Photo: an MQ-9 Reaper landing after a mission over Afghanistan, December 2007. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson, public domain. It is not from the October 2024 incident.

Short answer — On September 9, 2025, Rep. Eric Burlison played a short infrared clip at a House Oversight hearing. He said it showed an MQ-9 drone tracking an "orb" off the coast of Yemen on October 30, 2024, and a Hellfire missile from a second drone hitting it. A witness said the missile "bounced right off." The Pentagon hasn't authenticated the video, and the most detailed outside analyses say it fits a small, light object, most likely a balloon, being hit by a missile that didn't explode.

What's documented — The hearing, the clip being played, and what was said about it are all in the official transcript. Who recorded the video, how it left government hands, and what the object was are not.

Status — Unresolved. As of October 15, 2026, the clip doesn't appear on AARO's public UAP imagery page, and no official assessment has been published.

What the video shows, and who released it

The hearing was called "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection." It was held by the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. The witnesses were Air Force veteran Jeffrey Nuccetelli, Navy Chief Alexandro Wiggins, journalist George Knapp, Air Force veteran Dylan Borland, and Joe Spielberger of the Project On Government Oversight.

Burlison, a Missouri Republican, introduced the clip this way, according to the Government Publishing Office transcript: "I want to queue up a video that I have been given. And before it starts, I am going to describe, this was taken October 30 of 2024. This video is of an MQ-9 drone tracking an orb, or this object, off the coast of Yemen. You will see that another MQ-9 launched a hellfire missile. You cannot see that drone."

In the clip, a thermal camera tracks a bright object over the sea. A fast-moving shape, which Burlison identified as the missile, meets it. The object keeps moving, and smaller pieces appear to come away from it. Then the view widens, and, in Burlison's words as it played, "you can still see it traveling."

That's the observation. Everything past it is interpretation, and Burlison himself didn't offer one. "Again, I am not going to speculate what it is," he said. CBS News reported that the video was provided by a whistleblower. Burlison didn't say on the record who gave it to him or how they got it.

What was said under oath

Knapp, the Las Vegas journalist, was the witness Burlison asked. Knapp said he'd heard of the event before but hadn't seen footage: "We did not have the video, though." Then he gave the line most headlines used: "that is a hellfire missile smacking into that UFO and just bounced right off, and it kept going."

Later, Luna had the clip played again and asked the witnesses with sensor experience: "are you aware of anything in the U.S. Government arsenal that can split a Hellfire missile like this?" and "do whatever blob thing it did and then keep going?" Nuccetelli answered "Nothing." Wiggins said, "Nothing to my knowledge, ma'am." Borland said he'd prefer to answer in a SCIF, a secure facility for classified discussion.

Those are sworn answers, and they're worth having on the record. They're also reactions to a clip played in the room, not firsthand accounts of the event. Knapp's "bounced right off" is his reading of the footage, not a measurement.

Has the Pentagon confirmed it?

No. When ABC News asked, a U.S. defense official said, "we do not have anything to provide on this," and a Defense Department spokesperson said, "I have nothing for you." CBS reported that Pentagon officials had no comment.

A few weeks later, a U.S. Army spokesperson told Popular Mechanics that the Department of War "has not authenticated the video, or issued a substantive confirmation about the event." The Army also declined to say who decides to fire on an object like this, citing "operational considerations."

AARO, the Pentagon office that investigates UAP reports, posts declassified footage from cases it has reviewed on its UAP imagery page. When we checked on October 15, 2026, the Yemen clip wasn't there. That page does list several Middle East cases, including a 2024 Middle East clip AARO resolved as "almost certainly" a consumer-grade foil balloon, and an older MQ-9 "Middle East Object" it calls unidentified but not anomalous. Neither is the Hellfire video.

The balloon explanation

Three outside analyses are worth knowing, and all three come with caveats their authors spelled out.

Fred Lamb, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Illinois who chaired a ballistic missile study for the American Physical Society, told Popular Mechanics the target was likely a high-altitude balloon. His reasoning: the missile keeps going without being knocked off course, which points to a target with very little mass, and the pieces move apart slowly, the way they would if a wind were carrying them. He said a zoomed-in camera on a moving drone can make a slow object look fast, an effect called parallax. He also said his analysis rested on "many, many assumptions," because nobody outside the government knows the camera's distance, angle or altitude.

