Twenty-five contactsover the Gulf of Oman.

On 8 September 2021, a U.S. Special Operations Forces AC-130J was conducting a live-fire exercise over the Gulf of Oman in darkness. A water-activated flare was being used as a mock target. The crew were operating an aircraft designed to find, track and engage targets through sophisticated sensors.

Then the EO/IR scan reportedly found something else.

The intelligence report that followed describes two approximately four-foot 'cold orbs' near the water. The pair were reportedly between zero and twenty feet above the surface. According to the report, they departed after the crew pulled the trigger for the aircraft's 105 mm cannon.

That was not the end of it. The report describes roughly twenty-five UAP observations during the wider episode, including formations, erratic manoeuvring and estimated speeds ranging from 250 to 1,300 mph.

Those are extraordinary claims. What makes the case important is that they were written into a contemporaneous military intelligence report rather than appearing only years later in a witness interview.

These six positions are deliberately conservative. The authoritative case record identifies PR117 through PR122 as the released secondary captures, but this prototype does not invent individual thumbnails, durations or chronology while their exact official item pages are still being resolved.

Several conventional possibilities remain serious.

Birds have been proposed for some infrared UAP videos, although the report's description of these objects as thermally cold and the reported performance would need to be reconciled with that explanation. Drones, balloons, classified systems, sensor artefacts, geometry errors and incorrect range assumptions also remain candidates.

The released secondary clips alone are not rich enough to eliminate all of those possibilities. Nor does the existence of a possible mundane explanation for one clip automatically explain approximately twenty-five reported observations.

The whole-case question is therefore not 'can something in an infrared video look strange?' It plainly can. The harder question is whether one conventional explanation can account for the reported thermal appearance, repeated observations, formations, near-water behaviour, speed estimates and operational response together.

At present, the public record does not allow that question to be settled cleanly.