AARO 'Atmospheric Wakes' Case Resolution: Three Drone Videos, 2023
Three military drone videos from 2022 and 2023 seemed to show objects trailing a visible wake. AARO's partners concluded the wakes were infrared sensor artifacts and matched two of the objects to known aircraft, one of them an Airbus A380.
A trail streaming behind a moving object is one of the most persuasive things a UAP video can show. It suggests the object is really pushing through the air, and that whatever drives it leaves a mark. This three-page case resolution from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) deals with three such videos and concludes that none of the trails was real.
What this record is
This is AARO’s case resolution titled “Atmospheric Wakes,” dated 8 May 2023. It is a three-page unclassified summary in the office’s standard format, with a Key Findings box, a Case Essentials sidebar, and separate intelligence and science-and-technology assessments. The last page is a single annotated still labelled “Case Two: Sensor Artifact Trailing the Aircraft.” The Department of Defense prepublication office cleared it for open publication on 4 October 2023. AARO’s Chief of Staff reviewed it again on 6 February 2025 under the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act, marked it “Released in Full,” and gave it case number 330UAP000017. The Office of the Secretary of Defense then transferred it to the National Archives with the rest of its UAP series.
What it says
According to the Case Essentials sidebar, the three reports came from “Theater UAV operators” after three separate missions over the Middle East and the Mediterranean Sea in 2022 and 2023. All three were infrared recordings. The operators filed the reports because the objects posed a possible hazard to the mission and because the videos appeared to show “a potentially anomalous propulsion signature,” meaning a wake trailing behind each object. The sidebar gives no altitude or shape for any of them.
AARO’s key finding is that the objects “almost certainly were not exhibiting anomalous propulsion or atmospheric wakes,” and that the wake was “the result of a sensor artifact in all cases.” The three cases ended differently. The object in Case One was never identified, but AARO says it is “certain that it was not exhibiting anomalous behaviors,” and its intelligence partners call it almost certainly a prosaic object. Case Two involved two objects. One matched the track of a military aircraft in the area. The other appeared oblong because of camera aberration and could not be matched to a flight, but line-of-sight analysis and comparison with known objects led analysts to assess, with medium confidence, that it was a small aircraft. In Case Three the intelligence partners matched the object to “a specific Airbus A380 commercial aircraft” using commercial flight data. A separate photogrammetry estimate of its size came out close to that of an A380.
Two science-and-technology partners examined the trails independently and reached the same result. The first said the trails were camera artifacts caused by the object crossing the field of view quickly, and pointed out that other objects in the same videos left similar trails. The second analysed the full-motion video and the infrared sensor itself and reached the same conclusion with high confidence. Neither partner tried to identify the objects.
Context
AARO published a series of these short case resolutions between 2023 and 2025, and several of them turn on the same lesson: the sensor, and not the target, produced the anomaly. The “Western United States” resolution issued the same day reached a similar result for five lights that turned out to be airliners up to 300 nautical miles away (see the Western United States record). A wake-like trail from an MQ-9 feed over South Asia, shown to the Senate in April 2023, was likewise attributed to a camera-software artifact (see South Asia, 2023). The underlying problem is that an infrared imager on a moving drone smears any object that crosses the frame quickly. Once that happens, an ordinary aircraft can look as if it trails a plume.
The document is also an example of how AARO rates its own confidence. It is certain that Case One showed nothing anomalous, yet it cannot say what the object was. That can read as candour, since the office declines to invent an identification, or as a gap, since an unidentified object has still been declared ordinary. The report itself separates the two questions: whether the object behaved anomalously, which it answers, and what the object was, which it leaves open for Case One.
Status
AARO lists the case as “Resolved; prosaic aircraft; the ‘wake’ is a sensor artifact in each case.” For two of the three videos the identification rests on matching the objects to flight tracks, which is about as strong as this kind of evidence gets. The first object and the second object in Case Two remain unidentified. The claim that they were ordinary depends on the wake having been explained, not on any match to a known aircraft. None of the three videos has been published, so the analysis cannot be checked independently. On the evidence AARO describes, the wakes that made these reports stand out were produced inside the camera.
Sources
- National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/499915949
- PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/493468580/017_Atmospheric_Wakes.pdf
- Series: Records from the Office of the Secretary of Defense Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/493468580
- National Archives, Record Group 615 UAP records: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615