Two Official Accounts of One Night of Orange Orbs

At 10:27 one night in late 2025, a helicopter hovering over a mountain range in the western United States had two orange orbs flare up beside it, just above the rotor disk. Then a third lit up below them, then another, until there were four or five stacked under the first pair. A few seconds later they went dark in reverse order. Aboard was a senior U.S. intelligence official, watching with the naked eye while the two pilots used night vision goggles.

We know this because the government has now released two separate accounts of that night. The first is a three-page witness statement, logged minute by minute, that the Pentagon posted on May 8 in its first batch of UAP records. Coverage has described it as an FBI interview report. The second is a two-page first-person narrative from the same official, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence document released in the Pentagon’s second batch on May 22. Rep. Eric Burlison told the New York Post on Oct. 10 that he wants to explore whether intelligence personnel who witnessed the encounter could testify publicly. So we read the two documents side by side.

A debris search that turned into an intercept

The flight began as a daytime search. According to the witness statement, the helicopter, operated by a state partner agency, left an operations center at about 5 p.m. to search a mountain range near a sensitive facility. Personnel there had reported orbs and lights and “hearing thuds as if something has fallen and hit the ground.” The official’s narrative says the thuds coincided with UAP sightings reported over the previous several nights. During the afternoon the crew found debris several times. The narrative says each time it turned out to be remnants of rockets and other projectiles from years of weapons testing on the range. They also found and circled a large cave entrance.

Both accounts say a radar or sensor contact pulled them back out after dark. A ground observation post, using forward-looking infrared, reported an orb it described as “super-hot,” hovering near the ground before it moved east, then south at high speed, and split into two. The post then radioed that the object had risen and come within ten feet of the helicopter. That detail comes from the ground team, not from anyone aboard. The co-pilot, using night vision, reported something emerging from the two objects and heading off in a different direction. The helicopter couldn’t keep up and broke off. The witness statement puts the object some 20 miles away by then.

The orbs and the jets

Most of what followed was seen by the official with the naked eye and by the pilots through night vision goggles. According to the statement’s timeline, between 10:18 and 10:57 p.m. they saw a swarm of lights “too many to count,” the stacked formation beside the rotor, and repeated rows of four to six orange orbs. The rows flared on one at a time and off in reverse order, over the mountains and toward a nearby town.

Military jets were in the air the whole time. The statement records that at 10:07 p.m. the operations center reported five military aircraft conducting a training mission in the airspace, and later that the center had contacted them and they were on the way to assist. The official’s narrative says the operations center asked the jets to help identify the UAP. Several of the orb formations appeared over those aircraft. The narrative describes the orbs as matching the jets’ speed and flight path. The statement closes with the official’s own comment: “The orbs appeared to break off from [the helicopter] and pursue the [military aircraft].”

What only one version says

The two accounts agree on the sequence of events, but each carries details the other lacks.

Only the witness statement has a line the narrative never mentions. In a parenthetical note, it says that earlier that day an office “completed a successful test” at the site. The name of the office and the nature of the test are blacked out. It counts the military aircraft (five), and it blacks out the source of the “hits” that drew the helicopter back toward the orbs.

Only the narrative gives altitudes. The helicopter hovered at about 700 feet above ground for the closest sightings. It also describes the stacked orbs as a “T” formation and records that the pilots briefly considered landing because the objects were so close.

Neither account includes imagery of the closest encounters. The statement records that the pilots said they were recording, “however many sightings were above the helicopter which was outside of the helicopters FLIR camera angle.” The official writes, “I didn’t take photos, as I was focused on assessing what it was and whether it posed a threat.” Burlison told the Post that some witnesses have met lawmakers privately but haven’t shared all of the video.

A different case gets mixed in

Some coverage has blurred this incident with another one in the same release series. In June, the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) posted a case analysis of a separate western U.S. event, labeled “Orbs Launching Orbs.” In that event, six federal law enforcement agents reported orange “mother orbs” releasing smaller red ones over two days in October 2023. AARO’s June 5 memo found that about 60 percent of that activity was plausibly attributable to military aircraft. Flight logs showed aircraft in the area deploying infrared countermeasure flares during an exercise. The other 40 percent remains unresolved. That 40 percent is the figure Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist picked in June to lead the administration’s UAP science council, has cited as unexplained.

We did not find a comparable AARO analysis of the 2025 helicopter incident among the released files. The two cases share features: orange orbs, sequential flaring, mountain terrain and military aircraft overhead. But they are different events, two years apart, with different witnesses.

What the documents don’t claim

Advocates have described the 2025 mission as a deliberate operation to draw UAP in. Jordan Flowers of the Disclosure Foundation made that case on CBS, according to Liberation Times. Neither document says so. Both describe a search prompted by reported thuds and sightings, which then followed sensor contacts. The documents don’t say what the orbs were. They also don’t say whether the jets’ training mission involved flares or what the earlier test was. And they don’t name the facility, the agencies or the date. The official’s narrative ends with the crew landing, “virtually speechless,” and a quick debrief.

Burlison has said public testimony could be complicated. “There’s some people that are working for the agency that having them come forward publicly may expose other things,” he told the Post. He identified one witness as a career ODNI official who is not publicly known. House Oversight Chairman James Comer has said he hopes to hold another UAP hearing in November. No date or witness list has been announced.

Primary source: “USPER Statement about UAP Sighting,” Department of War UAP release 1 (May 8, 2026), archived copy, and ODNI-UAP-D001, “USPER Narrative, Senior USIC Official,” release 2 (May 22, 2026), archived copy. Read them yourself. Together they run five pages. Full context: the Pentagon’s release page at war.gov/ufo.