The "Yemen Orb" MQ-9 Reaper Hellfire Strike

Since October 2023, the Iran-backed Houthis had been attacking Red Sea shipping and Israeli targets with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and kamikaze drones. On 29 October 2024, they announced a multi-drone attack on southern Israel.

The next day, over the water, American drones found something.

30 October 2024. Off the coast of Yemen. An MQ-9 Reaper's infrared targeting sensor holds a bright, glowing object in its crosshairs. It moves in a straight line above the ocean waves, on a steady path. Some frames suggest a cylindrical shape. On the screen: "LRD LASE DES". One Reaper is lasing the target. A second, never seen on camera, is about to fire.

A Hellfire missile streaks in from the upper left. Contact. No explosion. The object deforms and tumbles. Smaller pieces trail behind it. And it keeps going. "It kept going, and it looked like the debris was taken with it," Rep. Eric Burlison would later say. "I'm not going to speculate what it is." The clip ends after about 50 seconds. The Reaper crews have never been named.

The footage reached Burlison from an anonymous military whistleblower. On 9 September 2025, he played it before the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, at a hearing titled "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection". He posted it on X the same day. An "independent review is ongoing," he wrote.

Journalist George Knapp, a witness at the hearing, was blunt. "That's the Hellfire missile smacking into that UFO and just (bouncing) right off." Luna turned to the witnesses: "Are you aware of anything in the U.S. arsenal that can split a Hellfire missile like this…and then keep going?" All three veteran witnesses said no. Former Pentagon intelligence official Luis Elizondo told CBS: "When a hellfire makes a hit, a kinetic strike on something solid, there's usually not much left."

A defense official told ABC: "we do not have anything to provide on this." CBS reported that the Pentagon declined to comment. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has said nothing public about this clip, though its general line is that it has found "no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology." No result from Burlison's review has been published. "Why are we being blocked from this information consistently?" he asked.

The debate moved online fast. Mick West and the Metabunk forum argued for a slow-moving soft target such as a balloon, its apparent speed an effect of parallax from the moving drone. West put its size as small as roughly 70 cm × 25 cm. University of Illinois physicist Fred Lamb suggested a high-altitude balloon hit by an AGM-114R9X, the bladed Hellfire with no explosive charge. Avi Loeb proposed a Houthi Samad drone, its tail or wings grazed by the missile. TWZ judged a subsonic cruise missile or kamikaze drone most likely, while noting the target's reaction was "very balloon-like, although this is not definitive."

Whatever it was, the clip appears to show the first known operational air-to-air engagement by an MQ-9. Commentators compared it with the 2015 "Go Fast" video, which AARO attributed to a balloon and parallax. The footage has never been authenticated. Its chain of custody is unknown. And on film, at least, the object is still flying when the clip ends.