DISCLOSURE / FILEMultiple UAPs Transiting Water Near Submarine March 2022
DOW-UAP-PR067, "Multiple Spherical UAP USO near Sub. [CALLSIGN] 2022/03/25 in and out of water"
A 4-minute-50-second infrared video, uploaded to a classified network in May 2024, showing multiple 'areas of contrast' near a redacted U.S. submarine callsign on March 25, 2022; AARO assesses the footage is likely from a military infrared sensor but flags an unsubstantiated chain-of-custody.
Brief
AARO released this video in response to a March 6, 2026 request by eight House members seeking access to 51 potentially UAP-related records held by the Department of War and the Intelligence Community. The video's uploader-defined title frames the objects as 'Multiple Spherical UAP USO' operating in and out of the water near a submarine whose callsign remains classified. AARO's own assessment goes no further than concluding the footage is 'likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform,' and explicitly disclaims any analytical judgment about the event's nature or significance. The agency also flags that many of the 51 responsive materials, potentially including this video, lack a substantiated chain-of-custody.
Metadata
- Agency
- Department of War
- Release
- 5/22/26
- Type
- VIDEO • .mp4
- Length
- 4:50
- Classification
- UNCLASSIFIED
- Programs
- AARO
- Tags
- USO, spherical, transmedium, infrared, submarine, 2022, in-out-of-water, multiple objects, DOW-UAP-PR067
Key points
- AARO assessed the footage is 'likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform' — the strongest claim the agency was willing to make.
- The video was not retrieved from official archives; a user uploaded it to a classified network in May 2024, roughly 26 months after the reported incident date of March 25, 2022.
- AARO disclosed that many of the 51 responsive materials identified for the House members 'lack a substantiated chain-of-custody,' a provenance problem that applies to this video.
- The uploader-defined title asserts a USO (Unidentified Submerged Object) classification — objects 'in and out of water' — but AARO adopted no part of that framing in its own language.
- The submarine callsign is redacted in the public release, preventing attribution of the observation to a specific hull or operational theater.
- Between 00:57 and 01:10, the sensor tracked two simultaneous 'areas of contrast,' panning to keep both in frame before the second object briefly exited the field-of-view.
- At 01:36 the sensor zoomed out and lost the second object entirely, a sensor-operator decision that may have constrained what data the footage can yield.
- Congressional pressure was the proximate cause of this release: eight House members formally requested access on March 6, 2026, triggering AARO's identification of the responsive collection.
Most interesting
- The phrase 'uploader-defined title' is AARO's way of putting the UAP and USO labels at arm's length — the agency is reporting what the anonymous user called it, not endorsing the classification.
- A 26-month gap separates the incident (March 2022) and the classified-network upload (May 2024), raising questions about where the footage resided in the intervening period.
- The video is 4 minutes 50 seconds long but the described motion events account for roughly 2 minutes of that runtime, leaving approximately 2 minutes and 50 seconds of footage whose content is not characterized in the release.
- AARO's chain-of-custody warning is unusually direct for a government disclosure: the implication is that the agency cannot rule out manipulation, re-encoding, or misattribution for any of the 51 items in this collection.
- The USO framing in the title is notable because AARO's formal UAP reporting framework does not yet have a standardized category for transmedium objects; the uploader applied an unofficial taxonomy.
- The disclaimer appended to the video description — that it 'should not be interpreted as reflecting an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination' — is boilerplate AARO language, but its inclusion here is significant given how specific the timestamp-level object tracking is.