Mission Report, Middle East, May 2022
A U.S. military operator in Iraq files this standardized incident report after spotting five objects moving across their screen during a May 2022 operation. The reporter hedges on what they saw — one object gets flagged as a possible missile, the other four as possible birds — capturing exactly the kind of ambiguous, in-the-moment judgment call that makes these MISREPs valuable as primary sources. It's a reminder that UAP reporting spans a wide range, from the genuinely puzzling to the mundane-but-unconfirmed.
This document is a Mission Report (MISREP), a standardized reporting form the U.S. Military uses to record the circumstances surrounding its operations. U.S. military services often use MISREPs to report Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) to AARO. The GENTEXT, or “general text” section of these reports often contains important qualitative, contextual information, distinguishing it from the more quantitative, or numerical, data found elsewhere in the report. A U.S. military operator reported observing “5x UAP fly across the screen.” The report continues by describing one of those observations as a “possible missile” and the remaining four as “possible birds.” All descriptive and estimative language contained in this report reflects the reporter’s subjective interpretation at the time of the event. Such characterizations should not be interpreted as a conclusive indication of the presence or absence of any intrinsic object features or performance characteristics.