PURSUE Record — PURSUE Case PR-036: Middle East 2020: U.S. Department of War / AARO · Infrared sensor, 2 min 17 sec. Extended thermal track of an unresolved obj

PURSUE Case PR-036 is a single-file military sensor video released by the U.S. Department of War and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) on May 8, 2026, as part of PURSUE Release 01. The record captures an infrared track of an airborne object over the Middle East in 2020, running two minutes and seventeen seconds. The case is classified as unresolved — meaning no conventional explanation has been formally confirmed — and it represents one of 28 videos included in a release spanning 162 total documents.

What this record contains

The releasing agency is the U.S. Department of War, coordinated through AARO, the office stood up specifically to centralize military, intelligence, and civilian UAP reporting. The incident occurred somewhere in the Middle East theater in 2020 — the public metadata does not specify country, altitude, or platform. The file consists of a single part: an infrared sensor video, two minutes and seventeen seconds in duration, described officially as an "extended thermal track of an unresolved object." The object remains unresolved in the frame throughout the recording and is characterized in AARO's catalogued metadata as an unresolved return — meaning the sensor captured a persistent thermal signature that analysts have not attributed to a known aircraft, drone, balloon, or sensor artifact.

The public release does not include additional metadata for this record beyond what is noted above — no witness statements, no accompanying PDF, no radar corroboration, and no classified annex summary has been made available alongside the video. What exists is the thermal footage itself and its associated case designation.

Sensor & operational context

Infrared sensors — the class of instrument that produced this record — detect differences in thermal emission rather than reflected light. Military-grade infrared systems operating in the Mid-Wave Infrared (MWIR) or Long-Wave Infrared (LWIR) bands can track objects based on their heat signature at ranges where optical cameras would return nothing useful. An "unresolved" object in infrared parlance typically means the return occupies only a handful of pixels at the sensor's resolution — enough to track a moving heat source across frames, but insufficient to determine shape, surface material, or propulsion type. The 2020 Middle East theater was an operationally dense environment: U.S. and coalition assets, adversarial drones, commercial aviation, and an elevated tempo of ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) missions were all present simultaneously. That context matters when evaluating what an infrared sensor might have encountered and why the return remains uncharacterized.

Two minutes and seventeen seconds is a meaningful track duration. It is long enough to extract velocity estimates and heading consistency if supporting platform telemetry exists, though whether analysts have had access to that telemetry in the AARO review process is not stated in the public release materials.

What this does and does not prove

What the record documents: a thermal sensor acquired and held a target return for 137 seconds over the Middle East in 2020, and that return has not been resolved to a known cause by the time of the May 2026 release. That is the full scope of what the document establishes. It does not prove the object was anomalous in the sense of being non-human in origin, nor does it rule that out. "Unresolved" is an analytical status, not a verdict. Adversarial drones with low radar cross-sections, novel propulsion configurations, or atmospheric phenomena can all generate ambiguous infrared returns. The absence of an explanation is worth documenting — which is exactly what AARO did — but it should not be read as confirmation of anything beyond the sensor record itself. See the SkyLens UAP files page for the full case listing and source links.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

PR-036 sits within the contemporary military sensor strand of PURSUE Release 01 — the cohort of recent Department of War mission records that AARO has vetted and cleared for public release alongside the FBI archive series dating back to 1947 and NASA archival imagery. Unlike the historical FBI files in the release, which document the institutional response to early-era sighting reports, this record is a product of modern ISR infrastructure. Its inclusion alongside resolved cases — balloons, birds, confirmed sensor artifacts — reflects AARO's stated methodology: show the analytical work in both directions, so that unresolved cases can be understood in the context of cases that were closed. For broader coverage of the release, other PURSUE Release 01 analyses are available on the SkyLens blog.

Editorial note: This analysis is independent commentary on a publicly released document. The original record, source links, and full release metadata are catalogued on the SkyLens UAP files page alongside every other case in the PURSUE Release 01 set.