A Hellfire hit, no damage: the clip that stunned a House panel
In a secure room on Capitol Hill, a video froze everyone in their seats. An MQ-9 Reaper’s camera tracked a bright, polished orb skimming over the sea off Yemen. A second Reaper let loose a Hellfire. The missile closed the distance, appeared to strike the object—and then kept going. The orb didn’t wobble, didn’t dim, didn’t break apart. It held its line like nothing happened.
Representative Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) cued up the footage at a House Government Oversight subcommittee hearing, saying as little as possible before hitting play. The clip was dated October 30, 2024. He did not explain how he got it. He did call it proof that Congress is still being kept in the dark about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, even as pressure mounts to get answers on what’s in U.S. airspace—and over U.S. naval lanes.
The shot sequence looked clean. You can see the fast-moving orb running low above the waves, bright against the water. You can also see the Hellfire’s violent closing speed, then the moment of apparent contact. No explosion. No debris plume. No change in the orb’s track or speed. The missile seems to skip off and continues on, as if it hit glass or a force field. That’s why the room fell quiet. The expectation is simple: when a Hellfire hits something, the target loses.
Journalist George Knapp, speaking at the hearing, claimed the clip is not unique. He said government servers hold a trove of similar videos that lawmakers still can’t access. Former Pentagon official Lue Elizondo told members he’d never seen a Hellfire hit and fail to ruin its target. Two witnesses—identified as Michael Nuccetelli and Wiggins—testified that no known American platform could shrug off a direct strike like that.
Pentagon officials declined to comment on the Yemen clip when reached by reporters. That silence only added fuel to the session, which marked the third congressional hearing on UAPs since 2023. The stated aim: transparency. The subtext: if this video is real, the U.S. military fired one of its most trusted weapons at something it could not affect.
Context matters here. U.S. forces have been running regular operations against Houthi threats in Yemen and the Red Sea since late 2023, using Reapers to surveil and strike launch sites and hostile drones that endanger Navy vessels and commercial shipping. The video’s mission details remain classified, but its location tracks with that ongoing campaign.
Also in the room, a former Air Force member, Dylan Borland, described a separate 2012 encounter near Langley Air Force Base—a large, silent, triangular craft, a skin that looked like molten metal, and nearby electronics acting up during the sighting. His account echoed years of similar military reports: objects with unconventional signatures and puzzling effects on sensors.
What the video could show—and the questions it raises
Before jumping to sci-fi, it helps to understand what a Hellfire is supposed to do. The AGM-114 family is a workhorse missile system with multiple warhead types. The common variants are built to penetrate armor or shred soft targets with fragments. The missile carries a fuze designed to arm after launch and detonate on impact or at a programmed delay. Reapers have fired thousands of these in combat. When they connect, you see fire, fragmentation, and wreckage.
So how does a strike—if that’s what the video shows—leave no trace? There are a few possibilities that don’t require rewriting physics, and they’re the first things weapons engineers would check:
- Miss distance and parallax: High-zoom, high-speed footage can fool the eye. A near miss along the line of sight can look like a hit if the camera, target, and missile are aligned just so. A single camera angle makes it hard to judge depth.
- Glancing contact without fuze function: If the missile clipped the object at a shallow angle, a point-detonating fuze might not trigger. Some fuzes need a certain amount of crush or a specific impact profile to fire.
- Fuze or arming failure: Safety mechanisms arm the warhead only after it travels a minimum distance and meets set conditions. A sensor fault or arming failure could turn the Hellfire into high-speed metal—still dangerous, but not explosive.
- Training or inert round: An inert or practice variant would not detonate. Operators usually know what’s on the rail, but misloads do happen in warzones, and observers of classified clips might not get that context.
- Environmental effects: Sea spray, sensor glare, compression artifacts, and auto-contrast settings can make a pass look like a strike. Even a small pixel bloom at the moment of closest approach can sell the illusion.
Those are the mundane checks. They don’t feel satisfying because the clip, as described by lawmakers, looks like a strike. But analysts typically rule out camera geometry, weapon status, and fuze behavior before calling anything unprecedented.
Now take the sensational reading. If the missile truly impacted at lethal velocity and did nothing, what could that mean? Materials tougher than a shaped charge? A field that disrupts detonation? Some kind of non-Newtonian envelope? These ideas leap ahead of evidence. They also run straight into what the Pentagon’s own anomaly office, AARO, has said repeatedly across public reports: so far, it has found no verified evidence of extraterrestrial technology, and many high-profile cases had conventional explanations once more data arrived.
That said, the video landed in a moment when Congress has little patience for mystery. Lawmakers have been briefed on a spike in UAP reports from May 2023 to June 2024—more than 750 new encounters logged across services. Most are likely mundane once fully analyzed: drones, balloons, clutter, sensor quirks, and misidentifications. A smaller fraction stays odd because the supporting data is thin or sensors conflicted.
That’s what makes the Yemen clip so charged: the sensors are modern, the weapons are modern, and the context is current combat. If a Hellfire appears to “bounce,” the data behind that frame—missile telemetry, fuze status, seeker video, thermal signatures, radar tracks, time stamps—becomes the whole ballgame. Without it, a single angle can mislead.
Here’s what investigators and skeptical engineers would want to see to vet the clip:
- Full-resolution, unedited sensor feeds from both MQ-9s, including infrared and electro-optical streams.
