Gulf of Oman, 2021: six clips, filmed off a gunship's screen with a phone

The AC-130J Ghostrider is a U.S. Air Force Special Operations gunship built around an extensive sensor suite, including long-range infrared cameras used for surveillance and precision targeting. On September 8, 2021, over the Gulf of Oman, someone aboard one of these aircraft — the Department of War's release does not say who — pointed a personal cell phone at that infrared display and recorded what it showed. Six separate clips survive, ranging from 2 to 34 seconds, and PURSUE Release 05 publishes all six as DOW-UAP-PR117 through PR122.

The Department is explicit, in each file's description, that every clip is a secondary capture: a phone recording a screen, not a direct sensor export. That distinction matters for what the footage can support — a secondary capture loses metadata and resolution and cannot independently verify the sensor's own targeting and range data, all of which a primary export would retain. It is the same caveat PURSUE has attached to other screen-recorded sensor footage in past releases, and the Department repeats it here rather than letting the clips speak for themselves.

DOW-UAP-D101, an Intelligence Information Report dated to the incident, is the document behind all six clips. An IIR is the U.S. intelligence community's standard format for disseminating unevaluated information from human sources, open-source material, or field collection — explicitly a raw input for later analysts to weigh, not a finished assessment. Its inclusion here means Release 05 gives readers both the original field reporting and the video record it was built from, rather than one without the other.

As with every file on the PURSUE portal, the Gulf of Oman case is published as unresolved. Six independent recordings of the same object, taken from the same aircraft, are a stronger evidentiary set than the single-clip sightings that make up most of the corpus — but they still describe what one sensor, filmed secondhand, picked up over open water in 2021, not a determination of what it was.