In More Than 8% of the Sensor Videos Declassified by PURSUE, the UAP Might be Birds

A bright point over water in the PURSUE video DOW-UAP-PR41 beats 6.43 times per second (Hz). The declassified video is titled “Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2020”. (Image credit: J. Haqq-Misra et al. 2026)The first paper from the UAP Science Advisory Council, posted recently here, analyzed a swarm of six infrared dots moving in a coordinated fashion, with intelligent maneuvering capabilities that supersede drones. This raised the intriguing question: might this be evidence for alien technology?The video showing the six dots, labeled DOW-UAP-PR135, was declassified as evidence for an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) by the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) on September 18, 2026.Our analysis paper, led by Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra, found that the brightness of these dots varies periodically about 7–8 times per second, consistently with infrared videos of birds flapping their wings taken by the Galileo Project observatories, as described recently here. The infrared brightness reflects the heat radiated from the body of a bird which depends on the area and orientation of the bird’s wings, triggering periodic variations as the bird flaps its wings. The flapping rate of birds increases with increasing altitude as the surrounding air gets more rarefied.This result changed an officially declared Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP) to a potential Identified Phenomenon (IP) in terms of flying animals. Indeed, some animals have collective behaviors more sophisticated than our best robots or drones. The great benefit of periodic brightness variations as an identification method is that it does not depend on the unknown distance to UAP.Encouraged by the match between DOW-UAP-PR135 and the birds in the Galileo Project’s data, Jacob went on to apply the same analysis method to all the sensor video released so far in the six tranches of PURSUE. This brought the count up to 10 PURSUE videos containing a total of 25 bird candidates. Th