Five military incident reports — declassified and released to AARO in early 2026 — document UAP encounters logged by U.S. Central Command aircrew across the Middle East and beyond between May 2020 and 2023. The documents, filed through USCENTCOM's Standardized UAP/Anomalous Phenomena Evaluation and Reporting system (SPEAR), were approved for release by MG Richard A. Harrison, USCENTCOM Chief of Staff. Together they offer the most detailed primary-source look yet at how the command structured its internal UAP reporting pipeline — and at what crews said they actually saw.
What the documents say
The earliest of the five, designated DOW UAP D38, covers a May 2020 incident over the Middle East. A crew conducting an ISR mission with the sensor set to black hot reported that a solid white object flew through the field of view. According to the debrief form, there was a temporary loss of the object, but it was re-acquired shortly thereafter. The crew was able to obtain 4x zoom on the object but lost it again due to poor track placement. The sensor operator was continuously manipulating the sensor to maintain eyes on the object — visible, the report notes, from the waves of water appearing and disappearing in the background frame. The object was described as round and was recorded via ATFLIR. No radar track, electronic signature, or IFF return was captured. The form was declassified under USCENTCOM MDR 26-0019 and approved for release to AARO on January 26, 2026.
The earliest of the five, designated DOW UAP D38, covers a May 2020 incident over the Middle East.
Three months later, on August 24, 2020, a crew from IHSM-73 filed DOW UAP D56 after encountering what the debrief describes as three possible unidentified small air contacts while conducting routine operations in the North Arabian Sea. The contacts produced negative ES, radar track, and IFF track. According to the report, the crew initially observed one unknown air contact and tracked it before losing sight as it went behind a cloud. When the contact was regained, two additional unknown air contacts were seen due east of the initial contact's location. All three, the report states, appeared to maintain their relative course, speed, and altitude. Speed, precise course, and distance to the contacts were all recorded as unknown, though the contacts appeared to be on a westerly heading. The form notes the contacts had wings or airframe features checked on the shape descriptor.
September 2020 produced a second Gulf of Aden encounter, documented in DOW UAP D57 by a crew from 1172 ATKS. The report is specific about geometry and timing: the contact occurred between 21:09Z and 21:17Z on September 4, 2020, while the aircraft was at 23,819 feet HAT. The crew tracked what they described as a round, cold object in IR traveling 168 degrees at 277 mph. According to the report, it made a few abrupt directional changes during the eight-minute contact. The sensor was aimed 39 degrees below aircraft altitude, with a slant range of approximately 6.1 nautical miles and a ground range of 8.81 kilometers. The IR sensor was set to black hot; the object appeared as bright white.
A closely related encounter — DOW UAP D44, filed by 1172 ATKS — documents a second round, cold object tracked over the Gulf of Aden on October 15, 2020, at 14:18Z. This one was tracked for only one minute, traveling 319 degrees at 20 mph at 19,073 feet HAT. The report notes the sensor was aimed 50 degrees below aircraft altitude with a slant range of 4.06 nautical miles and a ground range of 4.78 kilometers. The IR was again set to black hot, and the object again appeared bright white. Like the September encounter, it made a few abrupt directional changes during the brief contact. The document was declassified under USCENTCOM MOR 26-0038 to 26-0046.
The fifth report, DOW UAP D42, covers a 2023 encounter in Japan filed by a crew from 482 ATKS. The debrief describes an ISR mission at dusk during which the crew observed an initial object fly through the screen and began tracking it. According to the report, the initial object was surpassed by another object of the same size and shape but at much higher speed. At one point during tracking, there were three objects on the screen at the same time, moving amongst each other. The document was approved for release to AARO on March 16, 2026, under FOUO and PA guidance.
Across all five documents, the SPEAR system's privacy architecture is explicitly stated: the program sanitizes all reports of identifying information, and absolutely no identifying information for aircrew or squadrons is recorded for analysis. Crew names, squadron identities, and contact information appear only on the intake fields marked for contact purposes — not retained in the analytical record.
What it confirms, what it doesn't, and what remains open
These documents are internally consistent primary-source records from a structured military reporting system, not reconstructed accounts. Their evidentiary value lies precisely in that: they are the contemporaneous forms crews filed, not summaries produced years later for public consumption. The sensor geometry details in DOW UAP D57 and D44 — altitude, slant range, ground range, IR polarity, heading, and speed — are the kind of data that makes these reports analytically useful, even if they don't resolve what the objects were.
Some tensions in the record deserve flagging directly. The September 2020 Gulf of Aden report describes a round, cold object traveling at 277 mph and making abrupt directional changes over eight minutes. The October 2020 report describes a nearly identical object traveling at only 20 mph over one minute, also making abrupt directional changes. Whether these represent two genuinely distinct phenomenon types, two observations of similar objects under different conditions, or some other explanation is not addressed in either document. No follow-up analysis is referenced.
The August 2020 North Arabian Sea report describes an initial single contact that, after a cloud obscuration, became three contacts. The report does not attempt to explain the multiplication — it simply records what the crew observed. It's worth noting that AARO, in its investigation of the 2013 Puerto Rico FLIR event, determined that what appeared to be a single object splitting into two was actually two distinct objects in proximity. Whether that analytical framework applies here is unknown; the documents contain no indication that any comparable investigation was conducted on the SPEAR reports.
Several questions the documents raise go unanswered. None of the five reports reference any follow-up investigation, and the records do not indicate whether the display tapes — which crews were instructed to save for the entire interaction and upload to a repository — were ever recovered or analyzed. The DOW UAP D44 form explicitly instructs crews to ensure all display tapes are saved; whether that happened for any of the five incidents is not addressed in the released material.
The Japan encounter in DOW UAP D42 presents a separate set of unknowns. The incident is filed under USCENTCOM, despite occurring in Japan — suggesting the SPEAR system captured reports from beyond the traditional CENTCOM area of responsibility, or that the submitting unit was CENTCOM-affiliated and operating in the Pacific. The document doesn't explain the geographic anomaly.
No official statement or explanatory response from USCENTCOM, AARO, or any other agency accompanies these releases. The records document what crews reported; they do not document what anyone concluded about those reports. That gap — between structured military observation and any authoritative analytical response — is the most significant thing these five documents leave open.