Crosshair-Tracked Pair, FBI Military System, Timestamp Unknown

Brief

The FBI submitted a single still image derived from a U.S. military system to AARO as a UAP report, having already applied redactions to the original before transmission; no mission report accompanied the submission. The monochrome, grainy image contains a central crosshair reticle, against which a structured dark object with a left-side appendage appears at the top, and a smaller dark circular object is visible in the lower right quadrant. The operating system's clock was not properly set, making the date embedded in the image unreliable; incident timing is attributed to late 2025 from external records. The operator was unable to positively identify either object.

Metadata

Agency

FBI

Release

5/8/26

Incident

Late 2025

Location

Western United States

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

1 pages

Classification

UNCLASSIFIED

Tags

structured object, appendage morphology, secondary circular object, crosshair reticle, monochrome military imagery, Western United States, 2025, FBI-AARO submission, redacted imagery, dual-object frame

Key points

• Image was redacted by the FBI before submission to AARO, breaking unaltered chain of custody from the originating military system.
• No accompanying mission report was provided, stripping the imagery of operational context such as platform type, altitude, or tasking purpose.
• Two distinct objects are present: a structured object with a left-side appendage near the reticle center, and a smaller circular object in the lower right quadrant.
• The embedded image date is explicitly noted as incorrect due to an unconfigured system clock, making temporal attribution reliant solely on external documentation.
• The operator who captured the image reported being unable to positively identify the UAP.
• The image originates from an unspecified U.S. military system, not an FBI asset, indicating cross-agency sourcing prior to AARO submission.

Most interesting

• Redactions were applied before AARO ever received the image — meaning the oversight body tasked with resolving anomalies received a pre-filtered version of the raw evidence.
• The structured object displays a visible appendage on its left side, a morphological detail that distinguishes it from most natural phenomena, debris, and conventional aircraft silhouettes at typical engagement distances.
• Two separate objects appear in a single frame, raising the question of whether they represent formation behavior, a separation event, or two coincident but unrelated phenomena.
• The crosshair reticle places the primary object near the optical center of the frame, suggesting the operator had acquired or was tracking the object when the image was captured.
• The document is a scanned image with no machine-readable text, meaning no metadata fields, EXIF data, or analyst annotations have been made available to the public in parsed form.
• Location is attributed only to the Western United States — a region spanning thousands of miles — with no city, installation, or geographic feature named.