Case File · PURSUE coverage
The Iran 2022 Formation Video: Four Objects, No Heat, One Open File
Updated July 7, 2026 · Alan E. Keene
The record
DOW-UAP-PR050, published in PURSUE Release 02 on May 22, 2026, is a roughly twenty-second CENTCOM infrared recording from August 26, 2022, showing four distinct objects holding a stable formation over water near Iran. The release describes objects with no thermal signature and no visible exhaust. The file is cataloged as unresolved.
The source video and release frame are served from war.gov/UFO and indexed in our file archive.
What makes four objects different from one
Single-object clips invite single-object explanations: a bird, a balloon, a lens artifact, a distant jet. A formation is a different evidentiary animal. Four objects maintaining stable geometric spacing requires either coordination or a common cause — and each branch is informative. Coordinated flight means drones, aircraft, or something piloted or programmed; a common cause (four flares drifting, four reflections, one object multiplied by optics) tends to leave fingerprints an imagery analyst can find, and the file's unresolved status means the government's analysts either didn't find them or didn't publish them.
The no-heat observation is the genuinely odd element. Conventional propulsion is hot; even small drones show thermal contrast under high-end FLIR. An object that returns solid shape on infrared while showing no propulsion heat is either unpowered — drifting, which stable formation over water makes harder to sustain — or powered in a way the sensor cannot see.
A caution on circulating figures
As with the Syria file, specific numbers have attached themselves to this record in circulation — an altitude of 32,000 feet, instantaneous transitions from hover to Mach 3.5, radar correlation across multiple Aegis platforms. Earlier versions of our coverage repeated them. We cannot currently match those specifics to the published record and no longer print them as established. The release page itself supports the narrower description above: four objects, stable formation, no thermal signature, unresolved.
Context
August 2022 places this recording in one of the most sensor-saturated regions on the planet, in the same broad window as the Syria 2021 recording and eighteen months before the Lake Huron engagement. Iranian drone activity over Gulf waters was routine and heavily monitored in this period — which is exactly why an unresolved formation file from this theater is notable. The mundane candidates here were the ones CENTCOM analysts saw every day and could identify in their sleep.
Open questions
Whether the objects were tracked before and after the twenty-second window, and by what; whether any radar track data accompanies the video in unpublished form; what the formation's absolute scale was — spacing of meters reads very differently from spacing of kilometers; and whether the redactions visible on the release frame conceal identifying context or merely platform-protecting detail.
Our read
Our read: PR050 is the archive's most analytically interesting modern file precisely because formations constrain explanations more tightly than lone objects do. (Assessment.) The absence of thermal signature, if the sensor data is as described, is harder to dismiss than any velocity claim — heat is the one thing FLIR does not misread. (Consistent with the record.) We rank it just behind Lake Huron in evidentiary weight: no debris, no engagement, but a sensor observation that resists the ordinary outs.
Related records & reading
Syria 2021: the "instant acceleration" recording · Case file: the Lake Huron shootdown · What is PURSUE? · What "unresolved" means · The full record in the archive ↗