THE DOCUMENT
(Unchanged: a small FBI case file from a September 2023 UAP sighting: several FD-302 interview reports (the standard FBI form for recording an interview) and one composite sketch. The interviews were conducted in late September and early October 2023 and the forms drafted in October 2023. The witnesses were defence contractors working at a test site with restricted airspace. Names, the exact date and the location are redacted throughout. Released in PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov.)
Why this one is worth your time
Most of what this series has briefed carries decades of dust: sensor video, aircrew reports, diplomatic cables, astronaut transcripts, policy memos. This file is from September 2023. The interviews were taken within weeks of the sighting, the forms typed up the following month, and the witnesses are defence contractors at a working test site, people whose mornings involve safety briefs and restricted airspace. One of them had personally restricted the airspace over the site that day. She looked up expecting to be irritated by an intruder in her airspace, and instead watched something she could not identify drift silently above the tree line, with a light at one end so intense that the phrase she gave the FBI was “like looking into the sun”. It is the case in Release 01 nearest to the present, with witnesses interviewed less than three years ago.
What the file says
This is tier 2 material: the FD-302 forms are authentic FBI records. An FD-302 is the FBI’s standard form for memorialising an interview. An agent interviews a person, then writes up, in the agent’s own words, what the person said. It is not a transcript and not a sworn statement. Every FD-302 carries the same printed footer, and it is worth quoting because it is the document describing its own limits: “This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI.”
The forms and the sketch. These forms record interviews. They are evidence that the interviews happened and evidence of what each witness told the FBI. The composite sketch belongs in the same frame: a composite sketch is an artist’s or witness’s drawing built from a witness’s memory. It is a picture of a recollection, not a photograph of an object. The file is also heavily redacted. Names, the precise date, the unit and the location are blacked out. That is normal for a released FBI file, and it does mean the file describes the case in general terms.
The morning, as the witnesses described it. A team of defence contractors was heading to a test site early in the morning to do drone and LiDAR testing. They had restricted the airspace over the site for the tests. At about 7:02 am they received a standard safety brief, got into three vehicles and drove out. On the way, a gate on the access road misbehaved: a witness operating it by remote fob found that it opened only slightly and then closed on three separate attempts, before opening fully on the fourth. The same witness noted there had been no trouble with that gate before and none after. It is logged plainly, as an oddity, with no claim attached to it.
The lead witness’s account. The contractor who had restricted the airspace looked up between roughly 7:15 and 7:30 am and saw an object to the southwest, somewhere between about 500 and 3,000 feet above the tree line, perhaps a mile away. It was already there when she looked. She described it as cigar-shaped and “metallic bronze in color”, about the length of two or three Blackhawk helicopters placed nose to tail and a little under half that in width, though the light made the width hard to judge. The light was the dominant feature: an intense diamond-white glow with what looked like a ring around it, at the eastern end of the object, so bright that looking at it was “like looking into the sun”. The object was almost hovering, drifting slowly from east to west, and completely silent. Her first reaction was professional irritation, because she had restricted that airspace herself, and only then did she register that the object was not an aircraft or a drone. She and another witness watched it for five to ten seconds, edging a vehicle forward, and then it “just disappeared” from a clear, cloudless sky, leaving no contrails. She noticed no effect on her vehicle.
The other accounts. Another witness, in a different vehicle, gave a noticeably different account of what may have been the same object: a bright white light, stationary over the horizon, that then moved to the right and vanished after about ten seconds. He estimated it was ten to twenty miles away, said it stayed the same size throughout, and offered his own explanation: that it might have been a meteor coming toward them and burning up. A third witness corroborated the group sighting, and added a human detail the form records faithfully, that a storm knocked out the television that night, that he was “still freaked out” and went to check whether other sets in the building were also out, and that he had “weird dreams” and slept poorly for the first two nights afterwards.
What the file does not say
What the object was. The file contains no photograph, no sensor data and no physical measurement, only visual estimates made by witnesses without instruments or reference points. Every figure in the lead account is an unaided visual estimate: the distance, the altitude, the size in helicopter-lengths, the speed of the drift. The witness herself flags the uncertainty when she says the light made the width hard to judge.
A single agreed description. The accounts differ in size, distance and character, from a structured bronze craft a mile off to a white light placed ten to twenty miles away that a witness thought might be a meteor. The file is several partial views of one morning, not one settled observation.
That the object caused the gate to malfunction or caused a witness’s poor sleep. Those details are in the record because witnesses reported them, and the FD-302 attaches no causal claim to either. The file records a gate that misbehaved and a witness who was shaken; it does not connect either to the object.
Any conclusion of the FBI’s own. The printed footer says these documents contain “neither recommendations nor conclusions”. Tier 2 records that the FD-302 forms are authentic FBI documents; it attaches to the forms, not to the object.
From the record
“This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI.” The printed footer on every FD-302
“metallic bronze in color” The lead witness, describing the object
“like looking into the sun” The lead witness, describing the light at one end
“just disappeared” The lead witness, on how the sighting ended
Where the case connects
This is the first contemporary multi-witness case in the series, with interviews taken within weeks of the event, where Briefing 9 covers the Range Fouler debrief and how a formal reporting form records a witness account. Set alongside it, this file shows the same thing in FBI form: an interview report capturing what a witness said, not a measurement of what was seen. Briefing 1 covers the release and its tier system.
The file also leaves three live threads, stated as facts. Names, the exact date, the unit and the location are blacked out, so every one of those facts exists under the ink, and a fuller release, or witnesses speaking on the record, would turn a case described in general terms into a checkable one. The team had restricted the airspace that morning for drone and LiDAR testing at a site full of test instrumentation, and the released file contains no photograph, no sensor track and no vehicle data; either nothing captured the object or something did and has not surfaced. And an investigation that interviewed several witnesses and produced a composite sketch may have generated more than this small file holds. Any later tranche that releases more of the case, or any instrument record from that morning, lands in this series when it does.
Read it yourself
The case file, the FD-302 interview reports and the composite sketch, is hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 01.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and the publisher behind this briefing.
References and further reading
- Primary documents: FBI FD-302 interview reports and composite sketch, September 2023 UAP sighting, witnesses interviewed late September to early October 2023, PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- Briefing 9 in this series, on the Range Fouler debrief and how a formal reporting form records a witness account
- Briefing 1 in this series, on PURSUE Release 01 as a whole and the evidence tier system