Key Takeaways
- On 12 June 2026 the Department of War released a third batch of UFO files — 63 documents, six videos and three NASA audio recordings — through the PURSUE programme at war.gov/ufo
- The headline case is the Western US Event of October 2023, where six federal agents watched orange 'mother orbs' spit out smaller red orbs over two nights near a sensitive site
- AARO judged about 60% of that event was probably military flares — but roughly 40%, including objects that hovered for hours and mimicked cars, has no explanation
- The release also includes the CIA's own admission that U-2 spy planes caused more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and 60s
- A buried 1955 Air Force study found that the better the witness, the more likely the sighting stayed unexplained — the opposite of what you'd expect if it were all mistakes
📑 Table of Contents
- What's Actually in the Third UFO Release
- Orbs Launching Orbs: The Federal Agents at the Centre of It
- When FBI Agents Saw the Orbs Themselves
- Five Soldiers and One Silent Object Over Cheyenne Mountain
- The CIA Admits U-2 Spy Planes Were Half of All UFO Reports
- The UFO Statistic the Air Force Buried
- A Metal Disc in a Himalayan Crater
- The Night Zimbabwe Went on Military Alert
- Did the Astronauts Really See UFOs?
- What the Pentagon Says — and What It Leaves Out
On 12 June 2026, the Department of War posted its third batch of declassified UFO files to war.gov/ufo. This one is bigger and stranger than the first two: 63 documents and renderings, six videos, and three NASA audio recordings, pulled from the CIA, the FBI, NASA and the Pentagon's own UAP office. It went out under PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, the same programme that's been dripping these files out all year.
I've read through the documents and the case files behind the videos. Some of it is dry Cold War paperwork. A fair bit of it has an obvious, boring explanation. But a few of these cases are genuinely hard to wave away, and the one everyone's talking about involves six federal agents, two nights in the desert, and orbs that appeared to spit out more orbs. Here's what's actually in the release.
What's Actually in the Third UFO Release
The numbers first. The document bundle is 53 PDFs plus 10 digital renderings, around 826 megabytes. There's a separate 4.6-gigabyte video package: six FBI video clips and three NASA audio files delivered as video.
The material splits roughly into two halves. One half is modern — federal agents and FBI witnesses describing glowing orbs between 2021 and 2026. The other half is historical, reaching back to 1948, and it's mostly the CIA's old files on how the US and its allies handled the UFO question during the Cold War.
What ties it together is that the Pentagon isn't claiming any of it proves aliens. The official line, attached to everything, is that none of this confirms non-human technology. What the documents show instead is something more awkward: in case after case, credible people reported things that were investigated properly and never explained. Let's start with the one that made the news.
Orbs Launching Orbs: The Federal Agents at the Centre of It
The centrepiece of this release is what the files call the Western US Event, from October 2023. It's the case CBS, Fox and the Washington Times all led with, and it's the one worth understanding properly.
Over two nights in mid-October, six federal law enforcement agents — working in three two-person teams — were sent to watch for unauthorised drones near a sensitive national security site somewhere in the western United States. The exact location is blacked out. What they reported, independently, across both nights, was not drones.
They described three things. First, the orbs. A bright orange "mother orb" would appear for a second or two, expel two to four smaller red orbs, then vanish — and each time it did, there was a white flash over the horizon. One agent compared the way the orbs came out to "grapes being expelled from a basketball." Second, formations. Red orbs flew in lines, squares and triangles, and in at least two cases they simply hung in the sky for hours. One sat above a ridgeline far longer than any flare could possibly burn. Third, and strangest, objects that mimicked vehicles — a pair of lights hovering a couple of feet above a road that drifted silently off into the desert when the agents approached, leaving no dust, no sound and no tracks.
One agent's partner turned to him and asked, "Are you seeing this?" Another wrote that the objects seemed to "toy with us." The detail that sticks with me is from the agent whose account reads like a field log: every visible light went out at the exact same moment, the instant the agents got close or gave up the chase. He also found fresh, sharp-cut scrape marks in the ground around a plant the next morning, with no wind to explain them.
So what does the Pentagon make of it? The analysis comes from AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, signed off by its director Jon Kosloski. Their verdict is split. About 60% of what the agents saw is, they think, plausibly explained by military infrared countermeasure flares from a nearby exercise — the orange flashes, the red lights, the launching behaviour all fit. But the other 40% doesn't. Flares don't hover for three and a half hours. Flares don't follow a car down a road at 80 mph and then accelerate across four miles of rough ground in under a minute. There was no radar return, no aircraft transponder data, nothing on the deconfliction systems that should have caught a real aircraft.
