The Same Paragraph Twice over Iraq

What the two mission reports say

The morning report. DOW-UAP-D109, headed “Misrep 7467030”, comes from the 20th Attack Squadron (“Originator (Unit or Squadron): 20 ATKS”). USCENTCOM declassified it on 10 July 2026, and almost everything that would place it is blacked out under “(b)(1)(B)”: the call sign, the aircraft, the bases, the targeting pod, the sensors and every position. The aircraft took off at 21:49Z on 4 May, worked its tasking from 00:57Z to 15:52Z on 5 May, “TARGET DEVELOPMENT” on a compound where the crew was to identify weapons, storage areas and people, and landed at 19:24Z. The narrative gives the sighting one line (p. 1):

“AT 0524Z, […] OBSERVED […] PROB UAPS TRAVELING SW AT ROUGHLY 80-180 MPH. (SEE OBSERVATION 1)”

The observation section (p. 6) gives the time as “050524:00ZMAY22” and leaves the aircraft’s heading, height, speed and range as “-”; the location and the description of what was observed are blacked out. Its account is quoted in full in the next section. The weather field on the tasking page is the only one in the report that speaks of the objects’ surroundings: “DUE TO DUST STORMS SOME COLLECTION ON UAPS WAS AFFECTED BETWEEN 0524Z AND 0704Z.” (p. 5)

The evening report. DOW-UAP-D106, headed “Misrep 7468013”, comes from the 196th Attack Squadron (“Originator (Unit or Squadron): 196 ATKS”). USCENTCOM declassified it on 30 June 2026; its pages are 031–036 of a batch whose footer reads “USCENTCOM MDR 26-0084 to 26-0095”. The aircraft “TOOK OFF LATE … DUE TO WEATHER AT THE LRE” at 06:14Z on 5 May, collected signals intelligence from 06:40Z, supported an operation from 10:54Z to 21:00Z and landed at 00:39Z on 6 May. Its targeting pod is given as “ANDAS4”. The whole narrative account of the sighting (p. 1, repeated on p. 6):

“AT 2026Z […] WAS SCANNING POI IVO 38SMD38[…]54[…] AND PERIODICALLY OBSERVED UAPS FLYING SPORATICALLY WITHIN THE TARGET AREA OF 92AS. ACCORDING TO THE […] MTS, THE UAPs WERE TRAVELLING AT VARIOUS SPEEDS BETWEEN 80-180 MPH. WE WERE UNABLE TO DETERMINE ALTITUDE. THE SIZE OF THE UAPs WERE APPROXIMATELY 1-2 METERS. THE UAPs DID NOT HINDER THE MISSION.”

Unlike D109, D106 fills in the aircraft: “Aircraft Location: 38S MD 41[…] 45[…]”, “Aircraft Heading: -75”, “Aircraft Altitude: FL200”, about 20,000 feet, “Aircraft Airspeed: 100 KIAS” and “Range: 4.98NM”. The field for what was observed reads “Observed Activity Description: UAS”, an unmanned aircraft system. The weather field on the tasking page says “(U) WEATHER WAS NOT A FACTOR.”

D106 does not agree with itself in two places. Its timeline and observation fields put the aircraft in “Killbox (Location): 91AS5” and “Killbox & Keypad: 91AS”, while its account speaks of “THE TARGET AREA OF 92AS”. And the landing field blacks out the airfield, while the narrative leaves it in plain words: “AT 0039Z, CDR74 LANDED AT OKAS”.

