A video shared by Iranian state media on 19 March purports to show a US-operated Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter being struck by an unspecified Iranian air defence weapon.
The footage depicts an F-35 in level flight, being followed by some type of infrared search and track thermal sensor. An unidentified projectile approaches from below the aircraft, detonating in close proximity.
The flash of the explosion briefly washes out the grey-toned thermal view, after which the F-35 can be seen with an altered engine exhaust profile and what appears to be a second stream of hot gas or fuel emanating from the lower fuselage.
That could be the result of shrapnel damage from a proximity detonation.
Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency shared the footage shortly after US Central Command confirmed that an American F-35 experienced an unspecified in-flight emergency during a combat mission over Iran on 19 March.
The aircraft in that incident landed safely, according to CENTCOM, which described the pilot as being in stable condition – possibly suggesting an injury.
However, the Pentagon has not acknowledged enemy fire as a cause of the emergency, nor even the nature of the emergency itself.
A report from American broadcaster CNN, citing anonymous sources, is the origin of the claim that Iranian fire impacted the incident F-35. The network has based a number of Iran war reports on unnamed sources, including a series of stories in early March claiming that a ground offensive by Kurdish militias into Iran was being prepared.
The coverage strongly suggested that such an operation was imminent. No such operation ended up being undertaken and Kurdish leaders in Iraq have rejected any notion of acting as a ground force for the joint US-Israeli air war.
While the circumstances around the F-35’s emergency landing are muddled, the purported video of the incident that originated from the Iranian government appears suspect.
An analysis by FlightGlobal found multiple inconsistencies that are possible indicators of manipulation or outright fabrication by artificial intelligence software. The portrayal of the thermal gradient along the F-35 airframe, the depiction of the incoming munition, and the profile of the explosive detonation were all identified as being suspicious.
An expert source with knowledge of explosive weaponry also flagged the detonation signature and uniform thermal gradient of the F-35 fuselage, as well as the perfectly steady tracking by the thermal sensor, as appearing suspicious.
However, those issues could also be explained by a low-quality Iranian-made thermal camera, the source tells FlightGlobal. The individual was not authorised to speak on the record.
To further interrogate the video, individual frames were fed into multiple large language model AIs, including two models of Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini 3.
All three AI agents were shown frames depicting the F-35 in level flight, the approach of the incoming munition, the thermal view of the proximity detonation and the damaged F-35 in flight post-impact, and then asked to render a conclusion on the reliability of the footage.
The results were remarkably consistent with the human assessments.
Anthropic’s Claude describes the video as “likely inauthentic”, consisting of either real forward-looking infrared sensor footage overlaid with a computer-generated explosion or an entirely synthetic AI production.
A similar conclusion was reached by Google’s Gemini, which describes the footage as “almost certainly propaganda-tier fabrication”, likely based on open-source video game graphics engines.
Both AI analyses flag unrealistic thermal blooming (the whiteout of a thermal camera when capturing an explosion event) as inconsistent with an authentic detonation, along with the steady and uninterrupted tracking of the target during a thermal bloom.
Much as the human analysts discerned, the Anthropic AI raised doubts about the “near-perfect concentric rings” shown immediately after the near-impact of the munition.
An actual explosive event captured in FLIR footage would appear more asymmetric or turbulent, rather than a “mathematically smooth”, radial gradient.
Similarly, Gemini AI identifies the thermal signature depicted from the F-35 itself as being simplistic and inaccurate, as did the human analysts.
Rather than the entire airframe appearing uniformly white, as it does in the Iranian video, a genuine thermal image of a fighter jet in-flight would show hotter surface temperatures for leading wing edges and the exhaust nozzle, with varying levels of brightness along other portions of the fuselage.
That reality was captured by US defence manufacturer Teledyne FLIR at the 2016 Farnborough international airshow using one of the company’s 380-HDc multi-spectral sensor units, which recorded thermal video of an F-35B performing flight manoeuvres.
The Teledyne FLIR footage shows how much more data is captured and displayed by an authentic infra-red tracking sensor, although that discrepancy could be attributed to the presumably more-rudimentary equipment available to Iranian forces.
Despite all the indicators that the Iranian video has at least been partially manipulated, a successful strike against an F-35 cannot be ruled out entirely.
One plausible scenario put forward by an industry source is that Iran managed to detonate an explosive munition close to an F-35, but had no footage of the encoutner and fabricated the recording.
Another possibility is that the encounter did not happen at all, and Iran completely fabricated the footage based on details included in the CNN report.
Yet another explanation is that the Iranian footage is legitimate, but was captured on an especially poor-quality thermal camera.
Irrespective of this specific incident, doctored imagery has always had a place in propaganda, and AI will make it ever easier for belligerents and other parties to produce fabrications. In the May 2025 clash between India and Pakistan, for example, questionable imagery of the alleged shootdown of an Indian air force Dassault Rafale went viral on social media.
US Central Command has not confirmed any tactical details about the incident, including the exact nature of the in-flight emergency.
