Football-Shaped Object With Three Projections, East China Sea

Brief

INDOPACOM submitted this case to AARO consisting solely of 9 seconds of infrared video — no oral or written description from the original reporter accompanied the footage. The object appears football-shaped with three radial projections: one oriented vertically and two angled downward at 45 degrees relative to the object's major axis. The war.gov listing stresses that the video description carries no analytical or investigative weight. AARO has logged the case as unresolved.

Metadata

Agency

Department of War

Release

5/8/26

Location

East China Sea

Type

VIDEO • .mp4

Classification

UNCLASSIFIED

Programs

AARO

Tags

football-shaped, tri-radial projections, infrared, East China Sea, 2024, INDOPACOM, unresolved

Key points

• Footage duration is 9 seconds of infrared sensor video from an unspecified U.S. military platform.
• The submitting reporter provided no oral or written description of the observation — the evidentiary record is the video alone.
• The object's main mass is described as football-shaped with three radial projections: one vertical, two at 45-degree downward angles relative to the major axis.
• The incident occurred in the East China Sea in 2024, placing it within INDOPACOM's area of responsibility.
• AARO has not resolved the case; it remains open as an unresolved UAP report.

Most interesting

• Three-pronged or tri-radial UAP morphologies appear in a small but distinct subset of AARO submissions, making this object shape potentially cross-referenceable against other cases.
• The complete absence of any reporter narrative is unusual — AARO intake protocols typically solicit at least a brief verbal account alongside sensor data.
• The football-shaped descriptor with angled projections is geometrically specific enough to distinguish this object from the more commonly reported disc, orb, or tic-tac profiles in the public UAP record.
• The East China Sea setting places the sighting in one of the most contested and sensor-dense maritime zones on Earth, where both U.S. and allied ISR assets operate continuously.
• The war.gov disclaimer explicitly decouples the video description from any analytical judgment — a standard caveat that nonetheless signals AARO has not yet characterized the object's nature or origin.