One paragraph, two squadrons

The observation paragraphs of the two reports, cut into matching pieces (D109 p. 6, D106 p. 6):

	D109, 20th Attack Squadron	D106, 196th Attack Squadron
When	“FROM 0524Z-0704Z,”	“AT 2026Z”
What the crew watched	“[…] WAS SCANNING VARIOUS POIs IVO […]”	“[…] WAS SCANNING POI IVO 38SMD38[…]54[…]”
What it saw	“AND PERIODICALLY OBSERVED […] UAPS FLYING SPORATICALLY”	“AND PERIODICALLY OBSERVED UAPS FLYING SPORATICALLY”
Where	“WITHIN THE TARGET AREA AND IN THE NE PORTION OF […]”	“WITHIN THE TARGET AREA OF 92AS.”
Source of the speed	“ACCORDING TO THE […] […],”	“ACCORDING TO THE […] MTS,”
Speed	“THE UAPs WERE TRAVELLING AT VARIOUS SPEEDS BETWEEN 80-180 MPH.”	the same
Height	“WE WERE UNABLE TO DETERMINE ALTITUDE.”	the same
Size	“THE SIZE OF THE UAPs WERE APPROXIMATELY 1-2 METERS.”	the same
Reacquired	“DURING THE OBSERVATION PERIOD, […] WOULD REACQUIRE THE UAPs AFTER RETURNING THE SENSOR BACK TO THE ORIGIONAL POI LOCATIONS.”	nothing
Effect	“THE UAPs DID NOT HINDER THE MISSION.”	the same
Attachment	“WSV IS ATTACHED BELOW”	nothing

Three sentences and the last one are identical character for character, and the opening shares the same misspelling, “SPORATICALLY”. The differences:

• Time. A span of 100 minutes in D109, a single minute in D106.
• Target. “VARIOUS POIs”, points of interest, in D109; one point with a grid reference in D106.
• Number. D109 has a blacked-out box before “UAPS”, a count; D106 gives none.
• Area. D109 adds “AND IN THE NE PORTION OF […]”; D106 names the area, “92AS”.
• Source of the speed. D109 blacks out the word that D106 leaves as “MTS”, and runs the sentence on without a full stop before “ACCORDING”.
• Only in D109. The sentence about reacquiring the objects, with its own misspelling “ORIGIONAL”, and “WSV IS ATTACHED BELOW”.

The one thing certain is that the two descriptions are not independent in their wording: one was written from the other, or both from a common text. That D106 looks like a shortened copy of D109 is our inference, from the numbers of the reports (7467030 before 7468013), the times of the sightings and the fuller text of D109. The documents do not say so.

Where it was

D106 gives two grid references in the military grid (MGRS): the point the crew was watching, “38SMD38[…]54[…]”, which is also the tasking’s start point, and the aircraft, “38S MD 41[…] 45[…]”. We measured each box marked “1.4a” against the digits beside it: each is as wide as three digits. Two digits therefore survive in each half of the reference, and each position is known to a square of 1 km.

By our conversion, taking the middle of each square, the point watched lies at about 34.83°N 44.33°E and the aircraft at about 34.75°N 44.36°E, 9.5 km to the south-south-east. Both are in northern Iraq, by our measurement about 170 km north of Baghdad and 70 km south of Kirkuk. The map pin stands on the point watched.

D109 gives no position at all: every grid reference and the observed location are blacked out. It places the objects “WITHIN THE TARGET AREA AND IN THE NE PORTION OF […]”. Nothing in either report says that the two crews watched the same place; the only link between them is the date and the paragraph.

What the recordings show

The publisher released two recordings with these reports, DOW-UAP-PR140 (1 min 47 s) and DOW-UAP-PR141 (2 min 36 s), both in the release 06 video bundle and on the publisher’s video pages, 1472 × 828 pixels at 30 frames a second. PR140 switches between infrared and a daylight colour camera; PR141 shows infrared alone or infrared on the left and colour on the right.

Much on the screen is not an object. Every field of the overlay that would give time, position, range or sensor settings is blacked out with black boxes at the edges. A cyan crosshair and four cyan corner marks stay in place. Two small black boxes below the crosshair move from frame to frame: they are blacked-out overlay symbols, not objects. In PR141 a small cyan “N” circles beside one of them. In the colour frames a darker band along the left edge of PR140 and a bright round patch in the middle of the right half of PR141 stay put whatever the camera looks at; they belong to the optics.

