Is One of the Pentagon’s Unresolved UFOs Actually Just a Party Balloon?

A video presented to Congress by the Pentagon’s UFO investigators just might be of an ordinary balloon after all.

The striking video, taken by a MQ-9 Reaper drone over Syria, fascinated audiences around the world. An open source investigation, however, strongly proposes that the spherical, silvery object captured by the drone is nothing more than a balloon from a local festival.

The video was presented earlier this April at a NASA public hearing by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). AARO is the government agency tasked with investigating unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, a new government acronym that is essentially the same as unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

Why the government is involved

In recent years, and depending on who you ask, UAP investigations have grown more complicated. For those individuals for whom the focus of UAPs is determining whether or not Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, sightings of hobbyist and commercial drones have made that task far more difficult. The ability of drones to hover, plus their often unconventional shapes, make it difficult to discern them from presumed sightings of alien craft powered by otherworldly technology.

The U.S. government, on the other hand, takes a more expansive and ominous view, as it tries to figure out if UAPs are a threat to national security. That threat might be foreign-operated craft using ordinary technology, foreign-operated craft using extraordinary technology not otherwise in use, or… aliens. If it isn’t a threat, the Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence community can be expected to bow out of the investigation, perhaps leaving NASA to carry on with it.

Captured over the Syrian desert

The footage released by Kirkpatrick is approximately 30 seconds long. It was recorded by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone’s electro-optical sensor as it was pointed downward towards a number of walled houses. Suddenly a silvery, ball-shaped object travels from above and downward to the right then to the left. The drone operator hurries to catch up with the object, eventually tracking it for several more seconds. The video abruptly stops, likely as the Reaper’s camera could no longer traverse in that direction.

The footage was studied by Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based group of open source investigators that have done important work in the last nine years, including debunking Russian claims regarding the Malaysia Airlines MH17 airliner shootdown, the Syrian Civil War, the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, and other high-profile events. Bellingcat excels at investigations that aggregate obscure or highly technical information from the Internet and elsewhere, then using the data to draw conclusions or advance theories that often bust government narratives.

In this case, Bellingcat investigators were able to geolocate the UAP sighting to an area northeast of the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. The investigators were also able to make a panorama of the area in the camera field of view and using that were able to estimate the size of the object as if it were on the ground: .43 meters or 16 inches. The UAP’s true size, however, cannot be concluded without knowing how high the object was above the ground.

The investigation casts a lot of doubt on the UAP as an advanced technology craft. Sixteen inches sounds a bit small for an alien craft, but it’s just the right size for a balloon. The video recording date coincides with the last day of Eid al-Adha, a Muslim holiday, and Bellingcat discovered video of balloons in Eid celebrations in both Deir ez-Zor and the Syrian capital of Damascus. Bellingcat investigators also state the object, although it appears to be moving at a high rate of speed, may actually be stationary, the result of motion parallax in which “the speed of the Reaper Drone relative to the object creates the illusion that the object is moving.”

The takeaway

Bellingcat’s investigation appears solid, and there is little room left to suggest the object is nothing more than a balloon. While it is not impossible that an extraterrestrial craft, piloted by miniature aliens, would resemble a silvery sphere sixteen inches wide, Occam’s Razor suggests it is probably just a mylar bag filled with helium. But alien believers need not despair—maybe it was an alien balloon.

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