The case is officially unresolved. For the unexplained portion, AARO's working label is the carefully bland phrase "unrecognised technology." That these were federal agents, trained observers with no obvious reason to invent any of it, is what raises the stakes. I wrote a full breakdown of this case when the first witness accounts surfaced — see Six Federal Agents Watched Orange Orbs Launch Red Orbs — and this release adds the FBI's own digital recreations of the agents' accounts.
When FBI Agents Saw the Orbs Themselves
The orbs aren't just a one-off in the western desert. A large chunk of this release covers a separate cluster of sightings in a quiet part of the northeastern United States, running from 2021 right up to 2026. Four of the six videos in the package come from here, all filmed within about 25 miles of each other.
It starts with one witness who reported plasma-like orbs near their home, hovering in trees, near water, sometimes close to the ground, and who claimed they were recording spikes in gamma radiation and interference with GPS and electronics whenever the lights were active. A neighbour independently confirmed seeing strange lights in the treeline. The FBI took it seriously enough to survey the property and plan overnight visits with equipment.
The standout document is the one where the FBI agents saw it for themselves. On one visit, both agents watched a bright white light sitting above a red light at tree-top height. It moved left, vanished, reappeared instantly at the spot where it had started, moved left again, and vanished. Earlier the same evening, a white pulsation had moved erratically over water for under ten seconds — without casting any reflection on the surface. Their photos came out blurred because they didn't have a tripod, which is almost funny, but two federal agents describing an orb that blinks out and reappears is not nothing.
A separate couple, interviewed in 2026, described a red sphere about a metre across with a "white plasma sun" the size of a basketball glowing at its centre. They watched two of them drift west in silent tandem "as if tethered," appearing to merge into one as they left. That sighting is the one behind the most striking of the released videos.
Five Soldiers and One Silent Object Over Cheyenne Mountain
Another modern case in the release takes us to Colorado Springs, in February 2022. Five US Army soldiers, around one in the afternoon under a clear sky, watched a matte off-white object hanging motionless and silent in the air to the west, over Cheyenne Mountain — the home of NORAD. They described it as oval, almost bean or potato-shaped, its surface covered in shifting, fish-scale-like panels. They watched it for several minutes. When they glanced away for a moment, it was gone.
What makes this one credible is the corroboration. All five drew the object separately, and the sketches matched. Two years later the FBI brought the main witness in and sat him down with a forensic sketch artist — the same process they'd use for a criminal suspect — and produced a detailed rendering. He described the object as appearing to "cloak" before it vanished.
The intelligence community's own assessment is in the file too, and it's a study in hedging. Their best guess is a low-confidence one: sunlight bouncing off snow and lighting up low cloud. The problem, which the assessment itself admits, is that all five soldiers said the sky was clear. They also confirmed no aircraft or balloons were recorded in the area, and that the object "did not represent an unknown adversarial capability." In other words: not a foreign threat, no good explanation, case left open.
The CIA Admits U-2 Spy Planes Were Half of All UFO Reports
Now to the historical files, because this is where the release earns its keep. Tucked inside is a section of the CIA's own internal history of the U-2 and OXCART spy plane programmes, and it contains one of the most quietly remarkable admissions in the whole archive.
In the late 1950s and through much of the 1960s, the U-2 flew higher than anything else in the sky — above 60,000 feet. Airliner pilots cruising far below would catch sunlight glinting off its long silver wings and report a "fiery object" hanging impossibly high. According to the CIA's own history, those flights accounted for "more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s."
Here's the part that matters. Project Blue Book investigators, the Air Force's public UFO desk, would quietly cross-check these reports against the U-2's secret flight logs and find the match. But they couldn't tell the public. The aircraft was classified. So they let people carry on believing they'd seen something unexplained rather than admit a spy plane was up there. It's the cleanest example you'll find of how a real secret can manufacture a fake mystery — and the government knew it was happening.
The UFO Statistic the Air Force Buried
If the U-2 file shows how much can be explained away, the next one shows the limits of that. The release includes Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, from 1955 — the most rigorous statistical study of UFOs the US government ever produced. The Battelle Memorial Institute crunched 3,201 sightings from 1947 to 1952 on punch cards, sorting each into "known," "unknown," or insufficient data.
The official summary said it was "highly improbable" that any of the reports represented technology beyond what was already known. That's the line that got quoted for decades. But the actual numbers tell a different story. Nearly 20% of all cases stayed in the "unknown" pile after analysis. And the detail they didn't put in the headline: the better the sighting, the more likely it was unexplained. For the reports rated "Excellent" in witness and data quality, a third stayed unknown. For the "Poor" ones, it was about half that.
That's backwards from what you'd expect. If UFOs were all mistakes, whether planes, balloons or the planet Venus, then the best, most careful observers should produce the fewest mysteries, not the most. A statistical test in the report found the unknowns were genuinely different from the knowns, with odds against it being chance running into figures with more zeros than I can usefully write here. An Australian defence analysis in the same release, held in CIA files, picked up exactly this point and accused the US of publicly abandoning the investigation while quietly carrying on collecting the data.
