PURSUE Record — PURSUE Case PR-038: Middle East 2013: U.S. Department of War / AARO · Infrared sensor, 1 min 46 sec. Object described as chandelier-shaped in th

PURSUE Case PR-038: Middle East 2013 is a declassified 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 documents a 2013 aerial encounter over the Middle East captured on an infrared sensor. At one minute and forty-six seconds in length, it is notable for being the oldest incident in the release set — predating every other case published in this tranche by a span that, in UAP investigation terms, makes it a temporal anchor for the collection.

What this record contains

PR-038 is a single-part video file drawn from a military infrared sensor platform. The releasing agencies are the U.S. Department of War and AARO, the office established under the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act to serve as the U.S. government's central hub for UAP investigation and reporting. The incident is dated to 2013 and located in the Middle East; no more granular geographic or operational detail is included in the public release metadata. The clip runs one minute and forty-six seconds — long enough to constitute a sustained observation rather than a momentary anomaly, but short enough that continuous tracking data, if it exists, remains outside what has been made public.

The detail that distinguishes PR-038 most sharply in the official record is the object's described shape: the AARO report characterizes it as chandelier-shaped. That descriptor is unusual in the declassified UAP lexicon, which more commonly references spheres, tic-tacs, or undefined blobs. The public release does not include detailed metadata beyond this characterization — no altitude, no speed estimate, no sensor platform identification, and no analyst conclusion beyond the case status of Unresolved. The word "unresolved" carries a precise technical meaning here: investigators were unable to attribute the observation to a known object or phenomenon within the data available to them. It is not an affirmation of anything anomalous.

Sensor & operational context

Infrared imaging in military airborne applications detects thermal energy rather than visible light, meaning the sensor is recording heat signatures — engine exhaust, aerodynamic friction, solar absorption, or thermal contrast against a cooler sky. What an infrared sensor renders as a bright object may be a hot engine, a reflective surface, or an artifact of sensor saturation. The chandelier-shaped description is presumably derived from the thermal silhouette the object presented to the sensor, not from a visual observation. Infrared footage from this era — mid-2010s military ISR platforms — has well-documented characteristics: bloom effects around heat sources, limited resolution at range, and the potential for atmospheric conditions over Middle Eastern terrain (dust, heat shimmer, inversion layers) to distort apparent object geometry. None of this explains PR-038 specifically, but it establishes the interpretive frame within which any analysis must operate.

The 2013 timeframe places this incident roughly two years before the U.S. Navy's internal UAP reporting processes were formalized, and several years before the 2017 public disclosure of the AATIP program. Military aircrews in this period had limited official channels for documenting encounters they could not identify, which makes the existence of a catalogued, retained sensor clip notable in itself — it suggests someone, at some level of the chain, flagged and preserved this footage rather than allowing it to cycle out of the archive.

What this does and does not prove

What the record documents, as a matter of verified fact, is that a U.S. military infrared sensor captured footage of an object in Middle Eastern airspace in 2013 that investigators have since classified as unresolved — meaning no attribution to a known aircraft, drone, balloon, bird, or sensor artifact has been established and published. It does not prove the object was extraordinary, foreign, or non-human in origin. The chandelier-shaped descriptor tells us something about the thermal profile the sensor recorded; it tells us nothing about what produced that profile. AARO's case resolution framework includes explanations ranging from identified foreign military hardware to atmospheric optics, and an unresolved designation means none of those explanations has been formally closed on — not that all have been eliminated. Treating this record as evidence of anything beyond what the metadata states would go beyond what the document itself supports.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

PR-038 is one of 28 videos included in the 162-document PURSUE Release 01 set, which spans declassified military sensor records, NASA archive materials, and historic FBI files stretching back to 1947. As the oldest incident in the release, it anchors the contemporary military sensor strand of the collection at its earliest point. The Department of War cases in PURSUE Release 01 collectively represent AARO's effort to surface sensor data that was documented but never publicly examined — and PR-038, with its sparse metadata and unresolved status, is representative of that category: a real recording, from a real platform, of something that has not yet been formally explained. For additional context on the wider release and how the Department of War cases compare to the FBI archive and NASA imagery strands, see the broader PURSUE Release 01 coverage 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.