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UFOs & UAP

The Pentagon's '480 mph' Six-Dot Video Was Probably Birds, UAP Science Panel Members Say. One Number Still Doesn't Fit

Six members of the UAP Science Advisory Council, including Avi Loeb and Michael Shermer, say the six 'small spherical objects' in Pentagon video DOW-UAP-PR135 flicker at bird wingbeat rates, and that parallax explains the 480 mph. Their preprint, posted Oct. 8, 2026, names the crew's reported altitude as 'the greatest challenge' to their reading.

PERSIAN GULF By Dead of Night Dispatch

Location Northern Persian Gulf, possibly near Qaruh Island, Kuwait (per the paper)

Illustration: a dim operations room at night, a single glowing monitor showing a grey sea and six small bright points in a loose cluster, an empty chair in front of it
Developing Part of an ongoing series: The Pentagon UFO Files

PERSIAN GULF (Oct. 8, 2026): The mission report is short and strange. On July 29, 2025, at 23:22 local time over the Middle East, a U.S. Air Force crew logged six small spherical objects, grouped together, that “seemed to be agile, frequently changing direction” and were “able to change directions quickly and simultaneously.” The estimated speed: 480 mph. The estimated altitude: flight level 220, or 22,000 feet.

VideoDOW-UAP-PR135, Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2025Department of War, via DVIDS, . Watch on DVIDSThe video the paper analyzes, as the Pentagon published it. The six points cross the frame at about 0:05 and are tracked until 0:47.

The poster is our story illustration, not a frame from the video. Pressing play loads the video from DVIDS, which may set cookies.

Where it started

The original social media post

  1. u/Courtly-Chris

    Members of the UAP Science Advisory Council have concluded that the six Infrared dots in a declassified UAP Video is a flock of birds

    The post that brought the paper to r/UFOs the day it appeared. It links to Avi Loeb's Medium essay on the study.

    105 points · 39 comments as of Oct 10, 2026

    View original on Reddit

    From the conversation

    See the full thread on Reddit →

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The Pentagon released the infrared video, DOW-UAP-PR135, on Sept. 18, 2026, in the sixth batch of its PURSUE UFO files, labeled “unresolved.” Three weeks later, a group of scientists posted a different label for consideration: birds.

What we know

On the record: documents, statements, dates and places. Sources below.

  • The paper. On Oct. 8, 2026, six members of the UAP Science Advisory Council posted a preprint on arXiv: Jacob Haqq-Misra of Blue Marble Space, Ravi Kopparapu of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Richard Cloete, Omer Eldadi and Avi Loeb of Harvard’s Galileo Project, and Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society. It hasn’t been peer reviewed.
  • The flicker. Measuring each object frame by frame, they report that all six “brighten and dim steadily at 7.1 to 7.9 times per second, each at its own rate and out of step with the others.” Even two objects beating at the same rate are 119 degrees out of phase. A flicker caused by the video itself, they write, “would reach all six objects at one frequency and in one phase.”
  • The controls. The team planted constant-brightness dots in the video and re-encoded it with the same settings. The dots barely flickered, which they say rules out compression. The sensor’s own fixed defects flickered at different rates.
  • The birds. Running the same analysis on infrared footage from the Galileo Project’s cameras near Las Vegas, they found flying animals beating at 3.4 to 10 times per second, the range of bird wingbeats.
  • The speed. Without a laser range, the authors explain, a targeting system can only measure the speed of the point on the ground behind an object. A nearly stationary object at 60% to 80% of the aircraft’s height would produce the reported 480 mph. Their conclusion: the objects “are best explained as a small flock of birds flying nearer to the aircraft than the crew assumed.”

What’s claimed, and what isn’t settled

  • The altitude problem. The authors are upfront that one number doesn’t fit. “The reported altitude of the objects provides the greatest challenge to the bird hypothesis,” they write. If the crew’s estimate of 22,000 feet is right and the aircraft was higher still, the birds would have to be at about 4.8 kilometers, roughly 16,000 feet, above typical nocturnal migration and within reach only of high fliers such as herons and gulls. They suggest the crew’s estimates may have been wrong, since no range was measured, and say the redacted altitude of the aircraft “would resolve this uncertainty.”
  • A stray letter. The report’s speed field reads “48OMPH,” with a letter O. The authors read it as 480 mph, matching the Pentagon’s description, but note that 48 mph “would itself be more typical of bird flight.”
  • Where and what. From an island visible in the first seconds of video, they tentatively place the sighting near Qaruh Island off Kuwait, “a possible but unconfirmed identification.” From the report’s details, they infer the aircraft was an MQ-9 Reaper drone, adding that “none of our results depends on the aircraft type.”
  • Which birds. The local terns that nest on Kuwait’s islands beat their wings more slowly than the dots flicker, the paper says, unless each wingbeat produces two equal flashes. Ducks, grebes and waders would fit the direct reading. A flock of terns at that hour, it says, “is possible but not typical.”

What readers said

The paper reached r/UFOs the same day. Reactions split. “Seems suspicious that birds would just be in the sky like that while our trained observers were ufo hunting,” wrote u/Minimum-Classic-3523, in the top reply. Others accepted the analysis and turned the question around: “i mean… that was obvious. the question is why military classified this as unknown?” wrote u/Top_Gene8144. And u/MegaSeth27 bristled at the source: “A highly trained Sensor Operator tracked these targets for a long time only to find out that they’re birds, by some Harvard and DC suits? Hmmm…”

The disclosures

The paper says its authors are unpaid members of the council and received no funding for the work, and that “the analysis code, the figures, and drafts of the text were developed with Claude Opus (Anthropic), a large language model.” The data and scripts are archived publicly on Zenodo.

What’s next

The Pentagon hadn’t changed PR135’s “unresolved” label on DVIDS as of Oct. 10. The authors argue the case could be closed either way with one redacted number, the aircraft’s altitude. “What limits such analysis,” they write, “is not the phenomena but the data.”

Sources

  1. Six objects reported at 480 mph in a declassified military infrared video show brightness flicker at bird wingbeat rates · arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) Haqq-Misra, Kopparapu, Cloete, Eldadi, Shermer and Loeb; posted Oct. 8, 2026.
  2. DOW-UAP-PR135, Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2025 · Department of War, via DVIDS Published Sept. 18, 2026, in PURSUE Release 6.
  3. Members of the UAP Science Advisory Council have concluded that the six Infrared dots in a declassified UAP Video is a flock of birds · r/UFOs (Reddit)