DOW-UAP-PR055: spherical object slips in and out of clouds over Afghanistan

DOW-UAP-PR055 is the spherical-UAP video from Afghanistan that appeared on a U.S. classified network for the first time in June 2024 and was declassified in PURSUE Release 02. The encounter itself occurred on November 23, 2020, over Afghan airspace within U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility.

The footage is infrared sensor data from a U.S. military platform and shows a single spherical object moving in and out of cloud cover — the kind of weather-interactive flight behavior AARO has previously catalogued separately from point-source infrared contrast targets, because cloud-interaction is one of the few visual cues that disambiguates a real physical object from a sensor artifact or atmospheric event.

PR055 is one of three Afghanistan-theater clips in the Release 02 PR-series and the only one in which the encounter object is conclusively a sphere rather than an ambiguous area of contrast.