Key takeaways
- Message 00602874 (Category 405) on pages 322–323 of the NSA's May 2026 release is a Top Secret UMBRA cable headed 'Unidentified Flying Objects Sighted', with its date, place and source all redacted
- The cable describes a silent object with 'a luminous radiation of 20 meters extending in a spiral form from a black center' at 3,000 to 4,000 metres, which climbed and went east
- A second report in the same cable has an object descending 'in a spiral fashion' to about 2,530 metres and radiating an intense blue light, visible for one to five minutes
- The figure is 20 metres, not 22 or 24: the teleprinter's slashed zero has been misread in most coverage, including our own earlier article
- The witnesses' own guesses were guided missiles, a falling star, an airship and a satellite, and a rocket stage venting fuel fits the spiral better than anything else
Jump to section 7 sections
- NSA UFO Files: What Message 00602874 Is
- NSA UFO Files Page 322: The 20-Metre Spiral With a Black Centre
- NSA UFO Files Page 323: The Object That Spiralled Down Glowing Blue
- NSA UMBRA Redactions: What Was Cut From This Cable
- Spiral UFO Explanations: Rocket Fuel Dumps, Satellites and Balloons
- Why the NSA UMBRA Files Still Matter
- Where to Read the NSA UFO Documents
On pages 322 and 323 of the NSA UFO files released in May 2026 sits a short intelligence cable with a struck-through TOP SECRET UMBRA line across the top. Its header reads CATEGORY = 405, MESSAGE = 00602874, M = 12, and every page carries the NSA's release stamps Doc ID: 6904102 and Doc Ref ID: A2768997. The subject line, underlined by hand, is "UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS SIGHTED". It describes a silent 20-metre spiral of light with a black centre, a second object that followed it, and a third that came down in a spiral glowing intense blue. The date, the place and the people who saw it are all blacked out.
This is the tenth post in our Document of the Week series, where we take one item from our declassified UAP document archive and explain in plain English what it says. In May we covered the whole NSA UMBRA release at a gallop. This week we slow down and read one cable properly, because the most quoted line in the entire file has been misquoted by almost everyone, including us.
NSA UFO Files: What Message 00602874 Is
Message 00602874 is a two-page signals-intelligence report, printed on a teleprinter and later photocopied, stamped and redacted for release. The NSA does not investigate UFOs. It intercepts foreign communications, and when foreign networks talked about strange things in the sky, that chatter was translated and written up as an intelligence product. This cable is one of those products.
The layout tells you a lot before you read a word. Below the classification line are the routing fields (KZK RR, DE, FM, TO, EM) that in a normal cable would name the sending and receiving stations. All are boxed and blank. A second, inner classification line reads SECRET SAVIN, also struck through, which is the marking on most of the eyewitness cables in this part of the file (pages 313 to 326). Then comes "XMM", the subject, and "XCC", and finally the body text starting with "ON [redacted] SIGHTINGS OF UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS".
Two small boxes in the margins give the legal reasons for the blacking out: EO 3.3(h)(2), a section of Executive Order 13526 that lets certain records stay classified beyond the normal 25 years, and PL 86-36/50 USC 3605, the 1959 statute that protects the NSA's organisation, activities and sources. We will come back to what those redactions take away.
NSA UFO Files Page 322: The 20-Metre Spiral With a Black Centre
Page 322 of the NSA UFO files describes a silent object with a luminous spiral 20 metres across radiating from a black centre, seen at 3,000 to 4,000 metres before it climbed and moved off east. The body of the cable stitches together reports from several sources, each introduced with "the [redacted] informed [redacted]". The first is the one everybody quotes. Two unidentified objects were seen over the western section of a redacted place. The witness described the first as having, in the cable's exact words, "a luminous radiation of 20 meters extending in a spiral form from a black center".
The rest of that first account is worth reading slowly. The object's altitude was given as between three and four thousand metres. It "later gained altitude and went in an easterly direction without noise". A second object, "following the same trajectory, was sighted later at a higher altitude". And then the line that most retellings leave out: the observers "supposed these objects to be guided missiles". These were not people who thought they had seen a spacecraft. They thought they had seen a weapons test.
