A zoomed-in infrared image of the object. Image Credit: US Air Force

The Pentagon’s UFO office has reached a conclusion about the nature of an object observed near Eglin last year.The incident, which occurred on January 26th, 2023 over the Gulf of Mexico, was reported by the pilot of a US Air Force fighter jet during a sortie from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

Details were later made available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the report, the pilot had acquired a radar lock on four unidentified objects at around 16,000-18,000 feet, but was ultimately only ever able to observe one of these directly.

Oddly, the plane’s radar then malfunctioned and remained inoperable for the remainder of the event.The object that the pilot did manage to observe was described as vaguely pear-shaped and similar to the “Apollo spacecraft”. It had an “orange-reddish” illuminated, roundish underside and had a cone-shaped top section covered in “gunmetal gray segmented panels”.

Now, in a newly released analysis of the incident, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has put forward a conventional suggestion for what the pilot encountered that day.

“Although the pilot described the object as uniformly gray in the visible spectrum (it appears uniformly black from the viewing angle in the EO image), the magnified infrared image (see above) shows the object had a strong contrasting signature in the infrared spectrum,” the report reads.

“This contrast suggests either a temperature/emissivity difference or a reflectivity difference between its two hemispheres.”

With “moderate confidence”, therefore, the report suggests that what the pilot actually encountered was a “commercial lighting balloon”, or something similar.

The report also suggests with “high confidence” that the object was “not anomalous”.

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