PURSUE Release 01: DOW-UAP-D35, Mission Report, Greece, October 2023

  USCENTCOM Aegean MISREP

The Department of War's May 8, 2026 PURSUE Release 01 identifies DOW-UAP-D35 as a Department of War mission report for an October 29, 2023 incident in the Aegean Sea.¹ The seven-page PDF is a mission report, or MISREP, declassified by the USCENTCOM Chief of Staff on January 22, 2026 and approved for release to AARO.²

The report places the sortie in the air domain under USCENTCOM, with AFSOC listed as major command, the 603rd in operations-center fields, and 33 SOS as the originating unit.² Much of the aircraft identity, tasking, personnel, and grid-location detail remains redacted under national-security and privacy exemptions.²

  October 29 Near-Surface Sighting

The mission narrative records takeoff from LGLR at 1504Z on October 28, 2023, handover from the launch-and-recovery element, movement to planned tasking, and full-motion video and SIGINT collection before the reported UAP observation.² The timeline lists 20 hours and 1 minute of total mission time, 9 hours and 24 minutes on station, and landing back at LGLR at 1105Z on October 29.²

The UAP section records initial contact at 0811Z on October 29. It lists the event as a UAP incident, the observer assessment as benign, the physical state as solid, propulsion as unknown, and no reported effects on persons or equipment. It also records no observer engagement, no recovered material, no reported response to observer actions, and no indication of intelligent control.²

In the descriptive field, the operator reported a seemingly circular object too small for details, flying just above the ocean surface toward land before the feed lost it. The report gives an estimated kinetic velocity of 30 miles per hour and does not describe maneuverability observations, signatures, or anomalous characteristics beyond the reported near-surface movement.²

  PR-35 Infrared Clip

The release metadata pairs DOW-UAP-D35 with PR-35, a DVIDS-hosted Department of War unresolved UAP report from Greece in October 2023.¹³ The paired listing describes 24 seconds of infrared-sensor video from a U.S. military platform, tied to the D35 mission report's description of a small, circular object flying near the ocean surface toward land.³⁴

The PR-35 description says the sensor zooms toward an area of contrast at 00:02, tracks it over an ocean background from 00:03 to 00:19, and loses distinguishability around 00:20 as the background changes from water to land.³ The same release language cautions that descriptive and estimative statements reflect the reporter's interpretation at the time, not a conclusion about the object's nature or significance.¹³

  From Sortie to Public Release

DOW-UAP-D35 matters because it connects a short public video clip to the underlying operational report that generated it. The PDF preserves the mission context, sensor use, timing, redaction boundaries, and aircrew wording behind the observation, while the paired PR-35 media shows how the episode was later excerpted for public release.¹²³

Read together, the records show the story's path from a USCENTCOM ISR mission over the Aegean Sea, to a structured MISREP submitted for AARO release, to a public media entry with explicit limits on interpretation. The record does not identify the object; its value is the documented chain of observation, reporting, and publication.¹²³

  References

  References

1. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

3. dvidshub.net ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net ↩