The United States European Command submitted a report of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of twenty seconds of video footage from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2022.
AARO assesses, with high confidence, that the object depicted in the video is almost certainly (≥95% likelihood) a balloon. AARO bases its assessment on the object’s strong morphological consistency with other resolved imagery featuring balloons and the object’s performance characteristics strongly aligning with those of lighter-than-air objects, e.g., drifting at wind speed and direction.