For the first 4.5 seconds of both recordings a line of text is burned into the picture:

“Public disclosure of this information is postponed in accordance with 44 U.S.C. § 2107 Section 1843, UAP Postponement Code E.O. 13526”

The objects are small dark dots, a few pixels across. By our viewing of the files:

PR140.

• 0:00–0:04.7, infrared. A rocky slope and an escarpment.
• 0:05–0:10.7, colour. The same kind of ground, brown and lit by the sun, with shadows.
• 0:10.8–0:27, infrared. The edge of the high ground at 0:12, then a hazy plain; a dark dot up and to the right of the crosshair at 0:20 and 0:22.
• 0:27–0:31, colour. An even pink-orange haze with no ground in it.
• 0:31–0:45, infrared. Streaky ground and small dark specks.
• 0:45–1:13, colour. Haze again; dark dots on the left at 0:55, 1:00 and 1:06.
• 1:13–1:43, infrared. A dark dot up and to the left of the crosshair at 1:20.
• 1:43 to the end, colour. A dot on the left at 1:44.

PR141.

• 0:00–0:08, infrared. Ground cut by a dark winding band, a valley or a dry riverbed.
• 0:09–0:13, infrared. Haze; a small dark dot at the upper left at 0:09 and at the lower right at 0:12.
• 0:13.5–0:19.5, infrared and colour side by side. The colour half is a reddish-brown haze; the same dark dot shows in both halves at 0:16–0:18.
• 0:21–0:27, side by side again.
• 0:27–1:16, infrared. Dots at the lower left at 0:50 and at the upper right at 1:00.
• 1:16–1:28, side by side. A dot in both halves at 1:18 and 1:20.
• 1:28 to the end, infrared. Dots at 1:35 and 2:30.

Neither recording shows a shape, and none gives a range or a field of view, so a dot’s size on the screen says nothing of its size in the air.

Day, not night: which report the recordings belong to

The publisher’s pages pair both recordings with D109, and the content bears that out.

Daylight. Both recordings have colour frames of ground lit by the sun, with shadows. By our calculation, at 34.8°N 44.3°E the sun stood 38° above the horizon at 05:24Z and 58° at 07:04Z, 08:24 and 10:04 local time: the window of D109. At 20:26Z, the time of D106, 23:26 local time, it stood 38° below the horizon. A daylight colour camera does not give that picture at night.

Dust. For long stretches the colour frames show no ground at all, only an even pink-orange haze. D109 reports “DUST STORMS” that affected “COLLECTION ON UAPS … BETWEEN 0524Z AND 0704Z”; D106 says the weather “WAS NOT A FACTOR”.

Length. Together the recordings run 4 min 24 s, which fits within the 100 minutes of D109. D106 gives a single minute.

The recordings therefore say nothing about the evening sighting of D106.

Two stills without a date

Two one-page PDFs in release 06, DOW-UAP-PR130 and DOW-UAP-PR131, each carry one infrared frame with the same kind of overlay, its fields blacked out as “1.4a, 1.4g”. PR130 shows a dark elongated streak in the lower left of the frame; PR131 a dark shape with a faint trail at the upper right. Neither gives a date, a time or a place.

What ties them to this case is their position. Their footer is that of the same batch as D106, “USCENTCOM MDR 26-0084 to 26-0095 … 06/30/26”, and they are its pages 029 and 030, directly before D106 at 031–036. The batch covers twelve review cases, however, and D106 does not mention an attachment; the “WSV IS ATTACHED BELOW” is D109’s, which is not in this batch. They are infrared, so the night of D106 does not rule them out, but nothing shows they come from it either. We treat them as a weak trace and do not link them to the recordings.

