A charter fishing crew off the coast of Florida caught something mysterious other than fish on Saturday.
The striking resemblance to Iranian attack drones has since fueled speculation over the origins of the drone since the images started circulating on social media.
Is this a US military drone that was lost during training and testing, or does it have a more sinister origin?
And the mystery has yet to be definitively cleared up.
Following the day’s eventful fishing trip, Captain Daniel of Hot Spot Charters out of Pensacola immediately announced the odd catch on social media.
What clearly appears to be a large delta-wing style military drone was photographed alongside the rest of the day’s catch, and uploaded to the fishing company’s Instagram account:
View this post on Instagram
In case you couldn’t make it out, here’s the tongue-in-cheek caption included by Captain Daniel:
Great 6 hour today with this crew! If anyone is looking for their drone please call Hot Spots! – Captain Daniel
As I said, the mystery of what this drone actually is — and where it came from — is still unresolved.
And there is very little reporting so far covering this story.
The similarities to Iran’s Shahed-136 are obvious, as seen here:
How Shahed-136 Kamakazi Drone Works
pic.twitter.com/lC3aYZQHED
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973)
August 16, 2026
The possibility that the recovered drone is likely an American-made platform operated by the US military has been pointed out by one of the few mainstream outlets that has covered this story to date.
Some US-made platforms are very similar to the Shahed-136 design, and could plausibly account for easy misidentification, as is being reported by
WEAR-TV, an ABC News affiliate out of Pensacola:
Pensacola Fishing Charter Finds Large Drone Floating in Gulf
A Pensacola charter fishing group made an unusual catch on Saturday, a large drone pulled from Gulf waters.
Hot Spot Fishing Charters said the group was on a six-hour trip when it found and brought in the aircraft. The drone may be an MQM-172, though that has not been independently confirmed.
The MQM-172 is an unmanned aerial target aircraft used by the U.S. military for training and weapons testing. (Emphasis added.)
Not long after the original post appeared on the Charter Company’s Instagram and Facebook account, the fishermen commented on their Facebook post with an update:
Here’s the text of that update incase that’s hard to see:
The black suvs came and got their drone, all is good!
While the US Air Force remains quiet on the issue…
It is being reported by the OSINTdefender account on X that Hot Shot Charters did get a visit from the ‘authorities’, who took possession of the airframe:
On Saturday, Hot Spot Fishing Charters, a Pensacola-based charter fishing company found and recovered a large distinctive delta-wing unmanned aerial vehicle in the Gulf of America, several miles off the western coast of Florida.
The UAV, found by the charter group during a…
pic.twitter.com/YNuoo76HpR
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender)
September 20, 2026
Here’s the full text of that update from OSINTdefender:
On Saturday, Hot Spot Fishing Charters, a Pensacola-based charter fishing company found and recovered a large distinctive delta-wing unmanned aerial vehicle in the Gulf of America, several miles off the western coast of Florida.
The UAV, found by the charter group during a six-hour fishing tour, shares a striking resemblance with the Iranian Shahed-136, but is likely either a Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) or a Griffon Aerospace MQM-172 Arrowhead, both of which are American-built and designed copies of the Shahed.
So far the U.S. Air Force and nearby Eglin Air Force Base have declined to comment on the discovery, with Hot Shot Charters stating that authorities arrived later in the day to retrieve the drone.
The initial report from the ABC News affiliate I referenced earlier stated that the craft was recovered after a 6-hour fishing trip.
Still, I am very curious as to the exact location of the recovery.
Eglin Air Force Base is only about 40 miles away from the Pensacola base of Hot Spot Fishing Charters.
Though, as with most US military bases, there are very strict prohibitions covering drone flights around bases — and so far Eglin isn’t talking.
The charter trips by Hot Spot may vary wildly in distance travelled from port, according to the Company.
And trips may focus on either the bay in Pensacola, or the wider Gulf area, according to this information found on
Hot Spot Charters website:
Inshore / nearshore fishing charters in Pensacola are an excellent option for families or small groups of friends. They’re affordable and a great choice for anyone from an experienced angler to a first timer. On these Pensacola fishing charters trips, you will fish in either Pensacola Bay or the Gulf of Mexico, just depending on the weather conditions.
Offshore 6-pack charters are operated on thirty-one to thirty-four-foot center console boats and you’ll fish approximately 15 to 30 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico on the very popular 6- and 8-hour trips with Hotspots Charters. Fishing equipment, licenses, bait, ice, and fish cleaning are all included.