A second source, also redacted, "reported similar sightings but described the second object as a falling star". The same source added a third object "which appeared to be a dirigible", seen travelling north to south "at a very high altitude and a low velocity". An airship-shaped thing, very high, very slow: in plain language, a balloon.
Before going further, a word on the number. The Disclosure Foundation's own summary of this page says 22 metres. Our May overview said 24. The scan, read at 300 dpi, says "2Ø". The teleprinter that printed this cable used a slashed zero, and it uses the identical glyph in "253Ø METERS" a few lines down. So the spiral was reported as 20 metres across. It is a small correction, but this series exists to say what the document says, and we have fixed the figure in our earlier article too.
NSA UFO Files Page 323: The Object That Spiralled Down Glowing Blue
The final account in the cable is the strangest, and it runs over the page break. A third source informed someone that two unidentified flying objects had been sighted over another redacted location, moving east. Then, in the cable's words, "one of the objects descended, in a spiral fashion, to an altitude of approximately 2530 meters and radiated an intense" and page 322 ends. Page 323 picks up: "blue light. These objects were reportedly visible from one to five minutes."
Then the giveaway. "One half hour later, [redacted] saw a third object traveling in the same direction and they presumed this to be a satellite." The cable ends with the teleprinter sign-off "XXHH 420 NNNN" and nothing else. No analyst's comment, no assessment, no follow-up. Compare that with the neighbouring cables: page 320 says reliable observers "believe they are visual sightings of satellites or space debris", and page 326 ends flatly with "most plausible explanation of UFO's is that they are balloons". Message 00602874 offers no verdict at all.
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Every witness in this cable was guessing with the naked eye. A pair of binoculars turns a 'spiral with a black centre' into a plume you can watch drift and thin, and turns a 'falling star' into a tumbling satellite. New to them? Start with our guide to binocular astronomy.
Bright, wide and quick to point at something odd overhead. Enough to tell a fuel plume from a planet from an aircraft.
Bigger and heavier, but a high-altitude balloon or a spent rocket stage shows shape and motion at 15x.
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NSA UMBRA Redactions: What Was Cut From This Cable
The NSA redacted the date, the location, all three reporting sources and the sending and receiving stations from Message 00602874, leaving only the description. What was removed is everything that would let you test it. There is no date, not even a year. There is no country, city or region. The three reporting sources are blanked, so we cannot tell whether they were military radar stations, civil airports, police or a foreign news service. The stations that sent and received the cable are gone, which matters, because an NSA field site's location would tell us roughly which part of the world the intercept came from.
Two clues do slip through. First, the units. Altitudes are in metres, not feet, and the spiral is measured in metres too. American observers in the Cold War did not report in metres, so the original witnesses were almost certainly not American, and the cable is an English translation of foreign traffic. Second, the placement. This report sits among a run of similar SECRET SAVIN cables on pages 313 to 326 that, judging by their shared format and the "Category 405" filing code, come from the same collection programme and the same era. The Disclosure Foundation says the NSA's remaining exemptions cover material going back to the 1960s, which is consistent with the look of the print.
That is the pattern the Foundation complained about when it published the file: the pages that end "probably balloons" keep their context, and the pages describing something odder lose it. Page 322 is a clean example. The odd description stays; the boring details that would explain it are gone.
Spiral UFO Explanations: Rocket Fuel Dumps, Satellites and Balloons
The best fit for the page 322 spiral is a spent rocket stage venting propellant. A meteor, a balloon and a satellite account for the other objects, and the witnesses themselves suggested three of the four. Read as an astronomer rather than a cryptologist, this cable is less mysterious than it first looks, and the witnesses themselves did most of the work. Take their four guesses in turn.
