AARO "Middle East Object": MQ-9 Reaper Films a Silver Orb

Spring 2023. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, was reviewing more than 650 cases. Its January report had counted 510. Its director, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, was about to testify in public. He brought two cases that had been declassified recently. The first came from a drone over the Middle East.

July 12, 2022. An MQ-9 Reaper was flying over an undisclosed location in the region, with its electro-optical camera filming in daylight. "Those are not IR," Kirkpatrick would stress. Then something crossed the sensor's field of view. AARO called it "an apparent silver, orb-like object," and it looked small, spherical and shimmering as it zipped above houses and empty fields.

The camera operator kept it in view. "You'll see it come through the top of the screen, there it goes," Kirkpatrick narrated. "And then the camera will slew to follow it. You'll see it pop in and out of the screen field of view there." The path seemed to bend, first diagonal, then more vertical. The operator tracked it for a few more seconds, until the camera could no longer turn that way.

The whole clip lasts 24 seconds. "This is essentially all of the data we have associated with this event," Kirkpatrick said.

April 19, 2023. The Department of Defense released the video, and that day Kirkpatrick played it for the Senate Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. AARO's verdict was finely balanced: the object "is not exhibiting anomalous behavior," yet it "remains unidentified." The case went into AARO's "active archive," pending new data. Kirkpatrick also told senators: "AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics."

On May 31, 2023, he showed the clip again at NASA's public UAP meeting in Washington. "This is a typical example of the thing we see most of," he said. Metallic orbs, he explained, are "real objects" and are reported "all over the world." Some make "very interesting apparent manoeuvres." Panel chair David Spergel put it simply: "we need high quality data."

October 2023. The investigators at Bellingcat took the clip apart. Nathan Patin and Logan Williams matched its fields and buildings to Google Earth imagery. They placed the scene northeast of Deir ez-Zor, Syria. A building wall in the last frame measured about 11 metres, putting the object's maximum diameter at about 0.43 metres.

A west wind put the site downwind of eastern Syria's largest city. And by their account, July 12, 2022 was the last day of Eid al-Adha, when balloons are common in Syria. The apparent motion, they argued, was parallax from the drone's own movement. Their conclusion: "a balloon is consistent with what we see in the video."

On Metabunk, Mick West had already argued that the curving path matched a Reaper circling while its camera held the sphere. One post gave its verdict: "Party balloon size." Not everyone was persuaded. Micah Hanks at The Debrief recalled a 2019 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report of a "round silver drone" that could stop and hover. His point was that not every metallic sphere has to be a balloon.

The Pentagon has never confirmed the Syrian location. AARO has published no later resolution. The clip became the public face of the metallic orb, which Kirkpatrick called the most common type of UAP. For now it sits in the active archive, still waiting for more data.