites in apparent conjunction could also produce three points that keep the same positions relative to one another if the observing platform stays steady. Without flight data, without a distance estimate and without knowing whether the three points share the same thermal signature (the same level of heat), there is no way to choose between those readings.