An American F-15 pilot rescued by special forces after his jet was shot down over Iran in April, during Operation “Lion’s Roar,” told investigators he saw an unusual formation of Iranian drones just before ejecting. According to CNN, citing four sources familiar with the matter, he described several UAVs moving together in a uniform pattern that looked to him like a “jellyfish.”
The account has unsettled the U.S. intelligence community and is still being debated. One source told CNN that the pilot saw “a collection of drones connected to each other and moving as one body, with smaller drones under larger ones that looked like legs.” Another source said he compared the scene to a “minefield of drones” in the Iranian sky.
Officials initially considered whether the drone formation might have been linked to the downing of the American fighter, though the circumstances of the shootdown remain under investigation. The F-15 carried two crew members. The pilot was rescued hours after ejecting, while the weapons systems officer hid in the mountains for more than a day before being extracted.
CNN said this was the first time an American aircraft was shot down over Iran during the war. Intelligence officials remain divided over how to assess the pilot’s testimony, in part because he suffered a concussion in the crash and had already been shot down once earlier in the war in a Kuwaiti friendly-fire incident. The capability he appeared to describe is known as “One-to-Many Meshed Networking,” a distributed system in which many drones communicate and operate together. U.S. intelligence had not previously assessed that Iran possessed such a capability, though there have been reports that Tehran received help from Russia and China in developing advanced drone technology.
