NUFORC S142575

Mass UFO sighting my military personnel in Iraq. While an infantryman in the United States Army, I was on a combat deployment to the Maysan province of southern Iraq. I do not remember the precise date, however, the incident in question happened during a counter IDF mission along the Iraq/Iran border at a time after midnight local time. As a Humvee gunner, I was a part of a 3 vehicle convoy, consisting of two other gunner-mounted Humvees. After positioning out vehicles and going blackout, meaning we turned off our vehicles and any sources of light & mounted our infrared sights to our weapons and ACHs, we began our mission of being prepared to respond to any enemy IDF towards our forward operating base. This type of mission was typical of our overall mission while stationed at this FOB, and usually lasted between 2-3 hours. We were planning on holding position for 3 hours. Shortly after blackout, I’m not positive exactly how long, but don’t believe it to be more than 20 minutes, I received communication via the headset radio from the forward most gunner, who was in front of my Humvee by a distance of 50 feet. The lead gunner asked me if I had a visual of an airborne vehicle at one o’clock of his position, at an angle of 45 degrees to the horizontal, and at an unknown distance but believed to located on the Iranian side of the border. I lifted my helmet-mounted infrared and tried to acquire the target with the naked eye, figuring it would be easy to acquire with the naked eye. I could not locate it, which I communicated to the lead gunner. He then advised me to use my infrared. After deploying my infrared, I acquired a single target that was clearly airborne and giving off a strong reading on the infrared, which to me meant it was either using some type of infrared light source, or was giving off heat. After affirming target acquisition, I had a! short conversation with the lead gunner about what it could be. Considering the object’s slow movement, which seemed for the time being to be nearly or completely stationary, we speculated it to be a foreign helicopter, mainly because of the object’s position and our lack of knowledge of any friendly aircraft in the area. We continued to observe. I could see that the object was clearly moving, although slightly in multiple directions. I would describe it as a very disturbed, very unstable, very erratic type movement that seemed almost magnetic in nature. Even though it seemed to be making constant, albeit very slight directional changes, it always returned to what appeared to be it’s original position. Several minutes into observation, the object did appear to be closer than it originally appeared; now being visible at an angle closer to 55 degrees to the horizontal. The object appeared to move to this newly observed distance, which given the intense darkness and no visible landmarks with which to gauge a distance, it was hard to determine its distance from us. The object then seemed to hold position and become less erratic in it’s multidirectional movements. After seeming to stabilize, the object then began to make a very distinct aerial movement that was an obvious, almost figure eight pattern, although not quite. Shortly after beginning this new movement pattern, the object seemingly seemed to divide into two separate objects. Once there were two objects the movement pattern changed from a figure eight to a slow, coordinated movement. They would start close together in a side-by-side position before moving away from each other a short distance before the left side object gained altitude, while in the same movement the right side object reduced altitude. They then followed the same movement in reverse until they were back to the side-by-side position. After returning the their starting position, they began the movement pattern yet again, this time both objects divided at the beginning of their movements, seeming to create two more objects. This is the only moment of the event that I recall anymore radio chatter. The lead gunner radioed to me and said, “Are you seeing this?”. I simply replied, “I’m seeing it”. The now four aerial objects fell right into the pattern of movement, back and forth, each of which dividing again and again until, from my perspective, filled a quarter hemisphere of the night’s sky. At this point, there was an absolutely unknown number of the objects. It appeared to be in the hundreds. Their continuous and methodical movements seemed, from my perspective, to create a grid-like pattern in the sky. Each object following the grid lines forwards and backwards in their coordinated movements. Once a quarter hemisphere of the night’s sky was completely filled with these dancing objects, they began to slowly fade. Very slowly and at the same time for each object, their light became less and less visible to us. The fading didn’t seem to take more than 3 minutes once it began before all objects were no longer visible. During the entire ordeal, not a single object broke formation nor had an irregular movement to the other objects. Including during the disappearing act. After the objects completely disappeared, the NCO in charge of the mission was clearly spooked by the event as much as the rest of us, as he decided to return to base at that moment. Everyone else eagerly agreed after voicing our collective disbelief. The sighting didn’t seem to last more than 20 minutes to any of us, though we were 40 minutes from our scheduled 3 hour mission timeline. Nobody voiced concern about it, but we were clearly missing well over and hour and a half of time. Our watches read the correct time, we just don’t remember getting to that time. Whether that time was indeed lost or we were all just so mesmerized by what was happening that we didn’t notice how much time was passing, I can’t be certain. All I can be certain of is that nobody that was a part of the mission was eager to speak of it, as it went unreported by the NCO and wasn’t spoken of again, even between those of us who were there. As of writing this recounting, eight years after the fact, I’ve still not spoken to any of my fellow soldiers about the event, nor do I plan on it. At the time, everyone was clearly eager to forget it ever happened. I plan to respect that. However, I can speak for myself and I’ve been more and more eager over the years to speak about it. Still, even I haven’t spoken about to anyone other than my parents and one close friend of mine that is eager about the subject of UFOs and UFO sightings. I will say now that I’ve grown increasingly interested into what exactly happened that night and have gone over it time and again in my head trying to make sense of it. Given the loss of time, I am worried that there’s more to the story than even I can recall. The biggest reason for that worry comes from the emotional response I have to attempting to recount the event to someone. When trying to retell the story to my family and my closest friend, I became emotionally unstable. It was hard! for me to tell them what exactly happened without bringing myself to tears, as if the experience was indeed more traumatic than I remember. ((NUFORC Note: Witness indicates that the date of the sighting is approximate. PD))