Western US Event: seven federal employees report orbs and a 'translucent kite'

Over a two-day period in 2023, seven separate United States federal government employees reported close-range encounters with multiple unidentified anomalous phenomena at a site in the western United States. The Department of War's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) groups the witness accounts into four categories of experience:

First: orbs observed at distance, with the witnesses describing the orbs as launching additional, smaller orbs.

Second: a single large stationary glowing orb observed at close estimated range.

Third: witnesses pursuing a large phenomenon close to the ground.

Fourth: observation of a large, seemingly transparent phenomenon that witnesses described as a 'translucent kite.'

In its official summary released as part of PURSUE Release 01, AARO writes that these events — combined with the consistency among the seven witnesses, the reporters' credibility, and the apparently anomalous nature of the events themselves — make this report 'among the most compelling within AARO's current holdings.' It is the closest the U.S. government has come to publicly endorsing a UAP case as inexplicable.

On 12 June 2026, PURSUE Release 03 placed the first-person record of the case on the public record: five narrative statements provided to AARO by federal law-enforcement special agents (the Release 03 memoranda describe the incidents as occurring over two days in October 2023 near a sensitive national-security site), a notional overhead map of the four incidents, ten digital renderings the FBI prepared in 2026 from the agents' descriptions, two digital video recreations, and an AARO analysis update stating that the case remains unresolved as of June 2026. One of the FBI renderings — a glowing orange orb hovering against a desert mountainside above a two-lane road at night — is the iconic image of Release 03.