IncidentJellyfish UAP (2018, Iraq)

On 17 January 2024, investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp of KLAS-TV (Las Vegas, Channel 8) released a roughly three-minute black-and-white thermal-imagery video clip on Corbell’s Weaponized podcast that they identified as having been captured by U.S. military FLIR-equipped surveillance at a base in Iraq in 2018. The released footage shows a translucent or semi-transparent object — described by viewers as resembling a jellyfish or a Portuguese man o’ war — drifting over the installation at altitude. The object appears to have multiple appendages or trailing structures and to be self-luminous in the thermal band.

Corbell and Knapp identified the location as Joint Base Balad (JBB) in Iraq, a former major U.S. air base north of Baghdad, and stated the footage was from 2018. They reported that the object had been observed and tracked over the course of approximately 17 minutes (the released clip is a much shorter excerpt), that it had at one point descended into a body of water on the base, and that an AC-130 gunship had been sent to monitor it but had not engaged.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), through its public affairs channel, acknowledged in January 2024 that the office was aware of the footage and that it was among the materials in AARO’s records — without confirming the specific narrative details Corbell and Knapp provided. AARO declined to issue a substantive analysis publicly. The Department of Defense did not officially declassify the footage.

Skeptical analysis by Mick West and Metabunk forum contributors, posted in January 2024, argued that the object’s morphology — translucent in the IR band, with apparent trailing structures, drifting at a slow speed consistent with prevailing winds — is most consistent with a Mylar party balloon or similar reflective inflatable artifact. The IR-band thermal contrast inversion of a Mylar surface, which appears differently in IR than in visible light, produces the “translucent” effect seen in the footage. Whether the Mylar-balloon hypothesis accounts for the full 17-minute observation, including the water-descent claim, has not been resolved on the public record.

What the public record establishes: a real IR clip released by named journalists; AARO’s acknowledgment that the office holds the source material; a published skeptical hypothesis with a specific candidate prosaic mechanism; no formal U.S. government declassification or analysis to date. The case is a contemporary instance of the disclosure-cycle dynamic in which an unclassified release by a journalist precedes any official engagement.