This is one of the strangest things in the entire government UAP record, and it didn't come from a pilot or a radar operator. It came from six federal law enforcement officers who were simply doing their jobs — watching for drones near a sensitive site over two nights in October 2023.
The Department of War put the files out on 12 June 2026, in its third batch of UAP records. There are five separate witness statements, an AARO analysis memo, a map and a stack of FBI renderings drawn from what the agents described. I've read all of it. This page lays out what the documents say, where the accounts agree, and what the official analysis could and couldn't explain.
What happened in the Western U.S. event?
In October 2023, three two-person teams of federal agents were posted near a sensitive national security site somewhere in the western United States. Their job was straightforward: watch the sky for unauthorised drones. The teams were spread out and worked independently, which is exactly why their statements matter — none of them was comparing notes in the moment.
Just after dusk, around 18:45 to 19:00, the first lights appeared. A large, luminous orange orb would show up for a second or two, push out two to four smaller red orbs, and then simply wink out. A bright white flash would go off over the horizon at roughly the same moment. Then it would happen again. And again. Across the evening the agents counted the cycle repeating at least five times.
That alone would be odd. What turned it from odd into genuinely hard to explain was everything that followed: red lights that held formation and then hovered in one spot for hours, objects that sat on the road ahead of the agents and refused to let them close the distance, and — in the early hours — material drifting through the air that several of them compared to cobwebs.
| INCIDENT DATES | Two nights, mid-October 2023 |
| LOCATION | Western United States — exact site redacted |
| WITNESSES | 6 federal law enforcement agents (3 two-person teams) |
| TASKING | Counter-drone surveillance near a sensitive site |
| PRIMARY PHENOMENON | Orange 'mother orb' expelling 2–4 red orbs, repeating |
| OTHER PHENOMENA | Hours-long hovering, geometric formations, vehicle mimics |
| OFFICIAL VERDICT | ~60% likely IR flares; ~40% unexplained |
| STATUS | Unresolved as of June 2026 |
| RELEASED | 12 June 2026 — Dept. of War PURSUE Release 03 |
Orbs launching orbs: the core sighting
The detail that gives this case its name is the launching. Every team described some version of it. A big orange orb would appear, hold for a beat, and then push out a small cluster of red orbs before disappearing. Witness 3 put it more vividly than the rest, saying the orange orb expelled three red orbs "like grapes being expelled from a basketball," and that the whole thing looked mechanical rather than like a firework or a burning flare.
There was never any sound. No engine note, no whoosh, no crackle. No smoke trail, no falling embers. The red orbs that came out didn't drift down and burn out the way a flare does — they flew. They took up lines, squares and triangles, moved with what one agent called "perfect, smooth coordination," and on at least two occasions a red orb simply parked itself above a ridgeline and stayed there for hours. Flares don't burn for hours, and they certainly don't manoeuvre.
"The orange orb expelled three red orbs, almost like grapes being expelled from a basketball. There was no sound, and no exhaust. It looked mechanical."— Witness 3 — federal law enforcement agent, Narrative Statement 3 (DOW-UAP-D081)
The objects that mimicked cars
This is the part that stays with you. Several agents described objects that behaved like ground vehicles — but weren't. Witnesses 1 and 5 independently reported a pair of lights, one a white square and one a round red light, hovering two to three feet above the road like a set of tail-lights. When the agents approached, the lights drifted off the road and into the scrub, silently, with no dust kicked up and no tyre tracks left behind.
Witness 2's account is the most cinematic. An object stayed ahead of their vehicle at 80 mph for ten to fifteen miles. When they gave chase across rough terrain at 70 mph using night-vision goggles, it accelerated a mile south in under a minute and reshaped into "orange and purple lights in the shape of a box," covering roughly four miles of broken ground in about a minute. The agent reached for the only comparison that fit: the flying car from the Harry Potter books. And then the strangest structural detail of the whole case — the moment the chase ended and the object stopped, every hovering light in the sky went out at once.
Witness 1 added something I keep coming back to. After watching an object hover and then float up to 15–20 feet, they said it became semi-transparent: "I could see a star through the object." Witnesses 1 and 5 both described thick, floating, cobweb-like material in the air near the low objects — and Witness 5 found fresh, symmetrical, sharp-cut scrape marks around a plant at dawn, with no wind to explain them.
The witnesses and what they saw
Five of the six agents gave written narratives to AARO. They were taken separately, and the overlaps are the whole point — independent observers shouldn't invent the same specific oddities unless something specific happened.
Witness 1 — Night Two
Saw a large circular "swirly pattern of bright lava" around 1,100 m off a hillside that vanished without fading. Watched the orb-launching twice. Described an object mimicking a car, then floating to 15–20 ft and turning semi-transparent — "I could see a star through the object" — plus thick floating "spider web" material.
Witness 2 — The Chase
The longest statement. An orb expelled 3–4 red lights that "accelerated instantly" and held formation, repeating about five times before hovering above the horizon for roughly three and a half hours. Chased a road object at speed; all hovering lights vanished simultaneously when it stopped. Said the objects "appeared to toy with us."
Witness 3 — The Airfield
The narrative the FBI later recreated on video. Orange orb expelling red orbs "like grapes from a basketball," looking mechanical and silent. Four red lights took up a square formation over each corner of an airfield. A vehicle below kept its distance, floated off-road, and left no tracks — "when the vehicle was gone, so were the orbs."
