THE SOURCE
(Unchanged: DOW-UAP-PR38, “Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East 2013”, a 106-second infrared video clip from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 01, published at war.gov/ufo on 8 May 2026. It is one of 27 infrared sensor clips in the release and the one press coverage singled out as showing an “eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length”.)
Why this one is worth your time
Pause PR38 at the right moment and you are looking at the most recognisable image of the entire release: a dark star, eight sharp arms of alternating length, held inside a military tracking reticle and surrounded by blacked-out data. The press called it an “eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length”, and as a description of the screen that is fair. This is the first video briefing in the series, and it does two jobs: it introduces PR38, the single most visually distinctive clip in PURSUE Release 01, and it walks through how to read a military infrared targeting feed in general. Release 01 contains 27 of these clips, and every later video briefing refers back to this one rather than re-explain the basics. If you read one video briefing closely, read this one, and then go read the footage on your own.
What the file says
PR38 is a 106-second clip of black-and-white infrared footage with the look of a targeting-pod or surveillance-camera feed: a wide grey field, a small tracking reticle near the centre, corner brackets framing the tracked area, and a compass marker. For roughly the first third of the clip the framed area is empty grey sky. Then a bright object enters from the right of frame, appearing as a dark spot with sharp spikes radiating from it, the shape the press described as an “eight-pointed star”. A long, thin bright streak runs across the lower part of the frame for much of the clip. Over the remaining footage the camera slews to bring the object towards the centre reticle and tracks it there.
The display is heat, not visible light. The whole frame is infrared, also called thermal imaging: the camera registers heat rather than visible light, so pale areas are one temperature and dark areas another. Infrared feeds run in one of two modes, white-hot (heat shows bright) and black-hot (heat shows dark). PR38 is in black-hot. The bright pale field is the cooler sky; the dark spot is the warmer object; the long pale streak across the lower frame is, by the same logic, a cooler feature, consistent with a contrail or a band of cloud rather than an exhaust plume. So the object in PR38 is not a dark-coloured thing but a warm one displayed dark. The display registers that the object was warmer than its background. It does not register what the object was.
The furniture is the instrument talking. A targeting feed is an instrument display, not a photograph, and most of what is on screen is the instrument rather than the object. The reticle near the centre is the tracking gate, the point the sensor is aimed at or trying to lock onto; when the object and the reticle are not on top of each other, the camera is still slewing to catch up. The four corner brackets mark the field-of-view or track box, and things drift across it as the camera moves and as the object moves, two motions the footage alone does not separate. The small “N” left of centre is a heading reference for the sensor’s frame, not the object’s bearing or speed. The large black rectangles over the top, sides and bottom are redactions laid over the telemetry readouts; on an un-redacted feed those areas would carry the time, date, sensor mode, magnification, platform altitude, slant range to target and coordinates. In PR38 nearly all of it is hidden. As Briefing 1 noted, the redaction codes on this release point at operational and personnel secrecy, the kind applied to any military sensor product. Either way the practical effect is the same: without the numbers, the clip carries a picture and not a measurement.
The eight-pointed star. Paused on its most distinctive frame, the object looks like a star or asterisk: a central blob with sharp spikes radiating outward, and across the clip the spikes are not all the same length. The press described it as “an eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length”, a fair description of what the screen shows. A bright, compact light source captured by a camera is smeared into a star pattern by the camera’s own optics, the effect anyone who has photographed a streetlamp at night has seen; the technical name is a diffraction spike or lens flare, and the number of points and their relative lengths are set by the geometry of the lens, the aperture and the sensor rather than by the source. Across the frames of PR38 the star sits at different positions and focus states, and the spike pattern shifts and softens with it.
What the file does not say
What the object was. The footage on its own does not identify it, and “unresolved” is the military’s term for not yet identified, not a synonym for unidentifiable or anomalous.
The object’s size, speed, altitude or distance. The telemetry that would carry those numbers sits under the redaction blocks, so any figure drawn from the clip alone is a guess.
An eight-armed or star-shaped object. The spikes track the camera’s optics, as the frames themselves show when the pattern shifts with position and focus.
And anything that needs the dimension a single frame removes. A still strips out the one thing video carries that a photograph does not, motion over time, and it cannot separate the object’s movement from the camera’s slew. Those questions need the moving footage, and even then the redacted telemetry limits how far it goes.
From the record
“Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East 2013.” Title of the clip, DOW-UAP-PR38, PURSUE Release 01
“An eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length.” Press coverage of the clip
Where the case connects
This clip is the series’ worked example for reading infrared footage, and three threads run out from it. Briefing 1 covers the release as a whole, including the redaction codes that black out the telemetry here. The Western US Event briefing points back to this one for the skill of reading the ground infrared imagery filmed during that exercise. And Release 01 carries 26 more infrared clips, each showing the same elements PR38 does: a display mode, a reticle, a redaction layer, and whatever shape the optics draw around a bright source.
Read it yourself
The 106-second clip is hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 01, redaction blocks and all.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-PR38, “Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East 2013”, U.S. Department of War, PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Background on infrared imaging modes and optical flare artefacts in targeting-pod footage, AARO technical assessments, aaro.mil
- Signals from the Periphery, Briefing 1, “Release one, what is actually inside the Department of War’s first UAP document drop”