Did a Hellfire Missile Hit a Samad Drone Launched by the Houthis on October 30, 2024?
During the Congressional hearing on September 9, 2025, chaired by the brilliant and courageous Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a previously undisclosed video was shared showing a Hellfire missile shot from a MQ-9 Reaper drone off screen towards an Unidentified Anomalous Object (UAP) which continues along its path after sustaining some damage.
The video was provided to Rep. Eric Burlison by an anonymous whistleblower, and was shared publicly on X here. The known properties of the Hellfire missile allow us to gain insight about the properties of the UAP.
First let us review what we know from the open literature. The MQ-9 Reaper is an armed, remotely piloted aircraft primarily used for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and precision strike missions. It is armed with a variety of weapons, including AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. The Hellfire missile has a mass of about 45 kilograms, and constitutes a cylinder with a length of about 1.6 meters, a diameter of 18 centimeters and a wingspan of 33 centimeters. Its warhead contains a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) with a shaped charge, a tandem charge, a metal augmented charge and blast fragmentation. The missile is laser guided and detonates upon impact. Its speed prior to impact is 440 meters per second, namely 30% faster than sound (supersonic) or equivalently Mach 1.3.
The video was taken on October 30, 2024 off the coast of Yemen. From news reports around that time, we know that on October 29, 2024 the Houthis in Yemen announced that they carried out an attack with multiple drones on Southern Israel, confirming an earlier report by the Israeli military. This raises the reasonable possibility that the UAP in the video is a drone launched by the Houthis. Is there a reason to suspect that the UAP represents extraterrestrial technology instead?
Let us examine the evidence more closely. At the time tag of 20 seconds in the video disclosed here, the Hellfire missile establishes contact with the UAP and breaks off a few small pieces from it. Evidently, the Hellfire warhead does not detonate, as the video shows the missile continuing along its path after contact. The simplest interpretation is that the missile missed the main body of the target. A peripheral hit is consistent with the spin of the main body of the UAP after the impact.
Given the known length of the Hellfire missile, the UAP in the video can be inferred to be a few meters in size. This happens to be comparable to the scale of the Samad drones used by the Houthis. The mass of a Samad drone is about 200 kilograms, about 4.4 times larger than the mass of the Hellfire missile. A peripheral impact on the tail or wings of the drone by the side or the wings of the Hellfire missile moving at a speed of 440 meters per second, could have broken off pieces of the drone without triggering detonation of the Hellfire warhead.
During the encounter, the Hellfire missile is moving about 6 times faster than the target in the video’s projection. The known speed of the Samad drones goes up to about 70 meters per second, which is about a sixth of the speed of a Hellfire missile.
The agreement between the expected size and speed of the UAP and the properties of Samad drones suggests that the UAP in the video was launched by the Houthis rather than extraterrestrials. The Hellfire missile must have grazed the drone through a minor encounter that did not trigger detonation of the Hellfire warhead. The Hellfire missile only mechanically broke off some peripheral pieces of the Samad drone.
However, intriguing UAP evidence extends well beyond this incident. The Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets in the U.S. Congress, chaired by the visionary Rep. Luna, heard credible first-hand testimonies about far more extraordinary UAP encounters (with full details and written testimonies available here). As the U.S. Air Force Veteran Jeffrey Nuccetelli recommended in his written testimony, we have an obligation to “fund independent research and treat UAP study with the same seriousness as any other scientific field.” This is exactly the narrative of the Galileo Project under my leadership.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
