The Declassified DOW-UAP-PR043 in the PURSUE Disclosure is Likely a Missile

View of DOW-UAP-PR043 (left) side-to-side with the matched Google Earth terrain (right). The labelled points were used as candidate terrain controls rather than as target positions. (Image credit: Nandal & Loeb 2026)The UAP Science Advisory Council (https://uapsac.com/) is currently reviewing declassified, publicly available data, that was released so far on the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (PURSUE) website (https://www.war.gov/ufo/).The main challenge in determining the velocity and size of UAP objects involve uncertainties about their distance and direction of motion. Without radar data or triangulation from cameras at different locations, as attempted in the Galileo Project Observatories (https://galileo.hsites.harvard.edu/) under my leadership, the actual speed and size of the objects remain unknown.Together with my brilliant postdoc and council member, Dr. Devesh Nandal, we realized that unknown UAP parameters can be tightly constrained through a known background terrain, which can be used as a coordinate system to infer the motions of the target object as well as the camera, as functions of time.To demonstrate the remarkable power of this method, we studied the declassified case DOW-UAP-PR043, involving an unresolved UAP report from Africa in 2025, released by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon here. Amazingly, we were able to do better than AARO and resolve this case as a likely fast missile. Our full analysis report is available here. Below are some details of the related scientific analysis.***We started with the publicly released infrared video with a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels and a frame rate of about 29.97 frames per second. The video file is 11.75 seconds long.To evaluate the velocity of the small feature that crosses the image, we first located the terrain. The above image shows the video view (left) side-to-side with the matched Google Earth terrain (right). The be