Circular Object in Military Crosshairs, No Mission Report

Brief

In late 2025, the FBI forwarded a single redacted monochrome still image to AARO depicting a small, dark, circular object in the upper-right quadrant of a military sensor's crosshair reticle, with an indistinct mountain range visible in the background consistent with the western United States. The source imagery was drawn from a U.S. military system and altered with redactions prior to AARO submission; no mission report accompanied the file. The operator on record stated they were unable to positively identify the object. A timestamp displayed in the image is acknowledged as unreliable because the imaging system's clock had not been properly configured.

Metadata

Agency

FBI

Release

5/8/26

Incident

Late 2025

Location

Western United States

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

1 pages

Classification

UNCLASSIFIED

Tags

circular object, military optical imaging, monochrome still image, western United States, 2025, crosshair reticle, mountain range background, redacted imagery

Key points

• The FBI submitted this UAP report to AARO based on a still image derived from a U.S. military imaging system; no mission report accompanied the submission.
• The source imagery was altered with redactions before it reached AARO, meaning even the receiving office did not see the unaltered version.
• The operator reported being unable to positively identify the object — no prosaic explanation was documented in the file.
• The timestamp embedded in the image is explicitly flagged as incorrect; the system's date and time had not been set, removing any reliable independent date verification.
• The UAP appears as a small, dark, circular shape positioned just above and to the right of the central crosshair reticle in a grainy, monochrome frame.
• The image background shows an indistinct mountain range, consistent with the stated incident location in the western United States.

Most interesting

• The FBI — a domestic law enforcement and counterintelligence agency — was the originating submitter of this report to AARO, which handles primarily military and intelligence-community UAP cases; the pathway by which the FBI came to possess imagery from a U.S. military system is not explained.
• Redactions were applied to the imagery before transmission to AARO itself, meaning the government's own UAP resolution office received a pre-filtered version of the evidence.
• The system clock was never set on the originating military platform, which eliminates one of the most basic forensic anchors — time of capture — from any future analysis.
• The absence of a mission report removes all contextual telemetry: platform type, altitude, heading, sensor settings, and operational context are entirely unknown.
• The object's circular profile and central-reticle positioning is a recurring visual pattern in declassified UAP sensor imagery, though no analytical judgment about that pattern is drawn here.