The Department of War (DoW) has placed a 14‑second video clip from a July 2022 mission over Syria into its public PURSUE archive. The footage, captured by an MQ‑9 Reaper operating under the 89th Attack Squadron of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing, depicts an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) moving north‑to‑south.
The release, dated May 8 2026, follows the DoW’s declassification of the full mission report on October 8 2025. According to the mission file, the armed reconnaissance sortie—codenamed Operation INHERENT RESOLVE—took off from Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan at 18:22 Z on July 30 2022. The aircraft, identified by the callsign “1.4a,” remained airborne for nearly 21 hours.
At 02:39 Z on July 31, the crew logged an observation of an unidentified object traveling from north to south. No further description of the object appears in the released summary.
All sensor data from the MQ‑9’s infrared and electro‑optical suite were forwarded to the Distributed Ground System‑Intelligence (DGS‑I) for exploitation. Analysts report that the DGS‑I processing yielded no definitive identification, and the incident was subsequently marked “unresolved” when submitted to the All‑domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon’s central body for UAP analysis. The context of the sighting is noteworthy.
In July 2022, eastern Syrian airspace was heavily utilized by coalition forces, Russian aircraft, commercial traffic, and Iranian‑backed militia operations. The 89th Attack Squadron’s MQ‑9s conduct continuous surveillance of ground targets, meaning the crew would have been focused on surface activity when the aerial anomaly appeared.
Redacted grid coordinates in the report prevent precise location disclosure, but the document confirms that the object’s motion was the only observable characteristic noted. The incident is one of several Middle‑East cases now housed within AARO’s docket, reflecting the office’s mandate to centralize reporting across U.S. military services. The DoW’s decision to release the video and accompanying report through PURSUE underscores a broader shift toward incremental transparency on UAP encounters.
While each individual release is modest—a short clip, a single mission log—the cumulative effect builds a growing dataset for analysts, researchers, and the public. Despite the new institutional framework, the core outcome remains unchanged: the phenomenon observed over Syria has not been identified.
The DoW’s statement notes that resolution would require either a breakthrough in analytical techniques or the declassification of additional classified material that could explain the sighting—both of which are uncertain. As PURSUE continues to publish further records, pressure on AARO to deliver concrete explanations is likely to increase. For now, the July 2022 Syrian encounter stands as a documented moment in which a routine reconnaissance flight was interrupted by an aerial event that defies current identification.