Possible catches on the 6- and 8-hour deep sea fishing charters trips include snapper, grouper, amberjack, triggerfish, mackerel, sharks, and much more. We can also coordinate larger groups on larger boats, so don’t hesitate to give best Pensacola fishing charters a call if you have a group larger than six people. (Emphasis added.)
Considering the drone was recovered after a 6-hour trip per the earlier ABC News story, it sounds as though the area in which it was found was likely further out, beyond than Pensacola Bay area.
The question of whether this is an American-produced drone like the MQM-172 as referenced by ABC News, or something more like the Shahed-136 remains technically unanswered.
But a look at the specs and history of both tells part of the tale as to why they are visibly so similar.
The Iranian platform was ultimately adopted by Russia a few years ago, which started ramping up mass-production and fielding it in Ukraine, according to this spec writeup from
Global Military Net:
The Shahed 136 is an Iranian loitering munition designed by Shahed Aviation Industries and manufactured by the Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company (HESA). First documented in public footage in December 2021, the system is designed for long-range precision strikes against stationary ground targets. Russia produces a localized version of the aircraft at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone under the designation Geran-2. In late 2025, the United States deployed a reverse-engineered version, the Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS), manufactured by SpektreWorks.
Russia adopted the type as the Geran-2 in 2022 and moved from Iranian-supplied airframes to licensed assembly at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan, agreed in November 2022. By 2025 the Yelabuga plant was reported to be turning out roughly 170 airframes per day, for a cumulative total on the order of 26,000 units — a scale the Iranian programme never approached, and the reason the Geran-2 rather than the Iranian-built article is the airframe most often recovered in Ukraine. Reported unit costs for the Russian-built version run an order of magnitude below the Iranian export figure.
Meanwhile, the US military version was a direct response to the Iranian and Russian versions.
It was created as a testing platform to be used as a target for American training to knock out the foreign concepts, as noted in this
2025 article from Global Defense News:
Griffon Aerospace’s new MQM-172 Arrowhead to strengthen US response against Iranian Shahed drones:
On August 18, 2025, Daniel Beck, Airworthiness Manager and Program Manager at Griffon Aerospace, announced that their new drone, the MQM-172 Arrowhead, will be presented during the AUVSI Pathfinder Conference in Huntsville, Alabama, following its earlier display at the U.S. Army’s Maneuver and Fires Integration Experiment (MFIX) 2025 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The drone was described as a multi-role unmanned aircraft system with the capacity to function both as a high-performance reusable target platform and as a one-way strike asset if configured with an explosive payload.
The MQM-172 Arrowhead features a compact delta-wing design, and company materials emphasize that the system was designed, tested, and manufactured entirely in-house. The program manager, Daniel Beck, also stated that Arrowhead was created to provide operational flexibility across multiple mission sets, and images released from the demonstration showed a form resembling the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 loitering munition.
Ukrainian forces have had success knocking down the Russian version of the Shahed, as seen here:
Ukrainian helicopter shots down a Russian Shahed-136/Geran-2 long-range OWA-UAV with a side-mounted M134 Minigun rotary machine gun.
pic.twitter.com/YnolWuI98S
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973)
September 7, 2026
Though the Iranian design has had it’s share of ‘successful’ impacts…
As seen in this footage taken from an attack on Kuwait during a barrage of strikes carried out by Iran in the Middle East:
Footage of an Iranian Shahed-136 attack drone slamming into a warehouse in Kuwait earlier this evening.
Strikes on both sides have grown from distinct waves to a steady drumbeat of attacks today as the Iran war reescalates.
pic.twitter.com/U34jJnRyg9
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical)
July 15, 2026
Intercepts by US fighter planes have been filmed as well — and not all have been successful.
This clip from April of this year purports to show an American F-15 trying and failing to take out a Shahed-136 somewhere in Iraq:
A U.S. Air Force F-15 fighter jet pursued an Iranian Shahed-136 drone but could not shoot it down over Iraq.
pic.twitter.com/7UGjLcg3BS
— Clash Report (@clashreport)
April 1, 2026
The nearness of Eglin Air Force Base to the waters west of Pensacola where this drone was fished from American waters would seem to argue strongly that it is a US military drone.
But then again, with no direct confirmation from US authorities, questions remain.
And images like this, showing the Russian-made version up close from the Ukrainian battlefield, look eerily similar to the photos posted by Hot Spot Fishing Charters:
This is a developing story.
I’ll keep my eyes peeled, and report back with more information when it becomes available.
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[ H/T WLT Report ]
