The orb search, a sworn statement on a multi-hour helicopter pursuit at a US military facility

Mikey · 21 May 2026

THE DOCUMENT

A three-page FBI sworn statement, classified SECRET//NOFORN, describing a helicopter search for and encounter with luminous orbs at a US military facility on an unstated date in 2025. Recorded as a US person (USPER) statement and released in PURSUE Release 01 by the U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov.

What this briefing is

This is the fourth briefing in the series. The plan stays the same: take one document, say what is in it, say what it reliably establishes, say what it does not, and assign an evidence tier.

This one is different in character from the Central Command mission reports. It is not a clipped GENTEXT block filed by an aircrew. It is a narrative sworn statement, written in the first person and in the voice of a named witness, recorded by the FBI. The witness is described in the document itself as “a senior US intelligence official”. That status, and the length and detail of the account, make it one of the more striking single documents in the release. It also makes it one of the easiest to over-read, which is why the framing below matters.

TL;DR

The statement describes an evening in 2025 at a US military facility. Acting on “previous eyewitness reports from personnel who observed orbs/lights” and reports of “thuds as if something has fallen and hit the ground”, a group that included two senior US intelligence officials, several federal partners and pilots from a state partner organisation conducted an aerial search by helicopter. The search ran for hours, from roughly 1700 until after 2300.

Across that evening the witness and the helicopter crew logged a long sequence of sightings: a “super-hot” orb seen on Forward Looking Infrared hovering at ground level, an orb that reportedly “broke into two objects”, a “swarm of lights” too many to count, and repeated formations of orbs that “flared up one at a time in a horizontal formation” and then flared down in reverse order. The witness states the orbs “appeared to break off” from the helicopter and “pursue the [MILITARY AIRCRAFT]” that were aloft on a training mission.

It is a vivid document. It is also, read honestly, a record of eyewitness observation under difficult conditions, in near full darkness, much of it through night vision goggles, by observers who were actively searching for the thing they then saw. That does not make it worthless. It makes it tier 2 testimony, and this briefing explains what that means.

What the document actually is

The file is a sworn statement, three pages, classified SECRET//NOFORN. It is written as a chronological account, timestamped through the evening, and ends with a short block headed “[WITNESS 1] Comments”. Names, dates, coordinates, call signs, facility names and organisation names are redacted throughout and replaced with bracketed placeholders such as “[CALL SIGN 1]”, “[SITE CODE NAME]” and “[MOUNTAIN RANGE NAME]”.

The structure tells you something before you read a word of content. This is the FBI recording a first-person account from a witness, not the FBI presenting a conclusion. A sworn statement captures what a person says they saw. It does not, on its own, adjudicate whether they were right. Keep that distinction in hand for the whole document.

The witness is identified in the text as “[WITNESS 1 (a senior US intelligence official)]”. A second senior US intelligence official, “[WITNESS 2]”, is also named, along with several “[FEDERAL PARTNER]” entities and pilots from a “[STATE PARTNER ORGANIZATION]”. The seniority of the witnesses is part of why the document carries weight. It is worth being precise about why. A senior official is a more credible reporter of events and less likely to be inventing an account. Seniority does not change how human eyes and night vision goggles perform in the dark. A senior witness can be a careful, honest witness and still be looking at something with a mundane explanation.

What the statement describes

The account opens with the reason for the search. “Previous eyewitness reports from personnel who observed orbs/lights” in the area, and reports of personnel “hearing thuds as if something has fallen and hit the ground”, prompted a daytime aerial search of a mountain range west of the site. The document also records, as a parenthetical note, that “Earlier that day” an office “completed a successful test” of something at the facility. The nature of the test is redacted. That single line is important and the briefing returns to it below.

The daytime search located “a large cavern entrance” but is otherwise brief. The substance of the document is the night sequence, which runs from roughly 2141 onward. In summary:

At 2202, after a Listening Post/Observation Post reported infrared “hits”, the helicopter crew were directed to intercept. The LP/OP reported spotting “an orb under FLIR” that they “described as ‘super-hot’ hovering at ground level”, which then moved off at “a high rate of speed” and “broke into two objects”.

The crew pursued but could not match the object’s speed. The co-pilot “reported seeing under NVG something emerge from the two objects”.

At 2218 the crew and the witness reported “a swarm of lights (too many to count) moving in all directions”.

From roughly 2227 onward the witness, by naked eye, and the pilots, on night vision goggles, repeatedly reported orb formations. The most detailed entry describes “two large orbs” appearing close to the helicopter, “oval shaped, orange in color with a white or yellow center and emitting light in all directions”, which “flared up” and then a third, fourth and fifth orb flared up below them in sequence before all “flared down in reverse order”.

This flare-up-and-flare-down pattern recurs at 2228, 2233, 2241, 2249, 2252 and 2257, in different directions and at different distances, sometimes near military aircraft that were aloft on a training mission. At 2249 the statement records “three distinct orbs in a triangle formation”.