A Metal Disc in a Himalayan Crater
The single most concrete physical-evidence claim in the release comes from a 1968 CIA report on a wave of sightings along the Himalayan border — Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan — logged by Indian military and border personnel over about five weeks in early 1968.
Most of it is the usual catalogue: fast objects with red and green lights, bright enough to light the ground, often followed seconds later by a thunder-like sound. But one entry stands out. A metallic, disc-shaped object with a roughly six-foot base was reportedly found in a crater near Baltichaur, about five miles northeast of Pokhara in Nepal, with similar debris noted elsewhere. The overall pattern of the sightings suggested tracks running from the direction of Tibet toward the southwest.
This was 1968, with China and India both nervous about the other along that border, so there's an obvious intelligence reason to log every strange light in the sky. But a recovered metal disc in a crater is a different order of claim from a light on the horizon, and it's the kind of detail that deserves its own proper write-up.
The Night Zimbabwe Went on Military Alert
The most recent of the CIA documents, and one of the hardest to explain, is a secret 2008 cable. On 2 July that year, a disc-shaped object with a hollow centre and rotating, colour-shifting lights underneath hovered over Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe, then climbed away rapidly. It was tracked, the cable says, by "possibly both radar and optical means," and observers reported beams coming from it.
Zimbabwe went onto heightened military alert, partly because of this. Officials there argued over whether it was a foreign reconnaissance device or, in the cable's own words, "of extraterrestrial origins." What tells you the US took it seriously is the distribution list: the White House Situation Room, the Director of National Intelligence, the NSA, the FBI, the TSA and several military commands all received it. That's not how you circulate a curiosity. Radar plus visual, a military alert, no mundane explanation — it's the most clear-cut UFO report in the whole CIA batch.
Did the Astronauts Really See UFOs?
NASA's contribution to the release is the part most likely to disappoint, and I'd rather be straight with you about that. Most of the Gemini-era crew debriefings are routine engineering transcripts with no UFO content at all. The famous astronaut UFO stories mostly don't survive contact with the primary documents.
The release actually includes a 1998 NASA file that picks the big cases apart one by one. The well-known "cylindrical object with an arm" that astronaut Jim McDivitt reportedly saw on Gemini 4? The file shows that NORAD's list of nearby objects left out Gemini 4's own discarded booster, simply because nobody thought to ask about it — and the object was almost certainly that booster, seen while McDivitt's eyes were irritated. The famous "UFO photo" from that mission is described, by NASA and by McDivitt himself, as sunlight on a dirty window bolt. The Gemini 7 "hexagonal UFO" photo turns out to have been a deliberately retouched image of thruster lights.
There is one genuine oddity left standing. On Gemini 4, McDivitt and astronaut Ed White both saw parallel "curtain" lines of light rising near Australia, twice, and noted at the time that "this has never been reported before." That one reads as real and still a bit unexplained — though it's more likely exotic upper-atmosphere airglow than anything from elsewhere. And in one of the Apollo 16 audio clips, with the airglow being discussed, you can hear a crew member quip, "Could be an alien starbase or something, I don't know." It's a joke. But it's a good clip.
What the Pentagon Says — and What It Leaves Out
The Department of War's position hasn't moved. None of this, it says, establishes extraterrestrial origin or non-human technology, and it's promised to keep releasing files on a rolling basis.
That's true as far as it goes. What the official line skips over is everything the documents themselves admit. AARO couldn't explain 40% of what six federal agents watched over two nights. Five soldiers' clear-sky sighting got a low-confidence guess that contradicts their own account. A 1955 study found that the sharper the witness, the deeper the mystery. A 2008 object was tracked on radar and put a country's military on alert. These aren't cases that were solved and tidied away. They're cases that were looked into, properly, by serious people, and left open.
The honest reading of this release is that both things are true at once. A huge share of UFO reports really do have ordinary explanations — spy planes, flares, ice crystals, a bolt on a dirty window. And a stubborn minority, the same rough fraction that's turned up since the 1940s, still doesn't. The third batch of files doesn't close that gap. If anything, by putting the federal agents' accounts and AARO's own "unrecognised technology" verdict on the public record, it widens it.
If you want the wider context, my earlier piece on the 2026 release programme covers how PURSUE works and what came in the first batches.
Sources:
- Pentagon releases third batch of UFO files, detailing mysterious orb sightings — CBS News
- Pentagon releases third batch of formerly classified UFO documents — The Washington Times
- UFO files: Pentagon releases third batch of documents, videos — NewsNation
- Reports of glowing, red orbs included in newly released Pentagon UFO files — CBC News
- Department of War UAP file release (PURSUE)
