Round and Cold off Oman

The object came up bright white. The crew had their infrared sensor set to black hot, where heat shows dark, and the thing they followed for 73 seconds showed the opposite. Their form calls it "a round, cold object in IR traveling 319 degrees at 20 mph". Between 14:18:39Z and 14:19:52Z on 15 October 2020 it "made a few abrupt directional changes". The aircraft was at 19,073 feet above the terrain. The sensor was pointed 50 degrees below it at a slant range of 4.06 nautical miles.

What is on the record

The document is a Range Fouler Reporting Form, DOW-UAP-D44. 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-2 of the 172 ATKS filed it from an ISR mission. US Central Command declassified it in March 2026 and the Department of War published it in its first PURSUE release on 8 May 2026. The officer's name is withheld, as are most of the grid reference and the estimated latitude and longitude. No video or image accompanies it.

The form disagrees with itself twice. Its narrative says the aircraft was "over the Gulf of Aden". The grid digits left unredacted (40Q BD 63 and 19) fall in the open Arabian Sea about 60 kilometres off Oman's Dhofar coast, well east of the Gulf, and the release's own file name says Arabian Sea. The page is pinned there as a region. The direction and speed box reads 261/30, where the narrative gives 319 degrees at 20 mph.

The same squadron filed a form about a contact over the Gulf of Aden on 4 September 2020 in almost the same words, down to the black-hot setting and the bright white object. That points to a shared template. The dates, times, headings and positions differ, and they are separate reports. Neither the form nor the release offers an explanation.

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 the crew tracked is not resolved here.