Seventy-two of the 375 records in the declassified archive carry the CENTCOM/Middle East tag. Forty-six are videos, 25 are PDFs, one is a digital rendering. The locations run through Iraq, Syria, the Arabian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, Iran, and Afghanistan. Every dated Department of War report in the set falls between November 18, 2016 and October 20, 2024, and 2020 alone accounts for 27 of the 72 by incident date. Nine records carry a shape category, one balloon, one cylinder, five spheres, two triangles.
The records come in three kinds: Mission Reports, or MISREPs, from Air Force squadrons; Range Fouler forms from Navy crews; and a long run of infrared clips with uploader-defined titles like "Syrian UAP instant acceleration" and "4 UAP Formation Iran 26 Aug 2022 over water [CALLSIGN]." What each kind says, then the dull reason the count is probably this high.
The earliest dated report: a P-8A off Latakia, November 2016
DOW-UAP-D055 is a briefing slide dated November 18, 2016, and it carries the earliest incident date of any Department of War record in the CENTCOM set. A Navy P-8A monitoring a group the slide calls KCTG in the Eastern Mediterranean picked up an unidentified low-flying object 55 nautical miles northwest of Latakia, Syria. The timeline calls it a possible missile launch from an unknown origin, appearing to be in "sea skim mode," traveling at approximately 500 knots on a southeasterly heading outbound from the group. The crew held it for about two minutes, watched it pass between a Russian vessel identified as INGUL ARS and one unidentified vessel, and lost visual roughly 40 nautical miles northwest of Latakia.
Then the comments section drains the drama out. The task group calls it the first possible missile activity observed by P-8 aircraft in the Eastern Mediterranean and assesses it as standard activity consistent with the assessed activity of the group. A possible missile from 2016 landed in a UAP release nine years later.
What a MISREP looks like when a UAP shows up
The workhorse document in the stack is the MISREP, a form that logs takeoff, time on station, taskings, weather, and, in free-text GENTEXT fields, anything the crew thought worth writing down. DOW-UAP-D010 is a clean example: an Air Force ISR mission the archive places over Iraq, flown under Operation Inherent Resolve, airborne from 0246Z on May 6, 2022 to 0004Z the next morning.
The UAP content is four sentences in the observation GENTEXT. Between 1514Z and 1934Z the crew "OBSERVED 5X UAP FLY ACROSS THE SCREEN." The first, at 1514Z, had the visual recognition profile of a possible missile. The crew "PROCEEDED TO SEE 4X OTHER UAPS IN THEIR FOV UNTIL 1934Z," and then: "ALL 4X REMAINING UAP FIT CLOSER TO THE PROFILE OF POSSIBLE BIRDS." The form logs it as UAP regardless, because at the moment of observation nobody had identified anything, and that is what the U does.
Each page of D010 is stamped "Declassified by MG Richard A. Harrison, USCENTCOM Chief of Staff, Declassified on: 7 October 2025," with a Mandatory Declassification Review number and the line "Approved for Release to AARO." The same Harrison stamp sits on D019, D028, D032, and D064.
The Navy's version: a checkbox form for things in the range
DOW-UAP-D038 is a Range Fouler Debrief, the form a Navy crew fills out when something intrudes into controlled airspace during operations. Date: 05/14/20. Time of detection: 20:40:00Z, night, on an ISR mission the archive places over the Arabian Gulf. Then a checklist of twelve boxes, from Round to Reflective. The only box checked is Round.
In the narrative, a solid white object flew through the field of view, was briefly lost, then reacquired. The crew followed it as it appeared to make erratic movements above the water, got 4x zoom on it, and lost it due to poor track placement, with the sensor operator continuously manipulating the sensor to keep eyes on. One round white thing, low over the water, at night.
DOW-UAP-D044 is the same form five months later. Contact from 14:18:39Z to 14:19:52Z on October 15, 2020. "While at 19,073 HAT over the Gulf of Aden we tracked a round, cold object in IR traveling 319 degrees at 20 mph. It made a few abrupt directional changes during the 1 minute contact." The crew gives its sensor geometry, slant range 4.06 nautical miles, and explains why it called the object cold: the sensor was set to black hot, and the object showed bright white. Twenty miles an hour, one minute long, and a crew that wrote down its own polarity setting.
Strike Eagles over Shaddadi, with jamming in the same log
DOW-UAP-D019 is a MISREP from a two-ship of F-15Es of the 389th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron out of Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, flying defensive counter-air over Syria in the early hours of February 21, 2023. The narrative is a timeline. At 0021Z-0024Z the flight received radar jamming in the vicinity of Shaddadi at FL270. At 0025Z, same vicinity, "OBS 3X POSS UAP" at FL240, video produced, nothing further. At 0135Z, again near Shaddadi, one possible balloon at FL210.
The EMI block logs three minutes of radar jamming with partial impact to the APG-82 radar and no mission impact, and the crew offers a theory: this is standard for aircrew north of Shaddadi, and their working assumption is a Turkish X-band jammer on or across the Syrian-Turkish border. The AIRSIGHT block for the three possible UAP says the flight was cruising in CAP at FL270, no radar returns were received from the UAP, no health effects were experienced by the aircrew, and "2 WHITE OBJECTS IR SIGNIFICANT." The archive files this case under Balloon, a tag that comes straight from the crew's own "POSS BALLOON" call an hour later.
