Across three PURSUE tranches, glowing spheres appear more than any other shape - and while most have conventional explanations, a stubborn fraction don't. This is what the documented evidence shows.
One October evening in 2023, a group of federal law enforcement agents near a sensitive national security site in the western United States watched a bright orange sphere appear in the sky, then release two to four smaller red orbs before the objects disappeared. No video was captured. No conventional platform - drone, balloon, aircraft - was ever identified as the source. Two years later, the case sits in the Pentagon’s PURSUE archive as one of roughly 40% of UAP reports that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office says it cannot resolve.
Orbs have become the defining image of the current UAP disclosure era. Across the three tranches of declassified files released under the PURSUE programme (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters) since May 2026, spherical and globe-like luminous objects appear more frequently than any other shape. A 2025 sighting in the northeastern United States - a brilliant red sphere roughly one metre across, described by two witnesses as having a “white plasma sun” at its centre - produced cellphone footage that the White House later shared on social media. Understanding what any of this means requires separating a shape description from a scientific conclusion.
In UAP investigation files, “orb” is not a classification. It is a shape descriptor: any roughly spherical or globe-shaped aerial object, typically luminous, that a witness cannot immediately place. Investigators use it because it captures what was reported, not what the object might be.
That distinction matters because spherical aerial objects have mundane explanations in the vast majority of cases. Weather balloons - which are literally spherical - carry scientific instruments into the upper atmosphere and are routinely mistaken for anomalous craft when seen from unfamiliar angles or at dusk. Consumer and commercial drones with LED running lights appear as glowing spheres at a distance. Ball lightning - a rare natural plasma phenomenon - produces self-contained luminous spheres that can persist for several seconds to minutes and are not fully understood even by atmospheric scientists. All of these explain most reported orbs.
AARO’s investigators apply a hierarchy of competing hypotheses to each case, working from the most probable conventional explanation outward. A single eyewitness account of a glowing sphere with no corroborating sensor data typically resolves quickly. The cases that remain open are those where the conventional candidates have been tested and ruled out.
The roughly 300 declassified records released across the three PURSUE tranches - from the 1940s to 2026 - include several orb cases where federal investigators found they could not assign the object to any known platform or phenomenon.
In October 2023, according to a June 5, 2026 assessment signed by AARO Director Dr. Jon Kosloski, federal law enforcement personnel observed an orange “mother orb” that launched smaller red orbs near a sensitive national security site in the western United States. No imagery was captured. The case was assessed as falling within the category that may represent, in AARO’s phrasing, “unrecognized technology” - a term meaning a platform or phenomenon not in the U.S. government’s catalogue of known systems.
A July 2025 incident in the northeastern United States involved two witnesses who reported reddish spheres hovering approximately 90 feet away at an altitude of about 25 feet, near a body of water that had already generated prior incident reports. EarthSky’s analysis of the PURSUE release describes the objects as “brilliant” with what the witnesses characterised as a “white plasma sun” at the centre. Cellphone footage from this case was subsequently shared by the White House. An October 2024 sighting at another location in the same general northeastern region also entered the PURSUE record.
AARO is clear on the central point throughout all three releases: no file constitutes evidence of extraterrestrial origin or non-human technology. The open cases are open because investigators have not found a conventional match - not because they have positively identified something extraordinary.
Ball lightning is a confirmed natural phenomenon, but it is typically brief and has never been documented releasing smaller objects from itself, hovering motionless for extended periods, or returning to the same geographic location across months or years. The behaviours recorded in some PURSUE orb cases do not match its profile.
The cases that AARO and its predecessor offices have flagged as genuinely anomalous tend to share a cluster of characteristics: multiple trained observers rather than a single civilian witness, consistent descriptions of size, luminosity, and movement, and behaviour that does not match the performance envelope of any known commercial or military platform.
Resolving those cases will require better instrumentation than witness reports alone can provide. The Galileo Project at Harvard University is building exactly that kind of system: multimodal all-sky observatories - with the most advanced facility in Las Vegas, Nevada - collecting simultaneous infrared, optical, radio, and audio data on every aerial object that passes overhead. When something unusual appears, the multi-sensor, multi-location setup allows investigators to calculate distance, velocity, and acceleration directly from the data rather than from a witness’s estimate. According to project director Avi Loeb, multiple scientific papers from the observatories’ results are planned for release in summer 2026.
That is the standard the orb question ultimately requires: not what a witness believes they saw, but what calibrated instruments recorded. Until more cases reach that bar, the honest answer for the PURSUE orb files is the one AARO has already stated - that some of these reports remain, for now, genuinely open.
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