The Department of War made the December 2022 UAP sighting from Iraq available to the public on May 8, 2026, placing the material in the PURSUE archive. The release consists of a ten‑second infrared clip, a mission report labeled DoW‑UAP‑PR23, and a PDF file that totals three and a half megabytes. The document carries the designation “unresolved,” indicating that analysts could not correlate the sensor return with any known object in their database.
The footage was captured by a single aircraft operating from Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, callsign 1.4a. At 1620 Z on December 1, 2022, the crew was 19 hours and 17 minutes into a mission that lasted exactly 19 hours and 17 minutes.
The flight originated at 1206 Z and concluded at 0723 Z the following day. While airborne near Baghdad, the aircrew observed an anomaly that was later recorded by the aircraft’s Full Motion Video sensor, which was processed by a Distributed Ground Station‑Army system. The mission was conducted under Operation Inherent Resolve, the campaign that began in 2014 with the goal of defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
By 2022 the operation had transitioned primarily to an advise‑and‑assist role, though U.S. platforms continued to perform intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sorties. The specific unit involved was the 482nd Attack Squadron, which operates under the 609th Air Operations Center.
Their after‑action report describes the phenomenon as “an area of contrast moving from the bottom left to the top right of the sensor field‑of‑view.” The report also notes that the object was traveling west to east across the sensor’s view. The crew did not engage the object, did not alter their flight path, and simply filed the report before returning to base. The Department of War characterizes the sighting as unresolved because no match was found in existing libraries of known aerial phenomena, drones, birds, or sensor artifacts.
The decision to release the material now stems from the PURSUE initiative, a Department of War program tasked with declassifying and publishing UAP‑related records. Major General Richard A.
Harrison, serving as USCENTCOM Chief of Staff, authorized the declassification on October 8, 2025. The public received the package seven months later, a timeline that the Department notes is deliberate when measured against typical military bureaucracy, even though it appears slow by internet standards. This document adds to a growing collection of unresolved UAP reports from Iraq maintained by the Pentagon’s All‑domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
While many entries in that catalogue are explained as conventional drones, avian activity, or technical glitches, the December 2022 case remains in the subset that defies easy explanation. The released PDF allows anyone with a computer to download the file, view the embedded video, and examine the described area of contrast moving across the screen, fulfilling the PURSUE aim of transparency rather than leaving the record confined to a classified server pending a Freedom of Information Act request.
