In October 2023, six federal agents near a sensitive U.S. site watched silent orange orbs release red ones over two nights. Newly released Pentagon files show AARO ran every check available - and still can't account for 40% of what the agents reported.
The night was quiet near the classified facility in the western United States when the first orange glow appeared in the sky.
Six federal law enforcement special agents were stationed near a sensitive national security installation - its name classified in the released files - when they watched, across two separate nights in October 2023, something none of them could identify. An orange sphere appeared, briefly, what the official Pentagon report would later call a “mother orb.” It released smaller red spheres.
Those red orbs moved in coordinated horizontal patterns. They held altitude above a nearby ridgeline. In one account, they stayed stationary for several hours before disappearing. The entire sequence was silent.
The case was classified until June 12, 2026, when the Trump administration released it as part of PURSUE’s third batch of declassified UAP files - the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. By then, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon’s specialist UAP unit, had spent months investigating. Their conclusion: roughly 40% of what those six agents reported cannot be explained by any known cause.
According to the released AARO documents, the orange “mother orbs” appeared for one to two seconds at a time and released clusters of two to four smaller red objects. The red lights moved horizontally in what witnesses described as coordinated patterns, with altitude changes, and at least one remained stationary above a ridgeline for several hours before it vanished.
The agency’s case files grouped the related observations under four labels: “Orbs Launching Orbs,” “Fiery Orb,” “Dark Kite,” and “Translucent Kite” - suggesting the agents reported several distinct types of phenomena across the two-night window.
One witness described the interior of an orb as resembling a plasma “sun” approximately basketball-sized in appearance.
Not one of the phenomena produced any sound.
AARO ran a systematic elimination. Analysts compared the agents’ accounts against commercial and military flight logs, radar data, spatial estimates, and ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, the transponder data used to track aircraft) records for the area over those two nights.
Military flare activity was identified as a plausible explanation for a significant portion of the observations. Flares - bright, silent, descending in clusters - can match the visual profile of what the agents described under certain lighting conditions.
Foreign adversary technology was assessed as highly unlikely. Radar coverage, awareness of known foreign capabilities, and the location of the site made an intrusion implausible.
Those two explanations, applied together, still left a gap. According to the AARO document signed by office director Dr. Jon Kosloski, approximately 40% of the reported activity “remains unexplained after analysts compared witness accounts against commercial and military flight logs, radar data, spatial estimates and ADS-B records.” For that unexplained portion, the office designated “unrecognized technology” as a provisional hypothesis.
There is an important caveat to that designation. AARO noted that the assessment rested primarily on witness testimony rather than technical or physical evidence. No recovered material, no confirmed radar track, and no instrument recording independently anchors the unexplained 40%.
The witnesses here are not civilians filming a smartphone video. They are federal law enforcement agents who were actively working near a sensitive U.S. national security installation - people trained to make accurate observations under pressure, whose accounts were taken formally and fed into a documented Pentagon investigation.
That’s part of why this case was selected for inclusion in PURSUE’s third release, the most detailed batch released so far. The Trump administration has now published three tranches of declassified UAP material since May 2026, covering incidents from a 2008 CIA report on a disc-shaped object hovering over Harare Airport in Zimbabwe to a 2022 case in which five Army soldiers at Fort Carson watched a large white object hover silently over Cheyenne Mountain before vanishing.
What PURSUE is making visible, case by case, is not evidence of extraterrestrial technology - AARO has repeatedly stated it has found none. What it is revealing is that trained federal observers are regularly encountering things that government investigators, with access to radar data and flight logs, cannot fully account for. A meaningful fraction of those encounters is being investigated, documented, and now published.
The October 2023 incident near the western U.S. security site is, for now, one of them.
A hitchhiking teenager and two Exeter patrolmen reported a barn-sized shape with pulsing red lights, silent and low. Project Blue Book tried aircraft, refueling flights and 'stars and planets' - then logged the case as unidentified.
A future U.S. president and about ten others watched a bright, color-shifting light over Leary, Georgia. Two ordinary explanations fit the record - the planet Venus, or a NASA rocket's glowing cloud - yet Carter, an amateur astronomer, rejected both.
On January 8, 2008, dozens in Stephenville, Texas described a huge, silent craft. A later analysis of FAA radar records logged an unknown, transponder-less object - and the Air Force's account of that night changed twice.
