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A newly declassified U.S. military mission report from a 2024 operation in Syria describes an operator’s observation of a “misshapen and uneven ball of white light” recorded through a Full-Motion Video (FMV) feed, according to a Department of War document released to the public under the PURSUE archive.
The document, titled “DOW-UAP-D32, Mission Report, Syria, October 2024,” is a standardized Military Mission Report (MISREP) form used by the U.S. military to record operational circumstances. According to the Department of War’s official description accompanying the release, these forms are often used to report Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The report was declassified by Major General Richard A. Harrison, USCENTCOM Chief of Staff, on October 24, 2025, and released on May 8, 2026.
The incident occurred on October 20, 2024, during an Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) mission flown by the 12th Special Operations Squadron (12 SOS) under the 27th Special Operations Wing (27 SOW). The mission was part of Operation INHERENT RESOLVE. The aircraft, operating under a redacted callsign, took off from a base identified by the code “OJMS” and conducted FMV and signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection at multiple grid coordinates over Syria.
At 1559Z (3:59 PM UTC), the operator “observed an unidentified aerial phenomenon,” the narrative section of the report states. The Department of War’s official summary of the document provides further detail, noting that the operator described seeing a “misshapen and uneven ball of white light” with multiple “glares or light” emanating from an “unknown origin.” The summary adds that the reporter characterized the UAP as a “light/glare halo effect” at the top of the FMV feed.
The Department of War explicitly cautions that all descriptive and estimative language in the report reflects the reporter’s subjective interpretation at the time of the event. The official summary states such characterizations “should not be interpreted as a conclusive indication of the presence or absence of any intrinsic object features or performance characteristics.” The report itself is classified SECRET and releasable to the United States and the Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence alliance, with a declassification date set for October 20, 2049.
Reporting Structure and Agency Context
The MISREP form includes extensive administrative data, including the operator’s rank (Airman First Class), the submitting unit (12 SOS), and the operations center (609th). The report notes that the mission logged 20:24 total mission hours, with 14:22 hours of FMV collection and 13:02 hours of SIGINT collection across multiple taskings. The full motion video from the event was “exploited by GET,” an acronym that is not expanded in the released document.
Per a Wikipedia summary of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO is an office within the United States Office of the Secretary of Defense that investigates unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and other phenomena in the air, sea, space, and/or on land, sometimes referred to as “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP). The Wikipedia entry notes that the office’s first director was physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, who reported to then-deputy defense secretary Kathleen Hicks, and its current director is Jon T. Kosloski.
The Department of War’s PURSUE archive, which hosts this document at war.gov, is the agency’s public repository for declassified UAP-related records. The report is one of several documents released under a series of Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests, identified as USCENTCOM MDR 25-0100 through 25-0103.
What Remains Unanswered
The document does not provide a conclusion about the nature of the observed phenomenon. The operator’s narrative is brief and technical, focusing on mission timelines and collection activities. The report does not state whether the object was tracked by radar, whether it exhibited any unusual flight characteristics, or whether any other sensor data corroborated the visual observation. The official summary notes that the GENTEXT (general text) section of these reports contains important qualitative information, but the released excerpt does not include any additional analysis or follow-up investigation.
Readers should watch for future PURSUE releases that may include additional sensor data, such as the referenced “ISR 1,” “ISR 2,” and “ISR 3” collection files, or the “UAP 1” attachment mentioned in the narrative. The Department of War has not indicated whether these supporting materials will be declassified or released to the public.
