Yemen.Yemen — Orb / Hellfire Missile Strike (MQ-9, 2024)

On October 30, 2024, according to the congressman who presented the video, two U.S. MQ-9 Reapers operating off the coast of Yemen (an active theater for anti-Houthi operations against drone and missile attacks on commercial shipping) tracked an unidentified orb which, per the footage presented, was moving in a straight line low over the sea surface. Burlison explained that the Hellfire was fired by a second MQ-9 not seen in the video; the image carries the label "LRD LASE DES", which according to The War Zone indicates that the filming MQ-9 was laser-designating the target for the other. The video, about 50 seconds long, shows the projectile entering from the upper left and striking the orb, which sheds some debris; the missile deflects away without detonating and the object continues on its path until the clip ends. "It kept going, and it looked like the debris was taken with it," Burlison said. "I'm not going to speculate what it is." According to The War Zone, after the hit the object appears to go tumbling through the air, and at times the sensor shows it as more cylindrical than orb-shaped, perhaps because of the video quality.

The AGM-114 Hellfire is a highly effective missile against armored targets and drones, designed to detonate on high-velocity impact. Deflection without detonation implies either a failure of the impact-detonation mechanism or a material property of the orb inconsistent with any known aircraft or drone. The War Zone points to the former: a laser-guided Hellfire is an air-to-ground weapon, and a grazing blow without detonation suggests its fuze was not modified for aerial targets; it adds that for a Reaper to track it and a Hellfire to hit it, the object had to be moving slowly and steadily, and that parallax can make it look fast. That one platform laser-designated the target for another to fire, if the reading of the label is correct, indicates the object was treated as a real, trackable aerial target, not a sensor artifact or a diffuse phenomenon. The exchange was captured on the Reaper's electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) sensor.

The video was obtained by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Missouri) from a military whistleblower and presented publicly for the first time on September 9, 2025, at the House Oversight Committee hearing run by its Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets titled 'Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection.' At the hearing Burlison said the video came from a whistleblower and that an independent review was ongoing; in his social media post that day he stressed that the "footage [is] presented as received from a whistleblower" and that an "independent review is ongoing". The War Zone asked the Pentagon and Central Command for comment, and a defense official told it: "We do not have anything to provide on this."

The most cited prosaic explanation comes from within the scientific field itself. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, far from endorsing an exotic origin, proposed in a Medium article in September 2025 that the object was "comparable with a Samad drone" flown by the Houthis, whose fuze would not have triggered on a grazing hit; on the Metabunk forum it was objected that the wings of such a drone would be visible to that camera. Since October 2023 the Houthis had been attacking ships in the Red Sea and targets in Israel with missiles and long-range kamikaze drones. The War Zone, without committing, notes that what is seen is broadly consistent with an attempted shootdown of a subsonic cruise missile or kamikaze drone, and that the way the target changes aspect and reacts to the missile grazing it is "very balloon-like, although this is not definitive". A Hellfire fuze failure against a real target is a known and far less extraordinary event than an anomalous material property. The case is therefore genuinely open: military video and a documented armed engagement, set against conventional hypotheses the independent review has not yet ruled out.

The Yemen 2024 incident is a case with evidence of a direct armed engagement between a standard weapons system (Hellfire) and an unidentified object, recorded on high-definition military sensor and disclosed at a U.S. congressional hearing. For the first time it becomes public that MQ-9 platforms are reportedly being used to engage unidentified aerial targets, which in itself (apart from the orb's nature) is a significant operational revelation. The documented outcome (deflection without detonation, deformation, sub-object shedding) would be, if genuinely anomalous, category-breaking evidence about the material properties of the phenomenon.

The prosaic hypothesis is strong and comes from a critical scientist, not a believer: the orb matches an Iranian Samad Houthi drone in size and dynamics, and a Hellfire fuze failure is a known event. The combat zone, which on one reading rules out natural phenomena and civilian targets, on another reading is consistent with the object being precisely an enemy drone. Decisively, the video's authenticity and context rest on a whistleblower and on an independent review that, as of this record, remained ongoing and without official validation.