DOW-UAP-PR078, "2 November 2020 [CALLSIGN] [CALLSIGN] Observes and tracks UAP 2 of 2"

Investigation reading

This Release 02 item is an official Department of War / AARO video record from manifest row 138, published in the 5/22/26 WAR.GOV/PURSUE release and mirrored through DVIDS video ID 1007812. The public title is preserved as source/catalog language: "2 November 2020 [CALLSIGN] [CALLSIGN] Observes and tracks UAP 2 of 2". The callsigns are redacted in the public title, and this page does not infer the aircraft, unit, crew, mission, or location behind those redactions.

The official release description says eight U.S. House members requested access to 51 potentially UAP-related records allegedly held by the Department of War and the Intelligence Community. AARO identified responsive materials held on a classified network and warns that many of these materials lack a substantiated chain of custody. For this row, AARO assesses that the public video is likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform operating within the United States Central Command area of responsibility in November 2020, and says a user uploaded the video to a classified network in November 2020.

The source-provided video description lists a duration of 00:04:58. It says that from 00:00 to 03:21 the sensor pans to keep a low area of contrast within the center of the field of view and that the relative intensity of that area increases throughout the video. It says that from 03:15 to 03:17 a second area of contrast transits the top-right corner of the sensor field of view. It then says that from 03:22 to 04:58 the sensor pans from the first area of contrast to the second area of contrast and keeps the second area within the field of view. The same description is explicitly informational only and should not be interpreted as an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination about the described event's validity, nature, or significance.

AARO adds a source-level pairing note: DOW-UAP-PR077 and DOW-UAP-PR078 are not duplicates. The release says both videos depict highly similar subject matter, but are distinct. That statement is preserved here as a provenance lead; it is not a claim that Open Sky has reconstructed the relationship between the two videos.

The DVIDS page resolves to a canonical page for video 1007812 and lists category B-Roll, date taken 11.02.2020, date posted 05.22.2026 07:30, location (UNDISCLOSED LOCATION), filename DOD_111720890, VIRIN 201102-D-D0360-8296, and length 00:04:58.

What the released item appears to contain

The downloaded direct MP4 is a 1280×720 sensor-display clip with grayscale imagery, a central blue reticle/crosshair, small blue bracket-like display marks, blue display annotations, and black rectangular masking or redaction blocks over parts of the image. The public source says the imagery is likely infrared; this page treats that as source language, not as an independent Open Sky sensor determination.

Sampled full-frame and center-crop frames show a mottled, very low-contrast grayscale field with broad soft lighter and darker tonal regions. In the 00:00 to 03:21 center-crop samples, a small marked point or speck appears left of center in multiple frames, and faint bright/dark spots are visible near the reticle area, but they remain close to the surrounding texture and do not resolve into an identifiable object or scene feature. The imagery is too low in contrast and resolution to separate a discrete target from sensor/display behavior, background texture, compression, masking, auto-gain, or platform/sensor motion.

The source-described 03:15 to 03:17 top-right transit window is visible only as a very small, ambiguous contrast feature in the crop samples. A small marked speck or possible adjacent speck appears near the crop's center-left/center region after cropping the top-right portion of the original frame, but it is faint, only a few pixels at contact-sheet scale, and not well separated. It should not be treated as a confirmed separate object or independently tracked feature based on the still crop alone.

In the 03:22 to 04:58 interval, center-crop samples continue to show a low-resolution grayscale sensor display with the blue reticle and black mask present. Faint small specks appear near the reticle region in some panels, while the background texture shifts and becomes more diagonally streaked in the late samples. The public MP4/contact sheets are enough to document the source-described contrast-review windows, but they do not support identity, distance, speed, altitude, range, trajectory, platform identity, or anomalous-performance claims.

The MP4 includes an AAC stereo audio stream, but a full decoded audio check returned zero signal in this source review (RMS 0.0, mean absolute sample 0.0, max absolute sample 0.0). No transcript or audible content is quoted here. The contact sheets below are derived review aids from the downloaded official MP4; they are not independent evidence and should not be used to infer cause or identity.

Source asset review

The individual official DVIDS/CloudFront MP4 was downloaded and inspected directly; the full Release 02 video ZIP was not used as a substitute. The direct media response returned 200, content-type: binary/octet-stream, accept-ranges: bytes, content-length: 73021645, last-modified: Fri, 22 May 2026 11:30:23 GMT, and ETag "5ad9a4784105f2d89fedbdead51333f7-9". A byte-range probe returned 206 with content-range: bytes 0-0/73021645.