Mick West, who runs the skeptic forum Metabunk, built a 3D reconstruction from the numbers printed on the sensor display, working with other forum members. His conclusion was that the footage "seems very consistent with a near-static small object in light wind that descends relatively slowly after being hit." If the oval shape on screen is real, he estimated the object at roughly 70 centimeters long. He also warned that the results were "VERY sensitive to small inaccuracies" in numbers read off the screen.

Mauricio Barbi, a physicist at the University of Regina, posted a preprint on arXiv (it hasn't been peer reviewed) working through the momentum. A light balloon simply can't push a missile weighing around 100 pounds off its path in any meaningful way, so an apparent swerve is more likely a camera effect. He called a balloon-like object "the most conservative explanation compatible with known physics," while adding that the video lacks the sensor metadata, radar data and chain-of-custody records needed to rule anything in or out.

There's precedent for this pattern. AARO has published resolutions for other infrared clips that looked fast or strange: an object filmed near Al Taqaddum Air Base, Iraq, in 2017, assessed as a cluster of balloons; an object that seemed to fly through Mount Etna's ash plume, assessed with moderate confidence as a balloon traveling at wind speed; and the 2013 Puerto Rico video, where an apparent object splitting in two turned out to be two objects moving with the wind. That doesn't prove the Yemen object was a balloon. It does show how often fast-looking thermal objects turn out to be balloons once analysts have the full data. We've covered why sensor footage like this is so hard to read in why UAP photos are always blurry.

Why didn't the missile explode?

Nobody with direct knowledge has said, so this part is informed guesswork, and we're flagging it as unverified.

The Hellfire is a missile in the 100-pound class, first developed as an anti-tank weapon and later used for precision drone strikes. Lamb offered two possibilities. One is that the warhead simply didn't go off against something so flimsy. The other is that it was a variant without much explosive at all. The best known is the AGM-114R9X, which swaps the blast warhead for pop-out blades and has been used against individual people on the ground. Lamb said the R9X would be the most likely example, but there's no public record of which Hellfire, if any, was fired that day.

Either way, the absence of a fireball isn't evidence of anything exotic. It's what you'd expect if a missile met a very light target and didn't detonate.

What would settle it

Analysts who've studied the public clip, including on Metabunk, describe it as cropped, and it doesn't carry the full sensor data. To actually answer the question, they'd need:

• The original, uncropped sensor file with its full on-screen data
• Telemetry from both drones: position, altitude, speed and heading
• Radar tracks, if any were recorded
• The weapon type and the strike log
• Wind data for the area and altitude
• Chain of custody showing where the clip came from

AARO's published resolutions lean on exactly this kind of data. In the Al Taqaddum case, for example, it used location data from the sensor platform to work out the object's speed and direction. For the Yemen clip, none of it is public.

Where the case stands

Here's what's solid. A member of Congress played the clip at a public hearing, gave a date and place, and said a second MQ-9 fired a Hellfire. Sworn witnesses said they knew of nothing in the U.S. arsenal that could do what the clip seemed to show. The Pentagon has declined to authenticate the clip or explain it.

What's not established is almost everything else: the source, whether the date and location are right, and what the object was. The analyses published so far favor a small, slow, light object, but they're working from a degraded copy and say so.

The word that fits is the one in UAP itself: unidentified. If you're wondering how the government got from "UFO" to that term, start with why "UFO" became "UAP." For what orb reports usually look like in the official record, see what UAP actually look like. And if you've seen something yourself, here's how to report a UAP sighting.

Sources

• U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection," hearing page, Sept. 9, 2025
• Government Publishing Office: official hearing transcript, Serial No. 119-44 (CHRG-119hhrg61718)
• House Oversight Committee: "Hearing Wrap Up: Government Must Be More Transparent About UAPs," Sept. 9, 2025
• All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO): UAP Imagery
• ABC News: "Congressman shows never-before-seen video at military UFO hearing"
• CBS News: "Newly released video at House UFO hearing appears to show U.S. missile striking and bouncing off orb," Sept. 10, 2025
• Popular Mechanics: Elizabeth Howell, interview with Fred Lamb and U.S. Army statement, Oct. 3, 2025
• Metabunk: Mick West and contributors, "3D Analysis of the Yemen Orb," Sept. 2025
• arXiv: Mauricio Barbi, "Physical Analysis of a Reported Missile–'Orb' Interaction in 2024" (preprint)
• Wikipedia: AGM-114 Hellfire (weapon specifications and the R9X variant)
• Wikimedia Commons: "MQ-9 Reaper in flight (2007)," U.S. Air Force photo, public domain