Anchorage's viral "jellyfish UFO" was filmed in June, and it may be a kite

A tentacled "jellyfish UFO" that floated through international news this week was filmed five months ago in East Anchorage, and kite fliers who have reviewed it online think it's something more down to earth: a kite.

Sara Jane Osborn posted the 57-second video to Facebook just after 10 pm on June 15. "WHAT IS IT?!!" she wrote. Osborn has said she was photographing a rainbow when she spotted it. The post has since drawn about 168,000 views.

Nearly five months later, on Nov. 3, a UFO-focused Instagram account, Unknown Phenomena, reposted it with its own headline and branding. The caption said AI detection software reportedly hadn't flagged the clip, asked followers for theories and promoted a UFO e-book giveaway and paid content.

Within a week, the clip was in the Daily Mail, on NewsNation and on Indian news sites including NDTV and Hindustan Times, often framed around its direction toward Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

Alaska News reviewed Osborn’s video frame by frame, along with airport weather records and the sun’s position that evening.

Osborn's caption said downtown, but the building that appears at the end of the clip, the state's Geologic Materials Center, puts her in East Anchorage near the old Northway Mall.

In the video, the object hangs right in the rainbow, against the mountainside. A rainbow always appears opposite the sun. Just after 10 pm in mid-June, the sun was low in the northwest, so a rainbow would have stretched across the eastern and southern sky, according to Alaska News calculations of the sun's position.

That means Osborn was facing southeast, past Russian Jack Springs Park toward the Chugach Mountains, and away from the base's airfield and main post to the north. Her line of sight does cross JBER land in the foothills, about 4 to 6 miles out.

What the video can't show is how far away the object was. Seen against the mountain, it looks like it's hovering near the slope. But no ridge or tree line ever passes in front of it. It could be anywhere along the line from the camera to the mountainside, about 6.5 miles away.

That changes everything about its size. By Alaska News estimates from the video's frames, the object sits about 4 degrees above the horizon and spans about an eighth of a degree. Over Russian Jack, a little more than a mile away, it would be roughly 10 to 20 feet across and 250 to 550 feet in the air. Out over the foothills, 4 to 6 miles away, it would be roughly 45 to 70 feet across and 1,500 to 2,300 feet up. Against the mountainside itself, it would be about 75 feet across.

Russian Jack's fields are a listed flying spot for the local kite club, Alaskiters.

Commenters on Reddit and the analysis forum Metabunk, including people who said they fly kites, said its shape and the way its arms move look like an octopus show kite, a large soft kite sold online in lengths up to about 100 feet, mostly long fabric tentacles.

They noted it seems to bob around one spot rather than travel across the sky. Winds were light and easing. Shortly before 10 pm, airport weather stations recorded west winds of 8 to 11 knots, within the range one seller lists for a smaller octopus kite.

An hour later, Merrill Field's had dropped to 4 knots.

That's not a confirmed identification. No one has come forward with a kite, and the video can't settle how far away it was.

At the time, Osborn didn't think it was one. She has said she wondered at first whether it was a kite, but that it was "very clearly not a kite in its movements," and that she and her husband searched a nearby park afterward and found no one flying or packing up a kite. She described the object as black and silver, with dangling appendages, visible for about three minutes before it disappeared.

As the clip traveled, it picked up enhanced stills, AI narration and "secret military technology" framing that aren't in Osborn's original.