It took the Department of War more than three years to let the public see what a U.S. aircrew spotted over Iraq in December 2022. The document dropped on May 8, 2026, under the PURSUE archive. Ten seconds of infrared video. A mission report. That is the sum of it.
The report itself is a dry military form. DoW-UAP-PR23. Unresolved. That word matters. It means no one explained what the sensor picked up at 1620Z on December 1, 2022. The crew was flying a single aircraft out of Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, callsign 1.4a. They were 19 hours and 17 minutes into a 19-hour-and-17-minute mission. They were near Baghdad. They saw something.
The mission was part of Operation Inherent Resolve. That operation began in 2014, aimed at defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria. By 2022, the mission had shifted mostly to advise-and-assist, with U.S. aircraft still running intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights. The 482nd Attack Squadron, working under the 609th Air Operations Center, was doing exactly that when the crew reported a possible UAP.
The infrared video shows what the Department of War describes as “an area of contrast moving from the bottom left to the top right of the sensor field-of-view.” That is a careful bureaucratic description. It does not say orb. It does not say craft. It says area of contrast. The sensor was Full Motion Video, exploited by a Distributed Ground Station-Army. The report says the UAP was flying west to east.
Why now? Why did this get released in 2026? The PURSUE archive is a Department of War initiative to declassify and publish UAP-related records. Major General Richard A. Harrison, USCENTCOM Chief of Staff, signed the declassification order on October 8, 2025. Seven months later, the public got the file. That timeline is slow by internet standards, fast by military bureaucracy standards.
This is not the first unresolved report from Iraq. It will not be the last. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has been collecting these reports for years. Most are mundane — drones, birds, sensor glitches. Some are not. The December 2022 report falls into the not category. Unresolved means the analysts looked at the data and could not match it to anything in the library.
The crew did not fire. They did not maneuver. They filed the report and flew home. The aircraft took off at 1206Z on December 1 and landed at 0723Z the next day. A long mission. A short sighting. Ten seconds of video.
What the public gets is a PDF. Three and a half megabytes. The video is embedded. The mission report is attached. Anyone with a computer can download it and look at the area of contrast moving across the screen. That is the point of PURSUE. The Department of War made a deliberate choice to put this online rather than let it sit in a classified server until someone filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
The location is specific. Baghdad. The time is specific. 1620Z. The unit is specific. 482nd Attack Squadron. The document is specific. What it describes is not. Unresolved does not tell you what it was. It tells you what it was not — nothing in the database.