- Mission data: GPS time, weapon type and lot number, fuze settings, arming status, seeker lock quality, and cockpit or ground-station logs.
- Telemetry from the missile and drone: velocities, angles, and any onboard fault codes.
- Environmental data: wind, sea state, humidity, and thermal contrast at the time of engagement.
- Independent sensor corroboration, if available: shipboard radar, other airborne tracks, or satellite picks.
Without that package, people will see what they expect to see. Believers will call it proof that our best weapons don’t work against the unknown. Skeptics will call it a miss that looked like a hit. The truth likely lives in the data record—if Congress gets it.
So why hasn’t Congress seen more? Access fights are baked into this story. Burlison said the clip came from a whistleblower. Knapp said there are “banks” of videos locked on servers that lawmakers can’t reach. Across several hearings since 2023, members from both parties have complained they get slide decks and policies, not the raw footage and telemetry that settle arguments. The Pentagon’s public posture has been: we’re building reporting pipelines, we’re scrubbing and releasing what we can, and we have to protect methods and sources. That tension isn’t going away.
Meanwhile, the hearing fielded more first-person claims. Borland’s 2012 account of a triangular craft near Langley—silent flight, a molten-metal sheen, electronics interference—fits a pattern of reports from Navy and Air Force aircrews over the past decade. Some of those encounters produced gun-camera videos; others live only in testimony. Critics point out that memory fades and perception is fickle, especially under stress. Supporters counter that trained observers don’t mistake everyday targets for silent triangles the size of buildings.
Back to the weapon at the center of this: the Hellfire missile. A quick primer helps frame what “bounced off” implies. The AGM-114 typically weighs around 100 pounds, with a high-explosive or shaped-charge warhead tailored for armor, structures, or mixed targets. Guidance can be laser, radar, or millimeter-wave depending on variant and platform. A proximity or impact fuze triggers detonation. In normal use, a direct hit produces an unmistakable result—flash, fragmentation, and target damage. Even a dud is still a metal spear moving fast enough to punch holes.
The surface environment matters too. Over water, you get glare and reflection. Spray can bloom white in IR. A compact metallic or reflective object—like a foil balloon, a drone with a polished fairing, or sensor clutter—can look like an orb. At certain angles, reflections seem like propulsion or fields. Analysts with access to the original data often re-create the geometry to check those illusions.
As for Yemen, the operating picture has been chaotic. The U.S. and partners have been intercepting Houthi cruise missiles and one-way attack drones targeted at ships in the Red Sea corridor. Reapers loiter, locate, and strike. They do so in contested air with countermeasures, decoys, and an enemy that adapts. It’s not hard to imagine a field of decoys and emitters meant to scramble sensors. It’s also not hard to imagine a drone operator seeing something genuinely novel—and shooting at it.
There’s another layer: chain of custody. Congressional staff want to know who recorded the clip, who stored it, who redacted it, and what metadata was stripped. A single file pulled from a classified system, without the supporting mission package, invites doubt. That’s why lawmakers have pressed for secure-viewing access to originals. If the Pentagon won’t share it with committees, members will push for legislation to force the issue or for an inspector general to intervene.
Expect more calls for a full inventory of UAP videos and associated telemetry, not just carefully curated releases. Expect more pressure to standardize how military services label, store, and retrieve these encounters so investigators don’t lose context. And expect more pointed questions about where the line sits between secrecy that protects sources—and secrecy that protects embarrassment.
For now, the clip leaves two competing narratives hanging in the air:
- Breakthrough mystery: An object absorbed a modern missile strike without damage, showing capabilities beyond known tech.
- Explainable anomaly: A near miss, fuze failure, or camera geometry trick looked like a hit—and a sensational storyline raced ahead of the data.
Both narratives can’t be true. The files and telemetry can narrow it fast. If the warhead armed and struck within detonation parameters and still failed to affect the target, that’s a headache for the defense and intelligence world. If the missile missed by a meter on a deceptive angle, that’s a sobering reminder that single-angle clips can mislead even experienced viewers.
Members left the room asking for the basics: What variant fired? What fuze? What was the arming distance set to? Did the seeker maintain lock? Did the missile register a hit event? What did the second MQ-9 see on its own sensor, independent of the first camera’s perspective? Did any shipboard radar track the object’s size and speed? Was there wreckage or signature in the water after the pass?
Those questions decide whether this is a watershed case or a teachable moment. Either outcome matters. If a hostile or unknown object is immune to common interceptors, tactics and procurement change. If sensors are readily fooled in certain sea-skimming geometries, training and engagement rules change.
One more thread from the hearing: the surge in reporting. Since mid-2023, services have set up fresh pipelines for pilots, drone crews, and sailors to report odd contacts without stigma. The goal is to catch real threats—adversary drones, new platforms, or spoofing—while filtering noise. The 750-plus new encounters reported to Congress show the pipeline is being used. It doesn’t mean 750 mysteries. It means the military is finally logging what it used to shrug off.
As for the Yemen orb, it is now a litmus test. If the Pentagon wants trust, it has to give overseers the raw data that can confirm a hit, prove a miss, or show a fuze failure. If that data exists and remains locked away, expect more whistleblowers, more showdowns, and more dramatic screenings on the Hill.
Until then, all anyone has is a few seconds of startling video and a claim that a very lethal weapon met something it could not touch. In Washington, that’s enough to spark a hundred new questions—and more hearings to come.