UFO hunters say they've finally solved Pentagon's 'metallic orb' sighting - which they tracked to war-torn Syria

An eerie and tantalizingly shiny 'metallic orb' UFO, caught on tape by the US military in the Middle East, may have finally been identified. 

Footage of the object, hovering beneath an MQ-9 Reaper drone, was filmed on July 12, 2022 and played publicly for the first time before the US Senate's Armed Services Committee last April.

But now data scientists with the controversial, but ostensibly independent 'open-source' investigation group Bellingcat say that they have 'deflated' widespread speculation that the object might be an alien probe gliding over the MidEast.

The object, they report, is most likely a party balloon made of the silvery metallic plastic known as Mylar. 

Bellingcat's researchers were also able to determined the mystery 'orbs' flight path - northeast of the city of Deir ez-Zor in Syria - a detail that the Pentagon had previously kept secret.
The group was then able to match the Pentagon's 'orb' video to satellite data suggesting that the object is likely less than one-and-a-half feet in diameter. 
It was possibly released, they said, amid 'Eid al-Adha,' the second and largest religious holiday celebrated in the Muslim world.
While many UFO 'true believers' and more nuanced UFO transparency advocates joined UFO skeptics in commending Bellingcat's investigative efforts, some questioned why the Pentagon's UFO office chose to highlight this specific video in first place.

'This confirms what many of us have suspected given the small size and slow speed of the object,' said Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, in a post to X (formerly Twitter).

Since helping leak three unclassified UFO videos to the New York Times in 2017 — sightings that remain unexplained to this day — Mellon has spearheaded efforts to compel the US government to investigate UFOs more seriously and more openly.  

The fruits of that campaign led first to a short-lived Pentagon UFO task force in 2020 and now a permanent UFO office within the Department of Defense, which now investigates them under a new name: 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena' (UAP). 

But Mellon has not been entirely pleased with how this new group, officially named the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), has handled its mandate. 

AARO took a full year to stand-up its public-facing website, for example, which still lacks a formal reporting system for military personnel to report UFO sightings, which the office had been directed to create by Congress. 

And AARO's site only went live belatedly, following the media frenzy surrounding incredible and ominous sworn congressional testimony by UFO whistleblower and retired intelligence officer David Grusch — who has accused the government of running a decades-long and illegally operated UFO crash retrieval program.  

'It is hard to imagine AARO releasing anything but the weakest and least compelling UAP videos,' Mellon wrote, in reference to the 'metallic orb' video.

Bellingcat's researchers were able to decode the video starting with the scant information accompanying it from AARO: specifically, that the UFO was filmed on July 12, 2022 by a Reaper drone somewhere over the Middle East. 

The date matched that year's 'Eid al-Adha' ('Feast of the Sacrifice') festivities in Syria, which began the evening of Friday, July 8, 2022 and continued until Tuesday, July 12.

The holiday commemorates God's test of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of Abraham's son, as depicted in the Quran and other religious texts. 

'While it's exciting to imagine a 30 centimeter-wide alien spacecraft flying around the Middle East,' the Bellingcat investigation's two coauthors wrote in their post, 'Occam's razor suggests that perhaps we're just looking at a party balloon.'

Using Google Earth Pro imagery captured on July 13, 2022, the researchers were able to track the apparent flight path that the mysterious 'orb' takes in the MQ-9 drone's video.

While it looks potentially like the 'orb' might have zipped over 750 meters of Syrian desert in just 16 seconds, for a hot rod speed of 105 miles-per-hour (mph), the Bellingcat team argued that this could be explained with via an optical illusion: parallax.

Based on their calculations, if the Reaper that filmed the orb was travelling at approximately 186 mph at an altitude of the 24,606 feet, then the unidentified object could have easily moved at something closer to local wind speed.

'If it had an altitude of 2000 meters,' the group wrote, 'the object would have a real speed of 44 km/hr [27.3 mph].' 

'Historic weather data for July 12, 2022 forecasted winds of approximately 20 to 25 kilometers-per-hour at 0 meters to 3000 meters altitude, from a westerly direction,' Bellingcat noted — or half the orb's speed under their initial parallax measurements.  

The group's report did not elaborate on this gap further, approximately 15-to-12 mph of unaccounted speed above the wind temperature.

Instead, they posted an interactive parallax calculator along with their report.

Based on the group's interactive tool, a Mylar balloon would have to be cruising at an altitude of 2,300 meters to achieve a speed consistent with being pushed along by the local wind speed. 

The orb's diameter under this scenario would be just under 1-ft long, 30 centimeters.

The MQ-9 Reaper drone above, an unmanned aerial vehicle, would still be moving at approximately 186 mph (300 km/hr) at an altitude of the 24,606 feet (7,500 meters) in this plausible scenario.  

When Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of AARO for the Department of Defense, first presented the orb video to NASA's UFO advisory panel last June, the physicist described the orb as 'a typical example of the thing we see most of.'

A majority of the UFO reports to AARO are described as 'round or spheres,' Dr. Kirkpatrick said: about 52 percent.

'We see these all over the world,' he told NASA's panel, 'making very interesting apparent maneuvers.'

Kirkpatrick was even more explicit on this point in private, according to a source who spoke to the DailyMail.com and who was present at a closed-door, but unclassified meeting between the NASA panel, Pentagon officials and other guests.

'NASA had a big thing for their study plan in Florida, earlier this year,' said this source, who would only speak to DailyMail.com under the condition on anonymity.  

During that meeting, one of the scientists on NASA's advisory panel said to Kirkpatrick, as this source recalls it, 'Come on. You gotta give us something, right? You guys are telling us there's something here, but you won't give us any data.' 

'You won't give us any information. How are we supposed to do science with this? How are we even supposed to know if there's a there there?'' or so this source recalls the NASA expert as pleading. 

'And he [Kirkpatrick] says to them, 'Look. I will tell you this: There is something there.''

According this source, who has met in private with Dr. Kirkpatrick at various points since the former CIA scientist took on the AARO directorship last year, 'my impression of him is that he's been trying to get more information around this.'

'He's been complaining from the beginning, when I first met him,' the source continued, 'about having his hands tied, specifically by Moultrie,' in reference to the Pentagon's Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie.

Along with Scott Bray, the Pentagon's Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Moultrie spoke last year at the first public congressional hearings on UFOs in half a century. 

During that May 2022 hearing, Moultrie's comments to legislators and press, were in stark contrast to Dr. Kirkpatrick's alleged complaints about him in private. 

'Our goal is not to potentially cover up something,' Under Secretary Moultrie told Congress, 'it's to understand what's maybe out there.'