Picture it: a June evening in Anchorage, the sky still bright after 10 p.m. the way only an Alaskan summer can manage, and a rainbow stretched across the horizon. You roll down the car window to grab a few photos. Then something dark drifts into the frame, hanging right there in the rainbow, trailing long, wriggling tentacles.
That's the story Sara Jane Osborn told the Daily Mail this week, and her footage of a so-called "jellyfish UFO" has been floating around the internet ever since. It's a great story. It's also a perfect case study in how a strange shape in the sky can go from "WHAT IS IT?!" to "probably a kite" in about five days.
A rainbow, a parking lot, and "is that a mosquito?"
According to the Daily Mail's November 10 interview, Osborn and her husband, Pete, were in Anchorage on business on June 15, 2026. Around 10:13 p.m., while they drove along Sixth Avenue, she started photographing a rainbow. Pete pulled into an empty downtown parking lot so she could shoot without traffic lights in the way.
Then she noticed a speck she first wrote off as a bug. "I was annoyed, because I was like, is that a mosquito?" she recalled. When she looked past her phone screen, the shape was still there: dark, "black and silver," with dangling appendages that seemed to move independently as it hovered and turned side to side. She took a burst of stills and started recording.
The object hung above distant trees in the direction of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER), home to F-22 Raptors. Osborn said it stayed visible for about three minutes, then "disappeared almost as quickly as it came."
The search for a kite flyer
Here's the part that makes the Osborns' account interesting. They didn't just shrug and drive off. They went to a nearby park hoping to catch someone reeling in a kite. "And there was nobody taking down a kite," Osborn said. They drove toward Arctic Valley and scanned the treeline for about 30 minutes. Nothing.
Osborn, who lived in Anchorage for years, said she knows the city's colorful kites, and this didn't look or move like one. "It was very clearly not a kite in its movements," she said. Asked who might know what it really was, she gave the line that made headlines: "Only God and the government." To her credit, she also floated a down-to-earth possibility herself: "maybe it's a drone-type thing."
Five months later, it goes viral
Here's a twist many headlines skipped: this isn't a new sighting. Alaska News reports that Osborn posted the 57-second clip to Facebook just after 10 p.m. on June 15, and it has since picked up about 168,000 views. It only went global in November, once the Daily Mail story hit.
And once it went global, the analysts showed up.
What the experts say
On NewsNation's "Jesse Weber Live," "UFO Witness" host Ben Hansen said he believes Osborn's images are legitimate, captured "in camera" and not faked. But he and former UAP Task Force analyst Sarah Gamm both leaned toward an ordinary explanation. "Our likely suspect right now is perhaps some sort of kite, kite-ish, balloon type thing," Hansen said, adding that military exercises with high-altitude balloon launches were happening in the region around that time. Gamm's verdict: "Officially, I would call it unidentified, but most likely (it's) a high-altitude balloon."
Kite fans on Reddit and the analysis forum Metabunk went further. They pointed to octopus show kites, big soft kites sold online in lengths of up to about 100 feet, mostly long fabric tentacles that flutter out of step with each other, just like the "independently moving" arms in the video. Alaska News checked the weather: shortly before 10 p.m., airport stations recorded west winds of 8 to 11 knots, decent kite weather, easing to 4 knots at Merrill Field an hour later. The object also seems to bob around one spot rather than cross the sky, which is what a tethered kite does.
Even Jeremy Corbell, the filmmaker who released the famous 2018 Iraq "jellyfish" UAP video, reportedly said on his Weaponized program on November 11 that this one was most likely a tethered octopus-style kite. When the guy behind the most famous jellyfish UFO calls kite, that's saying something.
Was it really "over" the base?
Probably not. The video was shot toward JBER, but that doesn't put the object above it. Metabunk contributors who mapped the viewpoint estimated the nearest part of the base was about 4 km away and not even in the frame. And as the Daily Mail itself noted, without knowing how far away the object was, its apparent size tells us nothing reliable about how big it actually was.
So... case closed?
Not officially. Nobody has come forward with the kite, no one has matched it to a specific balloon launch, and a phone video can't measure distance. The Osborns' empty-park search is the main reason some people still doubt the kite theory, though a show kite can fly on a long line, with its owner out of sight behind trees or buildings.
Here's my fun "what if," and it's pure speculation: imagine whoever was holding that string, somewhere out of sight in East Anchorage, scrolling past headlines about a giant alien jellyfish menacing an F-22 base. If that's you, the internet would love to hear from you.
What we don't have is any evidence of anything exotic: no radar track, no military statement, nothing in the footage a kite in a breeze couldn't do. Still, it's a great reminder that strange shapes are often the easiest to solve, because somebody usually makes a product that looks exactly like them. If you ever catch something odd on camera, write down the time, direction, and wind, and look around for anyone holding a string.
What do you think: octopus kite, high-altitude balloon, or something stranger? Tell me in the comments.
Sources: Daily Mail (Nov. 10, 2026, interview with Sara Jane Osborn); NewsNation, "Tentacle UFO caught on video in Alaska likely a weather balloon: Experts"; Alaska News, "Anchorage's viral 'jellyfish UFO' was filmed in June, and it may be a kite"; Track The Unknown.
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