PURSUE Record — DOW-UAP-PR35, Unresolved UAP Report, Greece, October 2023: Greece

DOW-UAP-PR35 is a declassified military sensor video submitted by the United States Central Command to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and made public on May 8, 2026, as part of PURSUE Release 01. The record covers an incident in Greece dated to October 2023 and remains formally unresolved — meaning the object or phenomenon depicted has not been identified or explained in the materials released to date. It is one of 28 videos included in the PURSUE Release 01 set.

What this record contains

The record consists of a single file part: 24 seconds of infrared sensor footage captured from a U.S. military platform operating in or near Greece in 2023. The releasing agency is the Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense), with a release date of May 8, 2026. The incident date field in the public release is listed as N/A, though the record title anchors the event to October 2023. An accompanying mission report, referenced internally as DoW-UAP-D35, described the UAP as small and circular, flying near the surface of the ocean toward land.

The official video description walks through the footage in three segments. At the two-second mark, the sensor narrows its field of view to zoom in on an area of contrast near the center of the screen. From three seconds through nineteen seconds, the sensor actively tracks that area of contrast as it moves against an ocean background. At the twenty-second mark, the background transitions from predominantly water to land, at which point the area of contrast becomes indistinguishable from the surrounding scene. The public release does not include additional analytical metadata beyond what is summarized above.

Sensor & operational context

The footage was recorded by an infrared sensor — a system that detects differences in thermal radiation rather than reflected visible light. In IR imagery, objects are rendered not by color but by temperature contrast relative to their surroundings. Open ocean, particularly at low altitude, presents a thermally uniform background, which makes small objects with even modest thermal or reflective signatures stand out clearly. This is why IR sensors are standard equipment on military surveillance and ISR platforms: they are effective in low-light conditions and can distinguish surface or low-altitude targets against water with high reliability. The loss of contrast when the background transitions to land — documented at the 00:20 mark — is consistent with IR sensor behavior, since land surfaces are thermally complex and heterogeneous compared to open water.

CENTCOM's area of responsibility spans a broad region including the Eastern Mediterranean, and U.S. military platforms routinely operate in and around Greek airspace and coastal waters as part of long-standing NATO commitments. The submission of this footage to AARO reflects the post-2022 reporting mandate under which military personnel and commands are required to document and forward UAP observations through official channels rather than informally dismissing them.

What this does and does not prove

What the public release documents is this: a U.S. military infrared sensor tracked a small, circular object flying near the ocean surface toward land for approximately 18 seconds before losing contrast as the background changed. The object has not been identified. That is the full extent of what the record establishes. It does not confirm the object was anomalous in origin, exotic in propulsion, or anything other than a conventional object that happened to be difficult to resolve at the time. "Unresolved" is a classification of investigative status, not a claim about the object's nature. Natural phenomena, commercial or military drones, birds, and sensor artifacts have all produced footage with similar characteristics in other documented cases.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

DOW-UAP-PR35 sits within the contemporary Department of War mission-report tier of PURSUE Release 01 — recent cases generated under the post-AARO reporting framework, as distinct from the release's historic FBI archive files or NASA program imagery. Alongside other Department of War sensor records in the release, it represents the kind of operationally sourced, instrumentally captured data that AARO was specifically created to collect and evaluate. The inclusion of unresolved cases alongside resolved ones — balloons, birds, known sensor artifacts — reflects the release's stated intent to demonstrate analytical rigor rather than to assert that any single unresolved case is extraordinary.

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.