In January 2023, a military pilot reportedly encountered a series of unidentified objects while participating in training exercises over the Gulf of Mexico near Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.

Yet from the outset, there were problems with AARO’s analysis, whose investigators asserted only “moderate confidence” in their findings.

The problems with AARO’s analysis weren’t overlooked by Mick West, arguably the most well-known UFO skeptic and the administrator of Metabunk, a website that crowdsources information West and other site contributors use to attempt to resolve UAP cases. In a posting on X following the release of AARO’s case analysis on the Eglin incident, West was quick to point out that the object in the photos obtained by the pilot bore little resemblance to images of a commercial lighting balloon used for comparison in AARO’s report.