United States.Two hot 'tic-tacs' over Tyndall, filmed by the Coast Guard

On March 6, 2026, eight members of the House of Representatives formally requested access to 51 potentially UAP-related records held by the Department of War and the intelligence community. In response, AARO identified a collection of materials existing on a classified network — and explicitly warned, in the record for each of the resulting 50 videos, that 'many of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody.' These two clips, catalogued as DOW-UAP-PR066 and PR065, are part of that batch.

Per AARO's own assessment, the title these clips are known by — 'USCG C-144 Tyndall UAP 1/2 TIC TAC IR hot 24 April 2024' — is an 'uploader-defined title': assigned by whoever uploaded the video to the classified network in June 2024, not by the Department of War or AARO. The agency only assesses it as 'likely' that the footage derives from an infrared sensor aboard a Coast Guard platform operating in the Southeastern United States in 2024 — without confirming platform, exact location, or date.

AARO's own timestamped visual description attached to each clip is more modest than the title, and in places contradicts it. For PR066 (48 s): between seconds 9 and 15, 'an area of contrast appears from the upper right side of the screen; the sensor does not pan to track it, causing it to leave the frame on the left'; between seconds 33 and 48, 'an area of contrast enters from the lower right and leaves on the lower left; the sensor pans left but is unable to track it.' In other words, the sensor never managed to keep the object centered — the opposite of a stable silhouette held in tracking brackets. For PR065 (39 s), the description differs: the sensor does track an area of contrast for much of the clip before losing it while panning left.

The material was uploaded to the public DVIDS portal on May 22, 2026, as part of PURSUE's second drop — which, unlike drops 1, 4 and 5 (which document a combatant command or the Navy's UAP Task Force formally 'submitting a report' to AARO), corresponds entirely to this batch of 50 FOIA/classified-network-origin videos. No intelligence report, crew statement, or coordinates accompany the material — only the footage, AARO's provenance assessment, and the visual description quoted above.

This file is, above all, a lesson in how to read a video title in this corpus. 'TIC TAC IR hot' directly evokes the Nimitz case (2004) and suggests a stable, elongated capsule silhouette with its own thermal signature. But the Department of War did not write that title: an unidentified person wrote it upon uploading the file to a classified network in 2024, and AARO itself only 'assesses' — does not confirm — its origin. The official timestamped visual description depicts something more modest and less consistent: an 'area of contrast' the sensor loses track of in one of the two clips. The gap between the evocative title and the instrumental description is itself the most interesting datum in the file — and a general warning about the rest of the 50-video batch it belongs to (PURSUE Release 02; see ↗ and ↗).

The second reason to keep it is comparative. If the title were institutionally reliable, it would be worth contrasting with the Gulf of Oman —opposite thermal signature ('cold orbs' vs. 'hot')— as a datum about the physical heterogeneity of the 'UAP' category. With the title downgraded to an anonymous third party's label, that contrast loses force: it no longer compares two incompatible institutional assessments, it compares one institutional assessment (Gulf of Oman, with an AC-130 report) against a stranger's impression of a clip of uncertain quality.

The dominant prosaic reading doesn't change because of this — it remains the most likely one: an aircraft seen at distance and an unfavorable angle, in a dense air corridor off the Gulf coast, produces exactly an elongated, hard-to-track area of contrast in infrared. What does change is the certainty about the source: there is no substantiated chain of custody, no platform confirmation, and the very label 'tic tac' —the file's narrative hook— is a stranger's reading, not a sensor finding or an AARO conclusion. That is why the `8d` pattern (dubious provenance) applies here with the same force as in the Reeves case that originated the whole batch.