In February 2022, five service members watched a stationary object above Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. The FBI documented their accounts in two forms, an identification artist recreated the object, and an intelligence agency tried to explain it—with low confidence. The documents were released on June 12, 2026.
The Aliens editors
This story was put together by our editors from the original documents. Every quote, date and figure comes from the source files listed further down the page.
A clear morning in February 2022, around 9:35. Five U.S. service members step out of an office building at Fort Carson, Colorado. Someone looks west, toward the ridgeline of Cheyenne Mountain, about six miles away. There, hanging motionless and making no sound, is a white object. They watch it for a few minutes. Then, in about the time it takes to turn your head, it vanishes.
This story doesn’t begin with a headline. It begins with paperwork. Two FBI forms, a digital reconstruction of the object, and a four-page intelligence analysis were all released on June 12, 2026, as part of a document release on unidentified anomalous phenomena. Together, they document one brief event above one of the most sensitive sites in the U.S. defense system: Cheyenne Mountain, home to NORAD’s command center.
The first document is an FD-302, an interview report. In March 2025, an FBI special agent and a supervisory special agent interviewed one of the five witnesses, an active-duty service member, via Microsoft Teams. The second document, an FD-1057, records an earlier interview: on July 11, 2024, at the FBI’s offices at 26 Federal Plaza in New York, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer sat down with a special agent and an identification artist from the Operational Projects Unit. The meeting had one purpose: to reconstruct the object.
The third document grew out of his account: a digital reconstruction of the object above the ridgeline, set against a mountain-and-valley landscape on a clear morning. Not a photograph, not sensor data. A drawing built from a witness’s words.
The accounts in the two forms aren’t identical, but they overlap. In the FD-302, the object is described as dull white or off-white, nonmetallic, and shaped like a horizontal bean with a curved indentation on its underside. Its surface, the report says, was covered in intersecting lines or ridges that formed an abstract polygonal pattern across its body. The witness estimated it was about one-tenth the size of the mountain saddle, or about as large as a pool cue held at arm’s length.
The FD-1057 offers an even richer description. The former officer said the object was potato-shaped, with defined edges, and colored an opalescent, creamy white. It was slightly translucent and shimmered faintly. It appeared to be made of what he described as fish scales: asymmetrical, nonoverlapping, irregular plates. The object itself remained perfectly still, but each plate on its surface moved in slow waves, beginning at different points but all at once.
One detail is hard to shake: a stationary object with a moving surface. And after about two minutes, it simply vanished, without flying away or leaving a shadow.
Both forms note one procedural detail that’s hard to ignore. After the object vanished, the service members searched the western skyline but couldn’t find it again. None of them had a phone in hand to record it. So later, each drew what they remembered independently, then compared their sketches.
According to the report, all the drawings were consistent: a horizontal white, bean-shaped object with intersecting abstract lines. Five people, five independent sketches, one image.
The fourth document is unlike the others: a four-page intelligence analysis prepared by a partner organization in the Intelligence Community for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). It describes the event in measured terms: an object roughly the size of a large jet, completely stationary about six miles away, slowly changing shape before abruptly disappearing while the witnesses kept their eyes on it.
The analyst’s proposed explanation: the sun’s position relative to Cheyenne Mountain may have allowed sunlight reflected off snow-covered ground to backscatter. That reflected light could have illuminated low clouds in the area, perhaps explaining both the object’s appearance and its sudden disappearance.
But the document itself wraps the hypothesis in caveats. It is presented with low confidence, with uncertainty noted in three variables: the witnesses’ field of view, the amount of snow, and cloud cover. And it ends with a clear finding.
Here’s the precise discrepancy. The backscatter theory requires low clouds that could be illuminated. But the witnesses explicitly described clear skies, a bright blue day. The weather records themselves—from the Air Force weather agency and Weather Underground—point to partly cloudy to mostly cloudy conditions. In other words, the explanation depends on clouds the witnesses say weren’t there, and on figures that don’t readily agree with one another.
There’s also a small inconsistency within the analysis itself: the event is recorded at 9:35, while the calculation of the sun’s position refers to 9:45. Ten minutes, in a case that turns on the angle of the light.
And, as in most of the cases in this release, some things simply can’t be read. One entire page of the four was fully redacted. The name of the Intelligence Community organization that conducted the assessment is omitted throughout the document. The sentences remain, but the speaker has been erased.
The two forms close a small, unsettling loop of their own. The witness in the FD-302 said AARO contacted him in early 2024 and that he submitted a response, but that he was never interviewed, by them or anyone else, until the FBI interview in 2025. Nearly a year passed between the initial outreach and the actual questioning.
No aircraft or balloons were recorded as active above Cheyenne Mountain at the time. No sensor data was captured. What remains are five trained observers, four documents, and an object with no name attached to it.
Source: FBI forms FBI-UAP-D001 (FD-302) and FBI-UAP-D002 (FD-1057), digital reconstruction FBI-UAP-D003, and intelligence analysis ICA-UAP-D001. Released on June 12, 2026.