Guided missiles. A bright, silent, spiralling light at a few thousand metres that climbs and drifts east is a decent description of a rocket launch seen from some distance, and a very good description of what happens after one. When a spent upper stage vents its leftover propellant while slowly tumbling, the fuel sprays out in a spiral, catches the sunlight (or, lower down, the launch's own glow) and forms an expanding luminous whirl around a dark core. That black centre is the tumbling stage itself. The 2009 Norway spiral was a failed Russian Bulava missile doing precisely this, and Falcon 9 second stages have produced blue-white spirals seen across the UK and Europe several times since 2023. "Visible from one to five minutes" is about right for a fuel dump.
A falling star. The second source called the second object a falling star. If so, it was a meteor, and meteors are far commoner than people expect. Our guide to the next meteor shower in the UK explains why a bright one can look like it is "following" something else in the sky.
A dirigible. Very high, very slow, north to south, airship-shaped: a high-altitude balloon, the same explanation the NSA's own analysts attached to most of the radar tracks elsewhere in this file.
A satellite. The third source presumed the last object was a satellite, and in the 1960s and 1970s that was already a reasonable call. A steady point of light crossing the sky in a few minutes, half an hour after a launch, is exactly what a fresh payload or its rocket body looks like. If you have never watched one, our page on ISS passes tonight will show you the brightest example, and the skill of how to spot the ISS transfers to every other satellite.
The intense blue light and the spiral descent on page 323 are the hardest parts to fit, but a stage venting propellant low in the atmosphere can look blue-white and can appear to descend as it drifts and the plume expands. None of this is proof. It cannot be, because the NSA removed the date and place that would let anyone check a launch log. But if you wanted to design a document that a rocket fuel dump would explain, it would look very much like page 322.
Why the NSA UMBRA Files Still Matter
If the likeliest explanation is a rocket, why did this sit under TOP SECRET UMBRA for half a century? Not because of the spiral. The secret was never the sighting. It was the fact that the NSA could hear a foreign network talking about it, which station heard it, and how. UMBRA protected the ear, not the object. That is why the description is now public and the routing lines are not, and it is why these files were fought over in court from 1980, when a citizens' group first sued, through the classified Yeates affidavit, to the Disclosure Foundation's FOIA appeal that finally produced these 334 pages on 18 May 2026.
It also matters for what the file is not. Message 00602874 is not an American radar operator, a Navy pilot or a Pentagon analyst. It is a translated foreign report, passed on without comment. The other cables we have looked at in this series, from the CIA's Sary-Shagan report to Brazil's SNI intelligence file, show the same thing: intelligence services collected UFO reports because they collected everything, and filed them under whatever marking protected the source.
The honest reading of page 322 is that a group of witnesses somewhere saw something bright, spiralling and silent, tried hard to explain it themselves, and mostly got it right.
Where to Read the NSA UFO Documents
The full 334-page NSA production is published by the Disclosure Foundation, which won the release on appeal. Pages 313 to 334 are the readable eyewitness cables; the first 300 or so are the Taiwan Strait radar traffic we described in our May overview. We hold a copy in our UAP document archive, alongside the US PURSUE releases and last week's look at the Pentagon's fourth-release UAP videos.
If you see a spiral of light with a black centre from a British garden, check a launch schedule before you check anything else. Then check what you can see in the sky tonight, because half the "UFOs" reported to us every year turn out to be Venus, Jupiter or a very bright satellite. Get to a proper UK dark sky site and you will see plenty of odd things overhead. Almost all of them have a name.
Sources:
- NSA Releases Hundreds of Pages of Formerly Top Secret UMBRA UAP Records After Disclosure Foundation FOIA Appeal — Disclosure Foundation, 18 May 2026 (includes the full 334-page PDF)
- NSA FOIA production, Doc ID 6904102 / Doc Ref ID A2768997, pages 322–323 (Category 405, Message 00602874) — read from our local archive copy
- UFO files released: New UAP documents from NSA obtained by Disclosure Foundation — NewsNation
- UFOs: The National Security Agency (NSA) Collection — The Black Vault, for the 1980 lawsuit and Yeates affidavit background
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Ian ClaytonAmateur astronomer and founder of WatchTheStars.co.uk, dedicated to helping others explore the wonders of our universe. Full profile →