Witness 4 — The Pattern
The most chronologically expansive. Lights formed organised lines of three; "mother orbs" hatched smaller lights at least five times; nine lights held an even horizontal line above a ridge for 30+ seconds, then reappeared behind the witness. Described a solid object "slightly darker than the sky" seeming to use the terrain for cover.
Witness 5 — The Field Log
Reads like a timed log. 19:18 — a large red orb released two smaller red orbs, then a white flash to the west; repeated at 19:37. Around 04:30 the next night, white-square and red-round lights hovered 2–3 ft above the road before drifting to the bushes. At dawn, fresh symmetrical ground scrapes around a plant, and floating cobweb material.
The Sixth Agent
Six agents were present across the three teams; five provided the written first-hand narratives in the release. Their independence — separate teams, separate statements — is a core reason AARO rated the reporting as high quality rather than a single mistaken observer.
What did the official analysis say?
AARO's case-analysis memo — DOW-UAP-D077, signed by director Jon Kosloski on 5 June 2026 — is the spine of the whole release. It does something I genuinely respect: it splits the event rather than forcing a single verdict on it.
Roughly 60% of what the agents saw, AARO judged, was plausibly military infrared countermeasure flares from an exercise in the area. That accounts for a lot of the bright orange "launches" and the white flashes over the horizon. But the other ~40% — the red lights that hovered for hours, the objects that mimicked vehicles and reacted to the agents, the craft seen through night-vision goggles, the synchronised blackout of every light at once — has no radar return, no ADS-B transponder data and no deconfliction record to match it to any known aircraft or drone. AARO explicitly ruled out aircraft exhaust, standard battery-limited UAVs and foreign intelligence activity for that portion, and attached a provisional label: "unrecognised technology."
"The remaining observations are not attributable to flares, conventional aircraft, or known unmanned systems, and lack any corresponding radar, ADS-B, or deconfliction data."— AARO Unresolved Case Analysis Update (DOW-UAP-D077), June 2026
What the sceptics say
Honest coverage means giving the mundane explanations a fair hearing, and here they're stronger than usual.
The flare hypothesis. The single most likely explanation for the bright launches is military IR decoy flares. They're dropped in clusters, they glow orange, and from a distance a dispenser releasing several at once could look like one orb "spitting out" others. AARO itself attributes most of the event to exactly this. If you were only told about the launches, flares would be a tidy answer.
Misperception under stress and night vision. Tired observers, scanning a dark sky for hours through NVGs, can misjudge distance, speed and size badly. Lights with no reference points are notoriously hard to range. Some of the "instant acceleration" and shape-shifting could be parallax and the limitations of the kit.
Where the sceptical case runs out. What flares and fatigue don't explain is duration and behaviour: a flare cannot hover above a ridge for three hours, mimic a vehicle on a road, leave physical scrape marks, or coordinate a blackout of every light the instant a chase ends. That's the 40% AARO couldn't close — and it's why the file is still open rather than stamped "resolved: flares" and forgotten.
Timeline of the two nights
Why this case matters
Most famous UAP cases hang on one or two witnesses, or on a single grainy clip. This one has six trained federal officers, in three separate teams, independently describing the same specific and bizarre behaviour — and an official analysis that, having done the work, was honest enough to say it could only explain about 60% of it.
It doesn't prove anything exotic. Flares really do account for a chunk of it. But the leftover 40% isn't vague "lights in the sky" — it's hours-long hovering, vehicle mimicry, physical ground marks and a coordinated blackout, none of which fits a flare, a drone or a foreign aircraft. That's a strange thing for the U.S. government to publish about its own people, and it's why this is the headline case of the entire third release.
Current Assessment
The Western U.S. Event is the strongest multi-witness UAP case in the 2026 releases. The reporting quality is unusually high — six federal agents, three independent teams, five corroborating narratives — and the documents come straight from AARO and the FBI rather than from a third party.
AARO's own conclusion is the fair one: most of it was probably flares, but a real and specific minority of the observations cannot be explained by flares, conventional aircraft or known drones, and has no sensor data to pin it down. Until that 40% is accounted for, the honest position is that we don't know what those agents were chasing.
Primary source documents
Everything on this page is drawn from the official files released by the U.S. Department of War on 12 June 2026 through the PURSUE programme. You can read them yourself.
AARO Case Analysis Update
DOW-UAP-D077 · June 2026
AARO's formal analysis memo — the 60/40 split, the rule-outs and the "unrecognised technology" label. Plus five witness narratives (D079–D083) and the notional map (D078).
View on war.govFBI Digital Renderings
FBI-UAP-D014–D023 · 2026
Ten artistic renderings the FBI prepared from the agents' descriptions, plus two short video recreations of Witness 3's account (PR005, PR006). The images on this page are taken from this set.
View on war.govFrequently asked questions
What was the Western U.S. UAP event?
A two-night series of sightings in October 2023 near a sensitive site in the western United States, where six federal agents in three independent teams watched an orange orb repeatedly expel smaller red orbs, along with hours-long hovering, geometric formations and objects that mimicked vehicles.
What did AARO conclude?
Around 60% was assessed as plausibly military IR flares; the remaining ~40% — the hovering, the vehicle mimicry, the NVG craft — had no radar or ADS-B correlate and could not be explained. The case is unresolved as of June 2026.
Where exactly did it happen?
The location is redacted. The files place it near an unnamed sensitive national security site in the western U.S. A single grid reference appears in Witness 5's account before being blacked out.
Are the documents genuine?
Yes — published by the Department of War on 12 June 2026 at war.gov, including AARO's memo, five witness narratives, a map, ten FBI renderings and two video recreations.