The closing comments are the witness’s own. The witness notes the pilots “indicated they were recording”, but that “many sightings were above the helicopter which was outside of the helicopters FLIR camera angle”. The witness adds: “Some things I could not see with the naked eye, but I recall the pilots calling out sightings.” And finally: “The orbs appeared to break off from [CALL SIGN 1] and pursue the [MILITARY AIRCRAFT].”

Reading it carefully

Several features of the statement deserve a measured eye.

The observation conditions were poor by the document’s own admission. The search was conducted “in near full darkness”. Much of the detail comes from pilots on night vision goggles, and a good deal of it from a separate LP/OP team also using FLIR and NVGs and relaying by radio. Night vision goggles and infrared sensors are powerful, but they compress and simplify what the eye would otherwise see, and they make point sources of light hard to range, hard to size and hard to identify. A “swarm of lights too many to count” is a genuine observation. It is also exactly what an instrument-mediated view of distant lights produces.

The flare-up pattern is the most distinctive thing in the document and also the most double-edged. Orbs that “flared up one at a time in a horizontal formation” and then “flared down in the opposite order” are unusual as an account of solid craft. They are far less unusual as an account of light sources that brighten and dim. The witness comments themselves note that some sightings were called out by the pilots and not seen by the witness directly. The document does not, and cannot, establish what was producing the light.

The note about the test is the single most important line for a careful reader. The statement records that earlier the same day an office “completed a successful test” of something at the same facility, with the subject of the test redacted. The document draws no connection between that test and the orbs. But a responsible briefing has to flag it. When a military facility runs a test on a given day, and unidentified luminous objects are reported at that facility that night, the test is an obvious candidate context, whether as a direct cause, a coincidence, or simply a reason personnel were alert and looking up. The redaction means readers cannot assess this. It is the largest single gap in the document.

The internal honesty of the witness is worth crediting, in the same way the discipline of the CENTCOM aircrew was credited in Briefing 1. The witness does not claim to have seen everything. They distinguish what they saw by naked eye from what the pilots called out. They flag that the helicopter’s own camera could not capture the sightings above it. That candour is the mark of a careful witness and it raises, not lowers, the value of the account. It also, read plainly, tells you that the most dramatic claim in the file, that the orbs “pursue” the aircraft, is the witness’s interpretation of relative motion seen at night, not a measured fact.

What it reliably establishes

It establishes that on a date in 2025, a group including two senior US intelligence officials and several federal partners conducted a multi-hour aerial search at a US military facility, specifically in response to earlier reports of orbs and lights from personnel at that site. It establishes that this search was significant enough to be conducted by helicopter, to involve senior officials personally, and to be recorded afterwards in a sworn FBI statement. It establishes the witness’s firsthand account, in their own words, of repeated sightings of luminous objects that evening, including the recurring flare-up formations and a reported “swarm”. And it establishes that the military takes reports of this kind seriously enough to mount an organised, multi-agency response to them.

That is a substantial set of facts. The existence of the document, the seniority of the witnesses, and the scale of the response are all real and all on the record.

What it does not establish

It does not establish what the orbs were. The statement is testimony, not analysis. It records what trained but human observers saw, much of it at night and through optics, while actively searching for the phenomenon. Multi-witness testimony is still eyewitness testimony. Several people agreeing on what they saw makes honest error more consistent, it does not make it impossible, particularly when they were sharing radio calls and looking where they were told to look.

It does not establish that the orbs were anomalous, in the sense of defying explanation once fully analysed. The flare-up-and-flare-down pattern, the “swarm”, and the objects’ apparent speed are all consistent with luminous point sources whose true nature, distance and size the observers could not fix. The redacted “successful test” earlier the same day at the same facility is an obvious line of inquiry that the document leaves entirely open.

It does not establish that the orbs “pursued” anything. “Pursue” is the witness’s reading of motion. Two objects moving in roughly the same direction look like a chase. The statement is honest enough to phrase it as “appeared to”, and a reader should hold to that phrasing.

And it does not, by being a sworn statement, become proof. A statement is sworn so that the witness is on the record and accountable for the truth of their account. It raises the cost of lying. It does nothing to rule out honest misperception, which is the failure mode that matters here.

Where this sits

This briefing is evidence tier 2, primary document. The statement is an authentic, official, traceable government record of a firsthand account by senior, named witnesses. That is a strong tier and the document is one of the more compelling in the release. It is also, in the end, eyewitness testimony gathered under poor viewing conditions, with the most natural alternative context, the redacted same-day test, withheld from the page. Both of those things are true at once. The honest position is that this is a serious, well-documented account of something the witnesses could not identify, and that it does not, on its own, tell us what that something was.

Related wiki entries

The wiki entries below give background on the people, programmes and document types behind this briefing.

PURSUE · Department of War · AARO

References and further reading

• Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
• Source document: USPER Statement about UAP Sighting, FBI, PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov
• Briefing 1, Release one, what is actually inside the Department of War’s first UAP document drop
• AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
• On the limits of eyewitness testimony and night-time observation, AARO Historical Record Report Volume I, 2024, aaro.mil