In early March 2026, a video (archived) circulated online that claimed to show people in Kuwait approaching a downed pilot after the country's air defenses mistakenly shot down (archived) three U.S. fighter jets.
The footage showed the alleged downed pilot telling a man wielding what appeared to be a pipe above his head to "back up" and "I'm American."
The video also circulated on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived) and Reddit (archived). Snopes readers wrote in to ask if the footage was real.
Snopes found at least two different videos (archived) from the same location that appeared to show the same alleged pilot. The videos showed a location near the Al Farwaniyah Equestrian Club on the outskirts of Kuwait City, as geolocated (archived) by CNN journalists and
Because we could not identify who originally recorded any of the videos, we were unable to independently verify that they had not been generated or altered using artificial intelligence
Snopes contacted the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, to ask about the authenticity of the videos allegedly showing locals confronting a downed U.S. pilot in Kuwait and await replies to our queries.
We matched landmarks such as buildings, lampposts and fences from CNN's geolocation with frames in the video of the alleged pilot to conclude the footage showed the suggested location near the Al Farwaniyah Equestrian Club (seen below on Google Earth).
(Google Earth/X user @sentdefender/Snopes illustration)
According to Central Command's March 2, 2026, news release, six aircrew ejected from three U.S. F-15 fighter jets after Kuwaiti air defenses shot the jets down in "an apparent friendly fire incident."
Central Command said all six crew members were "safely recovered" and stable. The cause of the apparent friendly fire remained under investigation as of this writing.
Officials did not detail how the downed crew members were recovered or whether that involved interactions with locals. It was possible that locals may have been the first to encounter the crew after they parachuted from their downed planes.
Other videos circulating online in early March 2026 appeared to show two planes crashing near Al Jahra, on the western edge of Kuwait City. Two videos (archived, archived) geolocated by X users Christiaan Triebert and John Marquee, who both contribute open-source intelligence investigations to The New York Times, showed planes crashing around 23 miles from where CNN geolocated the video of the alleged pilot.
(Google Maps/X user @trbrtc/X user @john_marquee/Snopes illustration)
It was unclear whether the alleged pilot seen in the confrontation video was on either of the planes shown crashing in the videos above. A plume of black smoke was visible behind the alleged pilot in the video, suggesting that his plane may have crashed nearer to the site of the claimed confrontation.
At the time of this writing, the DOD and Central Command had not identified any of the crew members who were on the crashed F-15 fighter jets or confirmed exactly where they crashed.
Snopes previously investigated an image claiming to show a crashed pilot that had been generated or enhanced using artificial intelligence. We regard images created in this way to be fake, even if they are based on authentic images.