The Colorado UFO Orbs, October 2023

What Are the Colorado Orbs of October 2023?

The Colorado orbs are a Colorado UFO case made up of five files from a local police officer who filmed a light hovering near a highway in October 2023 and reported it to AARO, the Pentagon's UFO office. They were published on 18 September 2026 under a new "LLE" (local law enforcement) label: a one-page transcript and four phone videos. The case is listed as unresolved.

They arrived in the same release as the AAWSAP research papers, which got most of the attention (our guide to the sixth UFO file release covers the whole batch). But they are the only files in the release from someone who isn't military or federal, and they land in a month and a state that already appear elsewhere in the declassified record. This page sets out what each Colorado file says, in the order they were written.

What Did the Colorado Police Officer See? The Transcript

The officer saw a light he called an orb, about 300 feet up, which he says had hovered in one place for about 15 minutes before moving towards him. The transcript, LLE-UAP-D001, is his own narration while filming, and it covers just over a minute.

He opens by giving the time, his mile marker and his direction, all redacted, and then:

Police radio cuts in twice, both times redacted. Then he adds that it "has been flying stationary for about 15 minutes". There's the sound of passing traffic and a large truck, and at the one-minute mark comes the last line: "Okay, the craft is flying closer to me now. I can see it."

That is the whole document. It gives no colour, size or shape beyond the word orb, and it doesn't say what kind of radar he checked or how. The Pentagon's notes on the videos fill in one detail the transcript doesn't: the officer described the light as "silent" and as featuring "red, blue, and green flashing lights".

Why does "another orb" matter?

Because it's the most interesting word in the file and it can be read three ways. It might mean more than one orb was in view, that the officer had already seen one earlier that night or on another night, or that "orb" was simply the word already in use for these lights in a part of the conversation we don't have. The released files don't say which, and we won't guess.

Colorado Police UFO Videos: What the Four Clips Show

The four videos show a small point of light against a dark sky, filmed on a phone's rear camera, with the bottom half of most frames blurred by AARO to hide people and property. None shows a shape. Together they run to just over 18 minutes, and the 15-minute clip, PR002, is the one that matches the officer's "stationary for about 15 minutes".

AARO adds the same comment to all four, and it's the most useful sentence in the whole set for anyone trying to judge them. Phone cameras use autofocus and automatic processing that:

In plain terms: zoomed in at night, a phone can make a point of light look bigger, oddly shaped, pulsing or moving when it isn't. PR004 shows this happening, as headlights from passing vehicles twice throw the camera's filters off.

The 15-minute clip, PR002 (DVIDS 1023412):

And PR004 (DVIDS 1023416), the clip that goes with the transcript:

One small error in the release itself: PR004 is titled October 2023, but its own description says the footage was taken "in January 2024". The other three clips and the transcript all say October 2023. We've gone with the title and flagged it here rather than repeat either date as settled.

Colorado Springs UFO Sightings, October 2023: The FBI Triangle Interviews

The same month produced two more reports from Colorado, both from Colorado Springs and both describing triangles, not orbs. They are FBI interview records (FD-302s) released in the fifth batch on 7 August 2026, and they're covered in full on our black triangle UFO files page.

The first, FBI-UAP-D026, is a man interviewed in January 2026. At about 10:50pm on an October night in 2023 he and his wife were sitting on their back porch when something passed over the house. He described a triangle, possibly as low as 300 feet, with a haze around it, "ripples like you were looking at an object that is underwater", and "a band of silverish blue light" along its back edge. It was in view for four seconds. "The UAP was completely silent," the record says, and he lived near an airport and knew how ordinary aircraft looked and sounded.

The second, FBI-UAP-D030, is a witness interviewed in October 2025. Outside at work one evening between 8pm and 9:30pm, he saw a stationary grey cloud that looked pixelated, and a solid black triangle with a red light in each corner emerge from it. He judged it as big as the car park he was standing in, saw it bank sharply the opposite way to how an aircraft turns, and found the cloud gone when he looked back.

Neither interview mentions orbs, police or the other witness. Both were recorded two years or more after the event. Colorado Springs also has an earlier, better-known case from February 2022, the Cheyenne Mountain "potato" sighting by five soldiers, which is a separate event.

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Is the "Orbs Launching Orbs" Case in Colorado?

Not according to the files. The Western U.S. Event, in which six federal agents watched an orange orb expel smaller red orbs over two nights in October 2023, is placed only at a sensitive site in the western United States, with the exact location redacted. It's often grouped with the Colorado reports because it shares the month and the word orb, but nothing released puts it in Colorado.

It is by far the best documented of the October 2023 cases: three independent two-person teams, written statements, FBI renderings, and an AARO analysis that judged about 60% of what the agents saw to be plausibly military infrared flares from an exercise and left the rest unexplained. Our Western U.S. Event page goes through all five statements, and our first report on the orbs launching orbs files covers the release.

Are the Colorado UFO Sightings Connected?

Nothing in the released files connects them. What they share is a state, a month and some vocabulary. That isn't evidence of one event, and the reports describe different things.

The word orb also turns up across the same release in very different places: one drone crew over the Middle East in 2025 logged a white, round object, and another logged six small spheres. Those are military drone crews thousands of miles away. A shared word tells you how people describe a point of light at night. It doesn't tell you they saw the same thing.

What Could the Colorado Orb Have Been?

The files don't say, and they don't rule anything out. No explanation was offered, checked or rejected beyond the officer's own radar check. With the date, time and viewing direction all redacted, nobody outside can test one either.

What can be said is that a silent light hovering a few hundred feet up with red, green and blue flashes matches several ordinary things. A drone carries coloured lights and can hold position for a long time. An aircraft seen head-on at a distance shows red and green navigation lights and seems to hang still. A bright star or planet low in the sky twinkles through every colour as the air moves, and on a zoomed phone it can seem to drift and pulse. PR001 opens with a short, evenly spaced row of faint lights, the kind of pattern a line of satellites makes, though without a date we can't check that. None of this is a verdict. It's the list any of us should run through before we call something unexplained.

You can run it yourself next time. Check what you can see in the sky tonight for the bright planets, see whether there are ISS passes tonight over your area, and our guide to how to spot the ISS and satellites explains how satellites behave. Our UK night sky this week lists what's up, and if you're new to it all, stargazing for beginners covers the usual suspects.

How to Watch the Colorado UFO Videos and Read the Files

Everything here is public domain. Open the transcript and all four clips in our PURSUE files browser under LLE, which plays the videos and links a download from our own mirror. The two FBI interviews are there too, under D026 and D030. Our guide to the six US PURSUE releases explains the designations, and the UAP research hub lists every case we've written up from the primary documents.

Related Reading

Header image: an illustration generated with Google Gemini, not a photograph of the officer or the location. Transcript and video frames: LLE-UAP-D001 and PR001 to PR004, US Department of War via DVIDS, public domain. Triangle rendering: FBI-UAP-D031, public domain.