The United States has hundreds of soldiers in Syria, mostly in the northeast, part of its mission to fight the remnants of the Islamic State alongside its ally, Kurdish-led forces. The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has long demanded that the United States withdraw from all parts of Syria. The Syrian Army's general command said it "considers this cowardly terrorist act an unprecedented criminal act and affirms that it will respond with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organizations wherever they are found," according to the Syrian state media. Syrian government forces carried out artillery and missile attacks after the drone strike on Thursday, targeting several towns in the country's northwestern Idlib Province and killing at least eight people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. That part of the country is under the control of armed groups not backed by the United States.

Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (CEFAA), a Chilean government agency within the civil aeronautics directorate (the DGAC, roughly equivalent to the United States' Federal Aviation Administration) released a video taken by a Navy helicopter of a mysterious craft in 2014. The remarkable footage was captured by two naval officers on a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera, typically used in covert, aerial surveillance. If you've seen Predator drone footage, you've seen these cameras in action. Captured west of Santiago at an altitude of approximately 4,500 feet (far lower than commercial airliners), the Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon (UAP, the new preferred term for UFOs) was first observed with the naked eye from an estimated distance of 35 to 40 miles. The helicopter crew -- a Navy captain and camera technician -- captured 10 minutes of some of the most baffling and well-sourced video ever taken of a UFO.