In October 2023, six federal agents were stationed near a sensitive security site to locate drone operators. They saw orange spheres releasing red ones. Two and a half years later, AARO says about 40 percent of the phenomenon remains unexplained.
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.
Dusk settles over a valley in the western United States, October 2023. Two federal agents sit in a vehicle with its lights off. Their mission is entirely routine: find people launching drones near a sensitive security site. They watch the ridgeline, waiting for the small light of a drone operator. Then a sphere lights up above the hill.
Some cases begin with a dry form. This one began with a routine assignment. On June 12, 2026, the U.S. Department of War released a bundle of AARO documents—the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office—about a case officially called “the Western United States incident.” The central memo, signed by AARO Director John T. Kosloski, summarizes an analysis of a phenomenon reported over two days in October 2023, near a sensitive security site, around dusk. Five verbatim statements from the agents themselves were released alongside it.
The people who reported the sightings weren’t passersby. Six special agents, working in three two-person teams, were stationed at different viewing angles. They were there to watch for drone operators—people accustomed to telling one light from another, aircraft from stars. From different vantage points, they all described the same thing: a glowing orange sphere that appeared for a second or two, released a cluster of two to four small red spheres, and vanished. Then it happened again. And again, for hours.
The red spheres didn’t simply fall. They moved horizontally in a coordinated pattern, appeared to change altitude, and in at least one instance, one remained suspended above a ridgeline for several hours. The agents heard nothing. The phenomenon was silent.
The five statements read like five cameras capturing the same scene from different angles. Witness 1 described a sharply defined circle of light near a hillside, which a rangefinder later placed about 1,100 meters away: “like swirling lava,” with no visible structure around the edges, vanishing all at once without fading. Witness 3 saw an orange sphere alternating between transparent and orange in two- to three-second cycles, emitting three red spheres—“like grapes being shot out of a basketball.” Witness 4 counted nine stationary lights in a horizontal line above a ridge, and said larger spheres “hatched” smaller lights that fell like flares, more than five times.
“When the sphere was at an elevation of about 45 degrees, it emitted three smaller red spheres. The emission appeared mechanical.”
— Witness 3
Then the phenomenon came down to the ground. Several witnesses described encounters with something that looked like a car. Witness 1 recounted a vehicle with mismatched taillights—one red and one white, one round and one square—that didn’t bounce with the terrain but hovered, raised no dust, and kept its lights pointed at him no matter which way he turned. When they stopped, the lights went out and a dark object rose and moved away. An hour or two later, he saw it again, this time transparent: through its body he could see a star, the hilltop, and vegetation, “like looking at something through water.”
Witness 3 chased a vehicle that flashed its lights, couldn’t get closer than 100 yards, and saw it “hover” off the road over rough, roadless terrain. A later search found no tire tracks. Then came the sentence that ties it all together.
Witness 2, who described a triangular row of red lights above the horizon and compared it to the Phoenix Lights of the 1990s, wrote simply that the objects’ behavior was “inconsistent with physics” and that one seemed to be “playing” with the team.
This wasn’t an eyewitness sighting alone. The agents used binoculars, a rangefinder, night-vision goggles, and thermal binoculars. The equipment yielded some of the sharpest details. Witness 5 described a pair of lights—a white square and a red circle—hovering about two meters above the ground near a lake before dawn, gliding toward the sand and moving at 15 to 20 miles per hour. Through night-vision goggles, after the lights went out, a “thin, horizontal line, about four feet wide” remained, rising in altitude while staying flat. That morning, the agents found fresh, symmetrical scratches in the dirt around a particular plant, although there had been no wind the night before.
What do you do with all of this? AARO did what an anomaly-resolution office is expected to do: try to rule things out. Exhaust from a military aircraft was ruled out. A drone was unlikely. Military flares might explain about 60 percent, but not a red sphere suspended above a ridge for hours, beyond the burn time of any known flare and the battery limits of any drone. Activity by a hostile foreign power was highly unlikely. An environmental phenomenon was unlikely.
What remains is the gap. For about 40 percent of the sightings, radar and ADS-B data showed no known aircraft in the observers’ line of sight. After its initial analysis, AARO concluded, about 40 percent of the phenomenon remained without a reasonable explanation.
There’s one detail to keep in mind before imagining the scene. The document bundle also includes a map—a top-down diagram of the four events. But this map is neither a photograph nor precise. It was generated with the government’s genai.mil tool, and its caption makes clear that the phenomena were enlarged for illustration, distances are not to scale, and all locations are “conceptual.” In other words, the illustration is a reconstruction, not a record. Some of the witnesses’ accompanying sketches were also made with AI, about two and a half years after the incident, based on their descriptions.
That doesn’t diminish the testimony. But it’s a reminder of what this file does and doesn’t contain: five detailed statements from professionals, radar data, rangefinder readings, and marks on the ground. There’s no official footage showing the spheres. Witness 2 noted that video and audio were recorded during some of the encounters, but the agents themselves collected no image, video, or technical data at the scene.
AARO hasn’t closed the case. Its assessment is preliminary, and the office says it intends to continue investigating. The names of the site, lake, and base were omitted from the documents, as were precise coordinates—not to add mystery, but because the location is a sensitive security site and the agents are still active.
What remains on the table is exactly what makes the case compelling: six trained people, three viewing angles, two days, and one recurring phenomenon that no one has yet managed to name. Not proof, not a debunking—a documented gap that someone took the trouble to write up, sign, and publish.
Source: AARO memos on “the Western United States incident,” U.S. Department of War, released June 12, 2026 (DOW-UAP-D077 through D083).