By 2024 the form has a UAP section of its own
Three 2024 MISREPs, DOW-UAP-D075, DOW-UAP-D028, and DOW-UAP-D032, carry something the 2020-2023 reports above do not: a dedicated UAP block with fields for event type, observer assessment, physical state, intelligent control (yes/no), and objects or material recovered. The answers crews put into it are mostly unknown, benign, and no.
D075, from the 124th Attack Squadron over the Gulf of Aden on July 14, 2024, logs one UAP at 0517Z with a "STRAIGHT FLIGHT PATH AT SAME ALTI," assessed benign, propulsion unknown, intelligent control unknown. The crew "FOLLOWED THE UAP TILL THE DISTANCE BECAME TOO FAR TO FOLLOW," and the one anomalous characteristic listed is that its speed was faster than the aircraft's flying speed. Its stamp reads "Recommendation by MG Brandon R. Tegtmeier, USCENTCOM Chief of Staff, Recommended on: 2 June 2025," the earliest review date among the reports cited here.
D028 is the strangest of the three. A special operations crew was doing a weapons calibration in the restricted operating zone at Ayn al Asad Airbase, Iraq, on September 20, 2024. After a call for fire at about 2025Z and the release of an AGM-176 Griffin, the weapons systems officer and combat systems officer "OBSERVED AN UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT 'FLY' THROUGH THE AIRCRAFT SENSORS AT A HIGH RATE OF SPEED," between munition release and munition impact. The crew read the IR lens flare it left on the MX-20 and MX-25 sensors as a significant heat signature. "IT IS UNKNOWN AT THIS TIME WHETHER AN OBJECT DETACHED ITSELF FROM THE PRIMARY UAP IMMEDIATELY BEFORE LEAVING THE SENSOR FIELD OF VIEW." Physical state: solid. Assessment: benign.
D032, from a 12th Special Operations Squadron ISR sortie over Syria on October 20, 2024, is the most recent dated MISREP in the CENTCOM set. From 1559Z to 1644Z the crew "OBSERVED MULTIPLE GLARES OR LIGHT FROM UNKNOWN ORIGIN AT DIFFERENT ANGLES AND DIRECTIONS." Description: "MISHAPEN AND UNEVEN BALL OF WHITE LIGHT." Physical state: plasma. Intelligent control: no. The aircrew assessed it as benign and not a lasing event.
The odd one out: a 2002 triangle over Bagram, told to the FBI in 2024
Two CENTCOM-tagged records are not military paperwork at all. FBI-UAP-D024 is an FD-302, the FBI's interview form, recording a March 2024 interview with a former military pilot. The CENTCOM part is a recollection near the end. In June 2002, activated as a reservist to Afghanistan, the interviewee was outside looking at the stars with another pilot at about 4:30 AM local when the stars began blacking out over Bagram. Something huge went overhead west to east, an equilateral triangle shape, silent, at a consistent speed and altitude, possibly 150 knots, no lights visible. FBI-UAP-D025 is the digital rendering the FBI prepared in 2026 from that description, a dark triangle against a starry sky, and it is the single image among the 72. Between them they supply both of the archive's CENTCOM triangles, from a 22-year-old memory and a drawing of it, with no sensor involved.
The 46 videos, and AARO's caveats about them
Forty-six of the 72 records are videos, and the AARO text attached to UFOP-167, UFOP-168, and UFOP-182 is nearly identical. On March 6, 2026, eight members of the House requested access to 51 potentially UAP-related records. AARO found responsive material on a classified network, and "many of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody." Each title is described as uploader-defined. AARO assesses each as likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a US military platform in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, and describes the footage as "areas of contrast" moving through a frame.
UFOP-168, the one titled "Syrian UAP instant acceleration," runs 5:02, and AARO states up front that "this media was digitally altered prior to its upload to a classified network, and is presented as received." For 19 seconds the sensor pans to keep an area of contrast centered. At 00:20-00:21 the sensor stops tracking it and it rapidly exits the right side of the frame. Then come replays at 50 and 25 percent speed, with a "white edge threshold enhancement," with black and white values inverted, and a card reading "full original clip TRT: 2:52." The rest of the clips sit in the Pentagon and military UAP videos collection.
Why CENTCOM, probably
The files never answer this directly, but they carry the answer in their formatting. The MISREP has GENTEXT fields waiting for anything unusual, and by 2024 a whole UAP section. The Navy has a preprinted form for uninvited contacts in a range, checkboxes included. DOW-UAP-D064 shows the scale: one aircraft flew 20 hours 42 minutes over the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Gulf of Oman on November 2, 2020, was hailed on guard by Iranian air defense at 1012Z, and logged exactly two UAP, at 2143Z and 2148Z. Crews flying orbits like that stare at sensor feeds for a living, over airspace full of missiles, balloons, birds, and jammers, each of which appears in these reports as a crew's own first guess. Point that much glass at that much contested sky, wire it to standardized paperwork, and a UAP archive accretes on its own.
None of that explains any individual file. It does not explain a cold round object changing direction over the Gulf of Aden, or two white objects reading IR significant at FL240 minutes after a jamming event, or a heat source crossing a sensor between a missile's release and its impact. The count stands at 72, and new additions land on the latest release page as they arrive. Given how the last few releases have gone, that number reads less like a total than a pause.