80–180 mph and one to two metres without a range

The speed comes from “THE […] MTS”, a word the report does not explain and whose method it does not give. The sensor fields name only the targeting pod, “ANDAS4”. Nothing in either report measured the distance to the objects. D106’s “Range: 4.98NM” is the distance to the point being watched, not to the objects: by our conversion the grid references of the aircraft and the point lie 9.5 km apart, and 4.98 nautical miles are 9.2 km. D106 itself says “WE WERE UNABLE TO DETERMINE ALTITUDE”, and D109 leaves the aircraft’s height, speed and range as “-”.

A camera without a range gives angles. A size of “1-2 METERS” and a speed of “80-180 MPH” without a distance are angular quantities written in linear units: the same dot could be a small object close to the camera or a large one far away. On the recordings the data fields that would give range and field of view are blacked out, so the dots cannot be turned into metres or miles per hour either.

The next day, 60 km away

On 6 May 2022 another crew filed DOW-UAP-D10, in release 01. Its aircraft supported a unit the report, like D106, calls “MAG”, and gives its position as “38SMC53[…]96[…]”, by our conversion about 34.31°N 44.49°E, 60 km south-south-east of the point D106 watched. Its account (p. 6):

“FROM 1514Z to 1934Z, […] OBSERVED 5X UAP FLY ACROSS THE SCREEN. AT 1514Z […] OBSERVED A UAP WITH THE VISRECCE OF A POSSIBLE […] MISSILE FLY ACROSS THE FOV IVO 38SMC53[…]96[…] […] PROCEEDED TO SEE 4X OTHER UAPS IN THEIR FOV UNTIL 1934Z. ALL 4X REMAINING UAP FIT CLOSER TO THE PROFILE OF POSSIBLE BIRDS.”

Its weather field reads “DUST HINDERED MOST FMV COLLECTION OF THE GROUND.” It is the only report of the three that sorts what it saw, and it does so without a range either. It shows that crews in the area in those days were seeing objects crossing their cameras that they took for birds; it does not show that the objects of 5 May were birds.

What the publisher got wrong

Both recordings’ pages give the date taken as “01.01.2022”, 1 January 2022, and both identifiers begin with 220101; the reports put the event on 5 May 2022. The description of PR141 begins with “An area of contract”, for “contrast”.

The publisher got one thing right that it would have been easy to get wrong: it pairs both recordings with D109, not with D106, and the daylight and the dust in the pictures bear that out.

Why this scores where it does

Witnesses score 2: two crews of trained sensor operators, which the reports neither name nor count, and no one else. Radar scores 0: nothing measured the objects’ range, and “MTS” comes without a method. Optics scores 2: two recordings of four and a half minutes together show dots of a few pixels in infrared and in colour, but every overlay that would give range or field of view is blacked out, the dots have no shape, and dust hides much of the picture. Physical trace scores 0.

Multi-channel scores 1: the description in the second report is the words of the first, and the recordings belong to D109, so the two reports and the two recordings are one channel. The only independent element is that D106 noted something at 20:26Z, and that cannot be checked. Documentation scores 3: D106 gives times to the minute, grid references to 1 km, the aircraft’s height, speed and heading and a range to the point watched; D109 gives times and the weather, and the rest is blacked out. Anomaly scores 1: speeds of 80–180 mph and a size of one to two metres, both without a range; D106 itself calls the activity “UAS”, and both reports say the objects “DID NOT HINDER THE MISSION”. Data today scores 2: the reports and the recordings are public, but the positions in D109, the overlays and the sensor data are blacked out.

That puts the case at 1.3 overall, class D, with the status insufficient data.

What would settle it

The overlays blacked out on the recordings. The field of view, the slant range and where the sensor pointed, frame by frame, would turn the dots into sizes and the 80–180 mph into a measurement.

What “MTS” is and how it gave the speed. Neither report says.

D109’s positions and count. They would show whether the two crews watched the same area, and how many objects the morning crew saw.

The attachment D109 announces, “WSV IS ATTACHED BELOW”, and any recording of D106’s evening sighting at 20:26Z.

AARO’s file on the two reports, if it has one, and whether it treated them as one event or two.