A mysterious metallic orb zips across an unknown desert landscape. Is it a UFO? Proof that alien life exists?
No, it’s a balloon.
At least that’s the verdict of open source investigative journalism group Bellingcat, which put its skills to the test on a famous video that has so far stumped both the US Department of Defence and Nasa.
The video, filmed on July 12, 2022 and released publicly in April this year, appears to show a round, shiny object darting across an unidentified area at high speed, captured by an MQ-9 Reaper drone – a large surveillance aircraft that looks like a plane with no windows.
The footage has been studied by the Pentagon and Nasa, but neither have been able to confirm exactly what it is – nor would they confirm where it was.
Speaking during a Nasa livestream in May, the Pentagon’s Dr Sean Kirkpatrick said: ‘This is a typical example of a thing we see most of. We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent manoeuvres.
‘This one in particular, however, I may point out, demonstrated no enigmatic technical capabilities and was no threat to airborne safety.’
Dr Kirkpatrick is director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the department charged with figuring out Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).
Follow Metro on WhatsApp to be the first to get all the latest news
Want to be the first to hear the world’s top stories? Metro.co.uk is now on WhatsApp sending updates and trending stories straight to your phone.
Join the Metro WhatsApp community for breaking news, juicy showbiz stories and must-watch videos from across our website.
We’ll send you updates all day long, so you never miss a story! You can have your say by taking part in polls and reacting to messages.
To join our Metro community, just follow these two easy steps.
Simply click on this link, select ‘Join Chat’ and you’re in!
However, turning their attention to the video, the team at Bellingcat managed to locate the area where it was filmed using Google Earth imagery from July 2022, when the UAP was caught on camera.
They geolocated the video to an area northeast of the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. This enabled the team to identify buildings in the video, which then provided scale that allowed them to estimate the size of the object. The team suggests the orb is less than half a metre in diameter, much smaller than the one to four metres of typical UAP.
With the scale determined, the team could also assess how far and how fast the object travelled. At first sight, the video would suggest the orb covered 750m in 16 seconds, which translates into a pretty impressive speed of 105mph.
That’s exceedingly fast for a balloon, which can only really travel at wind speed – and there were no hurricanes reported in Syria that day.
However, what appears to be a phenomenal speed can instead be explained by a common optical phenomenon – parallax.
Often described as parallax error in filming, the illusion is caused by the positions of objects in the foreground and the background when captured from different angles by a moving camera.
As an example, the Bellingcat team said: ‘Objects closer to the viewer can appear to move faster than objects farther away, just as when looking out of a car window trees in the foreground seem to fly by while mountains in the distance barely move.
‘It’s not possible, based on the footage alone, to determine which direction the object is moving, or that it is moving at all. The parallax illusion can produce the impression of movement even where none exists.’
Conversely, optical illusions can also create the impression something is standing still when it is moving, as seen in this bizarre ‘floating plane’ footage.
But back to the Middle East.
The team notes the drone is flying at a rough cruising speed of 172 to 195mph, and an altitude of around 25,000ft. They then calculated that if the orb was at a height of around 2,000ft, it could have been travelling closer to 27mph – 2,000ft is very possible for a balloon, particularly if made of Mylar, a tough, shiny material also used on spacecraft.
Historic weather data for July 12 forecasted winds of about 20-25mph.
And one final factor that supports the balloon theory. The video was captured during Eid al-Adha, one of two major holidays in Islam during which balloons are often used for decorations.
The team concluded: ‘So, while it’s exciting to imagine a 30 centimetre-wide alien spacecraft flying around the Middle East, Occam’s razor suggests that perhaps we’re just looking at a party balloon.’
Occam’s razor is the philosophical principle that if two competing ideas can explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one.
The findings quickly found support from former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Christopher Mellon, who said: ‘This confirms what many of us have suspected given the small size and slow speed of the object.’
However, that does not mean the Pentagon is going to assume all UAP are balloons – even if quite a few have already proved to be.
The US government has been giving increasing airtime to the issue this year, particularly since whistleblower David Grusch alleged it had proof of ‘intact and partially intact’ alien vehicles, and that people had been ‘harmed’ in an attempt to cover up the information.
The Pentagon has also launched a website for AARO sharing some of its UAP data, which showed the main hotspots for UAP sightings are the US, the Middle East and Japan.
It has pledged to add a mechanism for anyone to submit a UAP sighting, but this is not yet available.
MORE : The UK’s UFO hotspots revealed – are you living in one?
MORE : The truth about aliens could be exposed ‘with one phone call’
MORE : Nasa unveils findings of study into UFOs
Follow Metro across our social channels, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
Share your views in the comments below
Get your need-to-know
latest news, feel-good stories, analysis and more
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
