The FBI's orb files: four years of phenomena in one corner of the northeastern U.S. — witnessed by the Bureau's own agents

Across four years, one sparsely populated area of the northeastern United States — the FBI withholds the precise location, noting only that all sightings occurred within 25 miles of one another — produced a series of orb reports unusual enough that the Bureau opened an investigation, collected and authenticated eyewitness video, surveyed the sites, interviewed the witnesses, and ultimately documented its own agents' observations. PURSUE Release 03 declassifies that file.

The four videos: 'Triangle Orbs' (November 2021, ~5:00 a.m.) — a bright light near the horizon resolving into multiple lights in erratic rotational motion. 'Red Orb Rotation' (March 2022, ~7:20 p.m.) — two bright-red light sources, the lower rotating slowly around the upper, silent throughout. 'Orbs Over the Pond' (October 2024, ~6:51 p.m.) — a 'plasma-like sphere' hovering above a pond for roughly 45 minutes, intermittently changing shape and luminosity, at times separating into smaller luminous points, with a secondary light just above the water that did not appear consistent with a surface reflection. And the July 2025 'Northeastern Orb Sighting' (~9:00 p.m.) — a 'brilliant red sphere' about one meter in diameter whose center appeared to be a white plasma 'sun' about the size of a basketball, hovering 25 feet off the ground in a residential backyard at an estimated 90 feet from the witness, joined by an identical second orb; the two moved silently in tandem, 'as though they were flying in formation or tethered together,' before appearing to merge as they passed out of sight. Each video was captured on a private citizen's iPhone and, per the release notes, analyzed and authenticated by the U.S. Government, with edits limited to privacy-protective cropping.

The seven supporting documents track the Bureau's escalating involvement: FD-1057s recording video collection and witness interviews (October 2024), a site survey (November 2024), and — the standout document of the cluster — FD-1057-06, in which two FBI special agents document their OWN first-hand observations of unidentified anomalous phenomena during the course of the ongoing investigation in November 2024, followed by a December 2024 follow-up survey of the location where the agents had observed the phenomena. Two FD-302 interview records from 2025-2026 complete the file. The FBI's credibility assessments — 'highly credible' for the video witnesses, 'credible' for the July 2025 couple — are themselves notable: the Bureau rarely attaches witness-credibility language to publicly released investigative records.

The corpus is the most sustained officially documented civilian-area UAP case in the PURSUE releases to date: same area, four years, multiple independent witnesses, government-authenticated footage, and federal law-enforcement officers as eyewitnesses of record.