US military operators spotted six spherical objects flying in formation at 480 mph over a Middle Eastern desert last year, according to a newly declassified report released Friday.
The 2025 US Central Command document describes “six small spherical objects, grouped together” that were “frequently changing direction” as they moved through the air. Pentagon officials published the report as part of their latest batch of declassified UFO files, accompanied by one minute of video footage showing the orbs traversing what appeared to be arid terrain.
The release also included infrared footage from 2023 showing circular objects over the Yellow Sea, captured by a sensor aboard a US military platform. That same year, a Colorado law enforcement officer recorded a 15-minute cell phone video of a craft with “red, blue and green flashing lights” that stayed “silent” as it hovered.
The modern sightings were published alongside records stretching back more than seven decades. Documents from the office of the US Air Force Director of Intelligence detailed “flying disc” incidents logged between September and December 1952.
Chief Warrant Officer Delbert Newhouse became entangled in that wave of reports when he filmed bright airborne objects near Tremonton, Utah, on July 2, 1952. Newhouse was traveling from Washington, DC, to Portland, Ore., when he pulled out a Bell and Howell auto master camera and captured 16mm Kodachrome color footage of the spectacle.
“The film later became one of the visual cases reviewed by Project Blue Book, the 1952–1969 U.S. Air Force program that investigated the nature and origin of unidentified flying objects (UFOs),” the declassified document webpage stated.
Project Blue Book investigators pursued multiple theories. They contacted General Mills, “the only known manufacturer of pillow balloons at the time, to determine whether a balloon release could account for the incident.” The Air Force Photo Reconnaissance Lab ultimately concluded in 1956 that the light in the film “was caused by seagulls soaring in thermal air currents.”
Yet another analysis contradicted that finding, stating it is “believed to be reasonably certain that the reflection brightness of these objects exceeds that of any natural diffusing type of reflecting object, such as white birds against the sky.”
The day before Newhouse’s filming, an unidentified correspondent reported a separate encounter with a “white object, shaped like an ‘elongated oval’ but ‘fatter than a cigar,'” estimated at roughly 100 feet in length.
All of these files entered the public domain after President Trump signed an executive order this past February declassifying most information about unidentified aerial phenomena sightings.