The ‘Jellyfish UFO’ Over Anchorage: What We Know, and Why Jellyfish Keep Showing Up in the Sky
At 10:13 p.m. on June 15, the sun was still up over Anchorage, Alaska. Sara Jane Osborn was photographing a rainbow through a car window when a dark speck crept into the shot. “I was annoyed, because I was like, is that a mosquito?” she told the Daily Mail.
It wasn’t a mosquito. Above a distant tree line hung what the internet now calls the Alaska “jellyfish UFO,” a dark shape with dangling appendages that seemed to move on their own. She says it hovered and swung from side to side for about three minutes, then was gone.
The footage went viral only in November. On Nov. 10 the Daily Mail published its interview with her under a headline about a U.S. military base, and within two days the clip was all over X and TikTok, with dozens of news sites retelling that one interview. Nobody has identified the object. Still, a lot can be checked, and the jellyfish shape has a revealing track record.
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What Osborn Says Happened
Osborn and her husband, Pete, who moved out to the Valley after years in Anchorage, were in the city on business, the Daily Mail’s Stacy Liberatore reported. As they drove along Sixth Avenue, she began shooting the rainbow through the open window, and Pete pulled into an empty lot.
When the speck stayed put, she asked Pete if he saw it too, took a burst of photos and started recording. She called it “black and silver,” unlike the bright kites she knew from Anchorage parks, and said the breeze felt too weak to fly one. Her verdict: “It was very clearly not a kite in its movements.”
Pete guessed it was within about three miles; a small plane near the mountains looked tiny beside it. Afterward the couple checked a nearby park for someone packing up a kite, then drove toward Arctic Valley and searched for about half an hour. They found no kite and no other witnesses. Only “God and the government,” Osborn said, would know what it was.
What the Clip Can and Can’t Show
The published footage and stills show a dark object with hanging strands above a wooded slope, near the rainbow. Her wider shots place that rainbow over the Chugach Mountains, east of the city. What a phone video can’t supply is distance, and without distance there is no size. A two-foot object a few hundred yards away and a 50-foot one four miles off fill the same patch of screen.
The military link is thinner than the headlines suggest. The Daily Mail’s article says only that the object appeared near what Osborn took to be Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER), home to F-22 fighters, yet the paper’s online summary says it was seen “soaring over a US military base.”
Other details drift between outlets, the way they did in retellings of the 1987 Czechoslovakia UFO incident. IBTimes UK called Osborn a tourist; the Daily Mail says the couple lived in the city for years.
The Daily Mail also puts them in “an empty downtown parking lot.” But an X post by Jordan Crowder, embedded by the Sunday Guardian, quotes her this way: “I was parked at the old Northway Mall when I filmed it.” That site lies about two and a half miles east of downtown, and a volunteer on Metabunk, a skeptics’ forum, says landmarks in the footage match it.
As of Nov. 12, we found no public statement on the clip from JBER, the U.S. Air Force, NORAD, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) at the Pentagon, or the Federal Aviation Administration.
What the Sky Over Anchorage Was Doing
The U.S. Naval Observatory puts that day’s sunset at 11:40 p.m., and the sky never got fully dark. At 10:13 p.m. the sun sat low in the northwest. Rainbows form opposite the sun, so hers would have stood in the eastern sky, where her photos show it. The 9:53 p.m. report from Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport noted distant showers to the east.
The reports filed at 9:53 and 9:55 p.m. from Merrill Field (about a mile from the old mall), Ted Stevens and Elmendorf on the base all showed a west wind of roughly 9 to 16 mph. Osborn remembered a breeze too light for a kite; the airports measured a steady one, though conditions over the woods or a few hundred feet up can differ.
Facing the rainbow, Osborn was looking roughly east, which is downwind. A loose balloon riding that wind would have been moving nearly straight away from her, and anything retreating along your line of sight can seem to hang still, shrink and slip from view. A kite holds its spot downwind of whoever has the line, bobbing in the gusts.
The Ordinary Suspects
On NewsNation’s “Jesse Weber Live,” two UAP researchers leaned toward something ordinary. Ben Hansen, host of “UFO Witness,” thinks the images are genuine, captured “in camera,” but called the likely suspect “some sort of kite, kite-ish, balloon type thing.” Sarah Gamm, a former Pentagon UAP Task Force analyst, said: “Officially, I would call it unidentified, but most likely (it’s) a high-altitude balloon.” Hansen also cited regional military exercises involving high-altitude balloons; we found no public record of such launches near Anchorage in mid-June.
