Senior U.S. intelligence officer: an hour of orange orbs from a military helicopter

PURSUE Release 02 is anchored by ODNI-UAP-D001, a USPER (U.S.-person) narrative authored by a currently-serving senior officer in the U.S. Intelligence Community. The officer describes, in the first person, what he characterizes as 'a series of close UAP encounters lasting over an hour' while flying onboard a U.S. military helicopter in late 2025.

As recorded in the narrative, the officer and the helicopter's pilots watched two large oval orbs flare up side-by-side, close to the aircraft and stationary just above the rotor disk. The orbs were described as orange in color, with a white or yellow center, and emitting light in all directions. Over the following minutes, the officer reports countless orange orbs flaring up and down around the helicopter, eventually forming a distinct triangular pattern before vanishing.

After the initial encounter, U.S. fighter jets were scrambled to the area. The officer reports that the same orbs they had observed near the helicopter then appeared near the fighter jets and, in his words, seemed to be 'chasing' them. After landing, the officer met briefly with the fighter pilots and concluded the narrative with what has become one of the most-quoted lines of the release: 'We were virtually speechless after these observations.'

This is the first publicly released first-person UAP narrative authored by a currently-serving senior U.S. intelligence officer to appear in the PURSUE corpus, and the most explicit modern in-service UAP testimony to enter the unclassified public record.