Are aliens real? US government's video of a star-shaped UFO raises worries of extraterrestrial existence

Out of everything the Trump administration had promised its citizens recently, one task is definitely on track—that of declassifying extraterrestrial and alien existence.

Recently, the US government released a declassified video of a star-shaped object observed in the Middle East back in 2013. The grainy clip consists of the alleged UFO moving erratically across the sky.





It was on May 8, 2026, that the US Department of War released its first tranche of declassified UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) files under President Donald Trump’s transparency directive, as part of an initiative called PURSUE, which stands for Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.

Among the dozens of videos published, this unexplained clip of one minute and forty-six seconds of an eight-pointed star-shaped object in the Middle Eastern sky took the internet by storm.

What did the clip actually show?

The footage officially catalogued as DOW-UAP-PR38 by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, the US government's dedicated UAP investigation unit, was captured by an infrared sensor aboard a US military platform operating in the Middle East on January 1, 2013.

Infrared sensors don't record regular light but rather scan heat. Objects that emit or reflect heat appear bright against a cooler, darker background, which is why the footage looks monochrome and ghostly.

At around the ten-second mark, the sensor zooms in on the object. It then moves within the frame, leaving a visible trail behind it, before exiting the bottom right of the screen.

After a seeming cut in the footage, it reappears and eventually exits from the top left of the frame. No eyewitness description was provided alongside the recording, and the case has no radar data or corroborating sensor information while remaining officially unresolved.

Was the UFO real?

Not really. The most exciting scientific explanation points to a military parachute illumination flare, a type of flare commonly used in conflict zones. These flares descend slowly on small parachutes, burn at extremely high temperatures, and drift erratically in the wind. When captured by an infrared sensor, a burning flare creates exactly the kind of starburst pattern seen in the video.

Moreover, AARO has consistently maintained that, of the thousands of UAP cases it has reviewed, none have produced verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial life or technology.

Most sightings are concluded to be drones, weather balloons, sensor glitches, or, as may be the case here, military pyrotechnics.