China.Star-shaped object over the Yellow Sea

On January 1, 2025, the United States Indo-Pacific Command submitted a report to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of 18 seconds of footage captured by an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform over the Yellow Sea. The material was later declassified and released as part of the fourth tranche of unidentified anomalous phenomena records released by the administration of President Donald Trump.

The video shows what government officials described as an area of contrast resembling a six-pointed star. The infrared image presents a small dark object centered in a cyan tracking reticle, from which faint star-like diffraction spikes radiate. According to the official technical description, the sensor tracks this contrast pattern throughout the entire 18-second recording, with no abrupt change in speed, evasive maneuver, or sudden loss of contact observed.

In the release documentation, the government expressly cautioned that the description of the visual pattern — the six-pointed star shape — should not be interpreted as an official conclusion about the object's identity or significance. The Anomaly Resolution Office issued no analytical assessment on the nature of the tracked phenomenon. The case was formally classified as unresolved.

The video was released in the context of an unprecedented opening of government UAP archives. In the first weeks of 2025, the Trump administration declassified several tranches of UAP reports, including infrared imagery and cases linked to U.S. nuclear facilities. The Yellow Sea case DOW-UAP-PR104 was released within that fourth tranche, made up of roughly 40 files — 19 of them videos — from the Pentagon, NASA, the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Energy, with incidents spanning from the late 1940s to 2025. Like the rest of that material, it was released without an analytical conclusion establishing what the sensor had tracked.

This case matters not so much for the visual pattern it shows — which could be a sensor artifact, an atmospheric phenomenon or even a conventional platform seen under specific conditions — but for its position within the Pentagon's transparency policy on unidentified phenomena. The video was declassified at a moment of maximum institutional openness: the first weeks of 2025 saw the release of more UAP records by the U.S. government than any comparable period since the start of the AARO program. That this case is released within a tranche of dozens of records — 19 of them videos — declassified at once is a marker of the scale that the declassification of military material on unidentified phenomena has reached.

The absence of analytical conclusion from AARO is also notable. This is not a case resolved as a weather balloon, commercial drone or known optical artifact, but a record that the office responsible for analysis openly declares it cannot close. That does not make it automatically extraordinary — it may be genuinely ambiguous due to data insufficiency, or marginal enough not to prioritize additional analysis resources — but it does distinguish it from the vast majority of UAP reports that AARO does resolve through conventional explanations. The case enters the corpus because it meets the institutional traceability criterion: it is an official document, with case reference (DOW-UAP-PR104), military platform sensor, and public acknowledgment that it remains unresolved.

It is also a representative example of what currently the strongest UAP reports available for public analysis look like. There are no visual witnesses describing impossible behavior, no multiple sensors confirming each other, no detailed telemetry data. There are 18 seconds of infrared video, a geometric shape cautiously described by officials, and an institutional assessment that acknowledges not knowing what it is. This data austerity is the structural norm in the corpus of declassified military videos: brief records, from a single sensor, with limited metadata, documenting that something was tracked without being able to establish what it was. The sheer volume released in this fourth tranche is significant: it marks how far the Pentagon's willingness has gone to make public records that its own analysis system acknowledges it cannot close.