House Committee Releases Radar Footage Showing Hellfire Round Striking Unidentified Object Off Yemen

A House committee on Tuesday released radar footage that officials say shows a Hellfire missile fired by a U.S. military drone striking an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) off the coast of Yemen, making contact and the object continuing on its path.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) shared the video during a disclosure hearing of the House Committee on Restoring Public Trust. The clip, described by witnesses at the hearing, was taken by an MQ-9 Reaper drone on Oct. 30, 2024 and shows a 100-pound Hellfire air-to-ground round apparently making contact with a glowing, fast-moving orb and the object persisting in flight afterward, according to testimony and radar analysis cited at the event.

George Knapp, a journalist and UAP researcher who spoke at the hearing, said a separate MQ-9 recorded the orb spinning after the missile made contact. "There’s a server where there’s a whole bank of these kinds of videos that Congress has not been allowed to see — that the public has not been allowed to see," Knapp said in his remarks. Knapp described the sequence as a Hellfire missile "smacking into that UFO and just bounc[ing] right off," and he posed questions about the object's nature.

Two former U.S. Air Force personnel who testified described other incidents they said involved large, unconventional aerial objects. Jeffrey Nuccetelli, a former military police officer who was stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, told the committee that he and others repeatedly observed UAP near facilities tied to missile defense operations.

Nuccetelli recounted a report from Oct. 14, 2003, when contractors described a "massive glowing red square" hovering silently near two missile-defense sites before drifting away. He said other security personnel later reported a bright, fast-moving object approaching the base that night and that an object subsequently descended and hovered briefly close to the installation before vanishing.

Dylan Borland, another Air Force veteran who testified, said he witnessed a large, triangle-shaped craft near Langley Air Force Base in Virginia during the summer of 2012. He described the craft as about 100 feet on a side, initially appearing as a circle, then revealing a triangular shape. Borland said the object exhibited no audible noise or discernible wind displacement, interfered with his telephone, and ascended rapidly.

Borland also told the committee that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon office created to investigate UAP, had misreported events in his view and urged skepticism about its public accounts. He said his career suffered after the incident and that he was unable to continue working in the intelligence community.

Committee members and witnesses at the hearing asserted that additional video and radar records exist in a government server bank that have not been publicly released. Witnesses described a range of shapes and sizes in reported UAP encounters, including rectangular and triangular objects and glowing orbs, and several said they observed unusual maneuvers and apparent resistance to conventional force.

The footage and witness statements were presented amid ongoing congressional attention to UAP encounters and government transparency. The Department of Defense and agencies involved in UAP investigations have previously said they are working to collect and analyze data across the military and intelligence communities, while taking a methodical approach to identification and threat assessment.

The committee did not provide an independent technical analysis in the hearing of the radar files shown, and officials present did not offer a definitive explanation for the events shown in the footage or for the accounts provided by the former service members. Several witnesses called for greater access to records by Congress and for more detailed public reporting of incidents.

Requests for comment from Pentagon officials and AARO were not addressed at the hearing. Government offices that handle classified and operational intelligence routinely withhold certain material for national security reasons; the witnesses and lawmakers at the hearing criticized those limits and urged fuller disclosure where feasible.

The release of the footage and the veterans' testimony add to a series of public hearings and reports in recent years that have increased congressional and public scrutiny of UAP encounters and the adequacy of official channels for reporting and investigating them. Lawmakers and investigators continue to press agencies for records and analyses to determine whether the phenomena represent advanced foreign technology, sensor anomalies, natural phenomena, or other causes.