The Release 02 remote video-ZIP central directory lists video_2605_DOD_111720890_DOD_111720890.mp4 as 73,016,086 bytes with CRC32 8adcf9f2, stored uncompressed. That does not match the downloaded direct DVIDS MP4 size or CRC32. Until the ZIP entry is byte-compared against the direct DVIDS object, this should be treated as a source-custody/versioning lead, not as a substantive finding about the imagery.

Source custody and provenance

Primary public provenance for this page is the official WAR.GOV/PURSUE Release 02 landing page, the Release 02 manifest row, and the DVIDS page for video 1007812. The public DVIDS page resolves to https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1007812/dow-uap-pr078-2-november-2020-callsign-callsign-observes-and-tracks-uap-2-2 and exposes the direct media asset at https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/video/2605/DOD_111720890/DOD_111720890.mp4.

The custody posture is intentionally bounded. The public release says many responsive materials lack a substantiated chain of custody. This row says the video was uploaded to a classified network in November 2020 and is likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform operating within the CENTCOM area of responsibility in November 2020. DVIDS adds a 11.02.2020 date taken, (UNDISCLOSED LOCATION) location, and VIRIN 201102-D-D0360-8296. Those fields are compatible at the broad catalog level, but they still need original sensor/platform records before Open Sky can assert precise platform identity, range, target identity, coordinates, or event reconstruction. This page preserves the official manifest/DVIDS provenance and the downloaded-source inspection facts without converting the title, visible contrast regions, or AARO summary into an Open Sky finding.

Graph context

No exact Release 02 graph record was returned for this slug, title, or DVIDS ID during this run's read-only graph context check. That is not a source-access problem; it means this page is currently anchored to official manifest/DVIDS provenance while graph ingest for Release 02 catches up. Future title-related or dataset-wide graph hits should be treated as leads until their provenance links resolve back to this exact official asset.

Leads to check

• Compare PR078 with PR077 only as a source-pairing lead: AARO says they are distinct but highly similar, so any comparison should preserve separate DVIDS IDs, file hashes, VIRINs, durations, and row provenance before making content-level claims.
• Byte-compare the direct DVIDS MP4 against the Release 02 video-ZIP entry because the direct-file size/CRC32 and ZIP central-directory size/CRC32 do not match.
• Review the 00:00 to 03:21, 03:15 to 03:17, and 03:22 to 04:58 sequences in full motion before treating any diffuse patch, tiny speck, or later contrast region as a discrete physical object; still samples cannot resolve sensor tracking, platform motion, compression, auto-gain, background structure, redaction/masking, or display artifacts.
• Identify the sensor/display mode, zoom state, reticle meaning, masking/redaction effects, platform position, line of sight, range, and exact recording context.
• Run prosaic context checks before escalation: aircraft, drones, balloons, birds, debris, ordinary thermal targets, clouds or atmospheric effects, ground features, smoke/dust, sensor contrast/auto-gain behavior, parallax from platform motion, display/redaction artifacts, CENTCOM-area air/ground activity, weather, satellite/launch/reentry context, and any available military or civilian incident logs for 2 November 2020.

Limits

This is a compressed public MP4 derived from a classified-network upload, and the release-level source warning says many responsive materials lack a substantiated chain of custody. The public record does not provide the original file hash, original sensor metadata, platform identity, precise recording time beyond catalog date, line of sight, range, altitude, coordinates, independent radar or optical tracks, air/ground traffic correlation, weather correlation, or original witness/operator notes on this page. Source-described areas of contrast are visible only as subtle contrast features in sampled public frames, including a faint and ambiguous top-right-window speck/possible adjacent speck, but their source, cause, distance, scale, and event significance remain unresolved from this asset alone. This page is a source-review draft and not a finding.

Sources

• WAR.GOV/PURSUE Release 02 landing page: https://www.war.gov/UFO/
• DVIDS video page: https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1007812
• DVIDS direct media asset: https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/video/2605/DOD_111720890/DOD_111720890.mp4
• Release 02 document bundle: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/052226/release_02/release_02_document_bundle.zip
• Release 02 video bundle: https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/uap052226.zip
• Official Release 02 manifest row 138, DOW-UAP-PR078, "2 November 2020 [CALLSIGN] [CALLSIGN] Observes and tracks UAP 2 of 2", release date 5/22/26, agency Department of War, kind VID.