Metabunk posters favor a tentacled octopus- or jellyfish-style kite and note that a local kite group’s map lists fields at Russian Jack Springs Park, about a mile from the old mall, as a flying spot. Nobody who was there has confirmed it, and Osborn has a question for the kite theory: “why would you only fly it for, like, three minutes?”
There is precedent. In July 2021, Colorado Springs station KKTV aired a viewer’s video of a strange object over the city, with a blunt verdict: “It is a kite. A really creepy kite.” The owner soon got in touch: it was an octopus kite about eight meters, or 26 feet, long.
A drone remains possible; Osborn herself said it might be “a drone-type thing.” A cluster of balloons, some half-deflated and sagging, is possible too, and it is the official answer in the best-known jellyfish case of all.
Why the ‘Jellyfish UFO’ Shape Keeps Coming Back
In January 2024, UFO journalist Jeremy Corbell released infrared footage of a lumpy object trailing loose strands over a U.S. base in Iraq. He said the Pentagon officially designated it a UAP; NewsNation noted it had not verified the video. Online, it became the “Jellyfish UAP.”
In 2025, AARO posted the full 17-minute video on DVIDS, the Pentagon’s media site. An infrared sensor on a force-protection aerostat, a large surveillance balloon, had recorded it near Al Taqaddum Air Base in October 2017. AARO’s verdict: “a cluster of partially and fully inflated balloons” that did nothing anomalous.
Since May, the Pentagon, now also called the Department of War, has posted batches of declassified UAP files at war.gov/UFO. A clip from the July batch, filmed over the Atlantic on Jan. 1, 2020, shows a layered, maroonish object some viewers likened to a jellyfish or a floating brain. Its debrief said it drifted with the wind, and EarthSky suggested a balloon or a clump of deflated ones. An AI-“enhanced” version that seemed to shape-shift went viral anyway.
Then there are rockets. On Oct. 13, a SpaceX launch from Cape Canaveral left a glowing jellyfish over Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia before sunrise, News4JAX reported. NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day explained a similar display from a March 4 launch: around dawn or dusk, the plume, mostly water vapor and carbon dioxide, rises into sunlight while viewers below are still in darkness. A cousin of that effect, the twilight phenomenon, creates colorful contrails “sometimes mistaken for UFOs,” the APOD editors add.
None of that fits Anchorage, where the sun was still up and the object stayed low over the trees.
AARO’s latest annual report, released in July, says it resolved 114 of 319 reports received from mid-2024 to mid-2025, all traced to ordinary things such as balloons, birds, satellites, aircraft and drones, DefenseScoop reported. What holds back the rest, the report said, is a “lack of timely and actionable sensor data.” The Anchorage clip has the same problem.
What Would Settle the Alaska Case
The quickest route to an answer runs through Osborn’s phone, which she says holds several stills taken milliseconds apart. Full-resolution originals with intact time and location data would confirm where she stood and, on many phones, which way the camera pointed. They might also show what the compressed copies online can’t: a thin line running toward the trees, or strands streaming with the west wind the way a kite’s tails do.
Records could fill in the rest. A balloon released that evening may have left a log or a witness, and JBER and the FAA could say whether radar or pilots noticed anything near the city. If the object was a kite, somebody in Anchorage owns it. That is how the Colorado Springs case ended.
The same checks work on the next viral sky clip: when it was filmed, who posted it first, how far off the object could be, and what the sun and wind were doing. Osborn says she can’t deny what happened, and nobody has given her a reason to. Whether the thing over the trees ever gets a name depends on evidence that hasn’t surfaced yet, starting with those full-resolution originals.
Sources
- Giant UFO with dangling tentacles hovers near US military base before vanishing
- Tentacled UFO seen in Alaska likely some kind of weather balloon, experts say
- Mysterious jellyfish-like object spotted floating across Alaska sky
- Anchorage, Alaska: Octopus Kite? (discussion thread)
- Sun and Moon Data for One Day: Anchorage, June 15, 2026
- Hourly weather reports for Merrill Field, Ted Stevens and Elmendorf, evening of June 15, 2026
- ‘Jellyfish’ UAP video: ‘Unlikely’ object is camera smudge, expert says
- Al Taqaddum Object (AARO video and assessment)
- APOD: Launch Plume: SpaceX Jellyfish
- Pentagon investigating mysterious UAP event reported by the Navy near Virginia’s coast
