Pentagon's former UFO investigator offers simple theory for mysterious jellyfish-shaped object on video

The video, recorded on June 15, 2026, shows a dark object hovering along a mountainside near a rainbow, with several long strands dangling beneath it. The object appears to pulse and shift in the air as the strands rise, fall and wave beneath it, moving back and forth across the frame.

Sara Jane Osborn, who recorded the unusual sighting and posted it to Facebook the following day, expressed her reaction on camera. "It looks like a friggin alien. I don't like it," she can be heard saying in the video. "It's moving very weirdly," she added later.

Military Response

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson confirmed to Fox News Digital that officials are aware of the footage. "We are aware of a video circulating on social media regarding a reported aerial sighting near Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson from June 15, 2026, but have no additional information to provide at this time," the base's 673d Air Base Wing Public Affairs office said in a statement.

The base did not specify whether the object was detected by military personnel or equipment, whether it entered restricted airspace, or if any known activity could account for what appears in the footage.

Expert Analysis

Sean Kirkpatrick, who led the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) until recently, cautioned against relying on social media footage to assess unexplained sightings. "I don't usually make any assessment from an online video," Kirkpatrick told Fox News Digital. "First, as I've said many times, social media is not a good source of data for anything, let alone UAP sightings."

Kirkpatrick noted that the footage alone does not provide enough information to determine the object's size, altitude, distance or actual movement. However, he pointed to a possible explanation for what appears in the video. "The motion is similar to a kite with streamers, particularly the waves," he said.

Historical weather observations show there was plenty of wind in Anchorage around the time of the reported sighting. Winds were blowing from the west at 16 mph at 9:55 p.m. and from the west-southwest at 15 mph at 10:55 p.m., according to Weather Underground. The sighting was reportedly recorded at about 10:15 p.m.

Despite the bright sky, the reported time of the sighting is not unusual for Anchorage in June, when daylight stretches late into the evening near the summer solstice.

Kirkpatrick emphasized that determining what was actually in the sky would require more information than the video alone can provide. "If it was a real video and not generated, I would add kite with streamers to the hypothesis category and then do some local research on whether there was any sort of celebration or party, what the wind patterns were, and whether or not there's any corroborating video from another angle," he explained.