Intelligence Information Report, Unresolved UAP Report, Gulf of Oman, September 8, 2021 — Department of War File
This document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), the primary standardized format utilized by the Department of War, military services, and the broader Intelligence Community to disseminate unevaluated intelligence information derived from human sources (HUMINT), open sources, and field…
Incident Overview
On September 8, 2021, in the Gulf of Oman, the Department of War preserved a documentary record that was declassified and published on August 7, 2026 as part of the fifth tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).
What the government released
This document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), the primary standardized format utilized by the Department of War, military services, and the broader Intelligence Community to disseminate unevaluated intelligence information derived from human sources (HUMINT), open sources, and field collection activities. IIRs are not finished intelligence products; they serve as inputs for subsequent all-source intelligence assessments. This report accompanies the footage contained within DOW-UAP-PR117 through DOW-UAP-PR122.
This report documents an observation by the aircrew of a U.S. Special Operations Forces (USSOF) AC-130 Gunship on September 8, 2021, during a nighttime live-fire training exercise over the Gulf of Oman. The aircrew reported first observing two unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) after dropping a water-activated flare. The report describes the UAP as stationary, approximately four feet in diameter, 0-20 feet above the water’s surface.
Throughout the training sortie, the aircrew reported observing approximately 25 instances involving similar phenomena via infrared sensor, describing them as “cold orbs.” Aircrew visual estimates of the UAP’s apparent speed range from 250 to 1,300 miles per hour. The report characterizes the UAP’s behavior as “maneuvering aggressively,” “flying in various formations,” and appearing to react to deployments of the aircraft’s onboard weapons systems. The aircrew stated that they were unable to capture video footage of the phenomena because the aircraft’s digital video recorder was not functioning during the incident.
All descriptive and estimative language contained in this report reflects the reporter’s subjective interpretation at the time of the event. Such characterizations should not be interpreted as a conclusive indication of the presence or absence of any intrinsic object features or performance characteristics.
Related records
This report is the written half of a pair. The Department of War released it to accompany the footage in Unresolved UAP Report, Gulf of Oman (DOW-UAP-PR117), Unresolved UAP Report, Gulf of Oman (DOW-UAP-PR118), Unresolved UAP Report, Gulf of Oman (DOW-UAP-PR119), Unresolved UAP Report, Gulf of Oman (DOW-UAP-PR120), Unresolved UAP Report, Gulf of Oman (DOW-UAP-PR121), and Unresolved UAP Report, Gulf of Oman (DOW-UAP-PR122), so the aircrew’s reported observation and a recording of what they were looking at are both on the table. That is unusual in this archive, though it falls short of a witness account checked against an instrument: by the government’s own description the aircraft’s digital video recorder was not working, and the footage is a cellular-phone capture of a sensor screen rather than native sensor data. An Intelligence Information Report also disseminates unevaluated information rather than a finished assessment, which is the release’s own caveat and worth keeping.
The case in this archive
This document is a primary source for the Gulf of Oman cold orbs, written up here at length from the contemporary record. The file and the case history are worth reading against each other: the document is narrower and more cautious than the account that grew up around it, which is usually the point.
Status of the case
Records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which means the federal government has not concluded the events were anomalous, has not concluded they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Where AARO has offered a likely source for an item — an infrared sensor aboard a military aircraft, a commercial camera, or a known optical effect — that attribution is the agency’s working assessment rather than a final determination. Conventional candidates such as drones, balloons, flares, satellites, parallax and forced-perspective artifacts, and ordinary aircraft remain on the table for any unresolved case absent better data than a single sensor pass or a witness recollection.