Pentagon releases U.F.O. files, including Colorado potato-shaped sighting

A potato-shaped object hanging over Cheyenne Mountain is now part of the Pentagon’s latest U.F.O. file drop, but the release says more about the limits of government evidence than it does about any final answer. The third tranche under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters added 72 files and kept the focus on unresolved cases, even as the Department of War framed the effort as a broader push for transparency.

The Colorado episode stood out because of how specific, and how ordinary, the witnesses were: five U.S. Army members at Fort Carson said they saw the object in 2022 on a February morning in Colorado Springs. They described it as creamy-white, opalescent and potato-shaped, with distinct edges and irregular surface panels that looked like fish scales. The object, they said, hovered for about two minutes over Cheyenne Mountain before the sighting ended.

The case also shows the basic problem that shadows every disclosure effort: there was no hard visual record. The soldiers said none of them had phones on them, so investigators had no photos or video to review. The Department’s low-confidence explanation pointed to backscattering of sunlight, with the rising sun reflecting off snow and low clouds, while investigators said no aircraft or balloons were believed to be in the area and that it did not appear to be foreign adversary technology. The case remains unsolved.

That unresolved status is the point of the new archive, not a footnote. The Department of War said the PURSUE program is reviewing tens of millions of records across dozens of agencies, many of them on paper and spanning decades, and it plans to post more files on a rolling basis every few weeks. Pete Hegseth said the release is meant to bring “unprecedented transparency” and that the public should see the files for itself.

The Colorado report was not the only recent sighting in the batch. Another released case examined October 2023 reports from six federal law enforcement agents who saw a bright orange orb above a ridgeline, followed by two to four smaller red orbs, with one hovering motionless for several hours. Together, the cases show a government still trying to separate unusual observations from proof. The files add detail, but they also underline how much remains unverified, and how easily uncertainty can fuel speculation when the evidence is thin.