In 2024, one of the strangest military UFO images in years suddenly appeared online.
It showed a dark, bizarre object captured in infrared, with a central body surrounded by long spikes. UFO journalist Jeremy Corbell called it “The Chandelier” and said the still came from military thermal footage recorded over the Persian Gulf. At the time, however, only the image was public, and NewsNation noted that it could not independently verify the footage behind it.
Then, two years later, something important happened.
The U.S. government released the video.
On May 8, 2026, AARO published DOW-UAP-PR038, a 1-minute, 46-second infrared recording submitted by U.S. Central Command. The footage was captured somewhere in the Middle East in 2013 by a sensor aboard an unidentified U.S. military platform.
And the government’s description is almost as strange as the image.
AARO says the footage shows an “area of contrast resembling an eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length.”
In other words, four of the apparent spikes are longer, with four shorter ones positioned between them.
Then it moves.
About ten seconds into the recording, the sensor zooms in. From roughly 11 to 29 seconds, the strange object moves through the camera’s field of view with what AARO describes simply as a “visible trail” behind it. It leaves the bottom-right of the screen before an apparent cut in the footage. The object then reappears and remains visible for most of the remaining recording before eventually leaving the frame again.
That trail is especially interesting.
Online, you’ll see it described as a heat plume, exhaust, propulsion, or even evidence that the object was producing some kind of energy.
We can’t actually say that.
The official description only calls it a visible trail. There isn’t enough released sensor information to determine what produced it.
And that’s the biggest problem with this case.
There is no witness statement.
The person who submitted the footage apparently provided no oral or written description of what they saw. We don’t publicly know the exact location, distance, altitude, size, speed or even what military platform recorded it.
So despite how insane the object looks, we don’t actually know whether those eight spikes represent the physical shape of anything.
One of the strongest skeptical explanations involves the infrared camera itself.
A bright or extremely high-contrast source can produce diffraction spikes, blooming, glare, or other optical effects that dramatically change its apparent shape. Under that explanation, the actual object could be far more ordinary—a distant aircraft, drone, flare, or another bright source—with the sensor creating the wild star-like appearance.
There’s also a genuinely weird wrinkle buried in the government’s own records.
The public DVIDS page still titles PR038 “Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2013.” But researchers inspecting the Department of War’s underlying release database found a secondary metadata field describing the same video as “Resolved as an Aircraft, Middle East 2013.”
No corresponding public analysis explains what aircraft, how that conclusion was reached, or why the public-facing page continues calling it unresolved.
So right now the government record itself is strangely inconsistent.
What we can say with confidence is pretty simple:
The image is real military infrared imagery.
The eight-pointed appearance is real in the sensor image.
The visible trail is really present.
But whether we’re looking at an actual eight-pointed craft—or an ordinary object transformed into something bizarre by infrared optics—is still the part we can’t determine from the footage alone.
And that’s almost what makes the Chandelier UFO better.
Because whatever was actually flying out there in 2013…
the camera turned it into one of the weirdest-looking UFOs the Pentagon has ever released.
