Newly Released Video Shows U.S. Reaper Drone Shooting at ‘UFO’

A recent Congressional hearing revealed video of a Hellfire missile fired by a Reaper drone “bouncing off” an unidentified flying object, which has onlookers—Congress included—scratching their heads. The hearing took place in a House Oversight subcommittee meeting on UFO transparency that was partially hosted by MAGA congresswoman and state-sanctioned UFO investigator Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.

The video sure is, uh, something. As Fox News melodramatically puts it:

A House hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) stunned lawmakers when video evidence showed a U.S. drone firing a Hellfire missile at an orb off Yemen—only for the object to remain intact and keep moving, raising urgent questions about technology beyond known military capabilities.

The video was first shared publicly by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Missouri), who noted that it was “taken [on] October 30 of 2024″ and characterized it as an “MQ-9 drone tracking an orb or this object off the coast of Yemen.” Burlison said the footage is “presented as received from a whistleblower. Independent review is ongoing.”

Below is the video I revealed in our @GOPoversight UAP hearing today, made available to the public for the first time.

October 30th, 2024: MQ-9 Reaper allegedly tracking orb off coast of Yemen.

Greenlight given to engage, missile appears to be ineffective against the target.… pic.twitter.com/jxJwl0e00S

— Rep. Eric Burlison (@RepEricBurlison) September 9, 2025

Calling this “orb” a UFO seems like a stretch, since it likely had something to do with the regional military conflicts around Yemen, where the footage was captured. But hey, it is a flying object that hasn’t been identified.

A few years ago, UFOs were re-branded as UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon). The rebrand was, like most rebrands, followed by a re-launch of the core product (in this case, UFO stories), and an attempted cultural re-glow-up. By that I mean, there’s been a concerted effort to make UFOs “a thing” again, and Rep. Luna has been at the forefront of those efforts. Luna’s recently launched “Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets” has been designed to resurrect many controversial “conspiracy theory”-tinged topics, UFOs included. Luna also hosted a hearing that featured claims made by supposed UFO whistleblower David Grusch.

What does the above video actually show? Your guess is as good as mine. I doubt it shows a time-traveling entity from another realm or an extraterrestrial spacecraft (both things that people who have spoken at Luna’s various hearings have offered as potential explanations for recent UFO sightings). However, one thing of material substance revealed at this hearing is that the U.S.’s unmanned aerial cadres are now being deployed to shoot unidentified objects out of the sky. The War Zone writes, of the recently released footage:

The footage and the circumstances behind it are otherwise unconfirmed, but this appears to be the first known instance of a Reaper engaging an aerial target of any kind in an operational setting…The idea of employing MQ-9s in the air-to-air role, at least for self-defense, is not new. In a test in 2017, a Reaper successfully downed a target drone using an AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile. There was a precedent already at that time for arming drones in this way, with at least some Predators having been modified to allow them to fire heat-seeking Stingers in the lead-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In at least one instance in 2002, a Predator fired a Stinger at an Iraqi MiG-25 Foxbat fighter that was trying to shoot it down…

A story about a hostile engagement between aliens and a drone would, of course, be more interesting, but the evolution of unmanned aerial defense systems is pretty interesting, too. On that front, our flying killer robots just seem to keep getting better and better. That’s good news, I suppose, until the day one happens to come after you.