Eight Minutes over the Gulf of Aden

For eight minutes the crew kept it in the sensor. Between 21:09Z and 21:17Z on 4 September 2020 their aircraft was 23,819 feet above the terrain over the Gulf of Aden on a night intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission. The infrared sensor was set to black hot and "the object in question was a bright white". The form describes "a round, cold object in IR traveling 168 degrees at 277 mph" that "made a few abrupt directional changes during the 8 minute contact". The sensor was looking 39 degrees down at a slant range of 6.17 nautical miles.

What is on the record

The document is a Range Fouler Reporting Form, DOW-UAP-D57. AARO describes it as the standard form the US Navy uses to record an unauthorised intrusion into controlled airspace during operations or training. An O-3 of the 172 ATKS filed it. US Central Command declassified it on 16 March 2026 and the Department of War published it in its first PURSUE release on 8 May 2026, under a title that calls it a mission report. It is a single range-fouler form.

The officer's name is withheld. So are most digits of the grid reference and the estimated latitude and longitude. What survives of the grid places the contact over the western Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somaliland, which agrees with the narrative, and the page is pinned there as a region. The form's contact-altitude box repeats the aircraft's own height, so the object's altitude is not recorded. No size is given and no video or image is paired with the form.

The same squadron's form for 15 October 2020 uses almost the same words: the round, cold object, the black-hot setting, the bright white return and the abrupt turns. Only the numbers change. That points to a shared template or copied text. It does not show two crews confirming one thing, and the reports are six weeks apart. Neither form offers an explanation and the release adds none.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. The observers are an aircrew identified by its squadron, with every name withheld. No independent testimony sits beside the form in the archive, and the tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What held the sensor for eight minutes is not resolved here.