United States.FBI UAP still images · A series (linked by the official index to a Western U.S. test range, 2025)

In late 2025, at a sensitive U.S. government test installation in the western part of the country, a federal and state team was investigating several nights of orb sightings and dull thuds in the range's mountains. On the night described in the USPER case's FBI-302 interview, a listening post and observation post in the mountains, equipped with forward-looking infrared (FLIR) and night-vision goggles, reported a 'super-hot' orb hovering at ground level that then moved off at high speed, while a helicopter carrying a senior intelligence official tried to intercept it. This entry covers eight sensor still images linked by the official index to that event: the A series (A1 to A8), which the FBI submitted to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and which were published in the first release of the PURSUE system on May 8, 2026.

The official caption of each image is terse and nearly identical: the FBI gave AARO 'a still image derived from a U.S. government system'; the date and location of the event 'have not been provided'; the original imagery 'was altered with redactions' before submission; no mission report was attached, and the operator was 'unable to positively identify' the phenomenon. But war.gov's own official index partly contradicts that caption. It gives all eight images the incident date 'Late 2025', although its location field reads 'N/A' for all of them, and pairs them with two documents: the FBI-302 interview ('USPER Statement') and the same official's ODNI-UAP-D001 narrative, published on May 22. The official description of the 302 lists photos A001 to A008 and B001 to B024 and states that the linked photos 'are connected to a set of UAP encounters on a sensitive government testing installation in the Western US in 2025', observed by multiple personnel and sensors; the D001 narrative adds that it is accompanied by infrared imagery taken during the same exercise by other federal officials from the ground. The A series' link to that installation therefore comes from no location field, only from that pairing with the 302.

The images themselves are monochrome frames a few hundred pixels wide with an aiming reticle at the center, a graduated scale and black blocks over all the edge symbology, where the time, coordinates and sensor data would be. The background is terrain seen from above, with no horizon: arid slopes with scrub in A2 to A5 and smooth or streaked surfaces in the rest. In A1 and A8 the object is a small, dark, slightly irregular blot, just below and to the right of the crosshair; in A2 to A6 it is a sharper dark disc, at the center of the crosshair in A3, below and to the right in A2 and A4, and below and to the left in A5 and A6; in A7 it is a light object with a bright specular highlight, below the crosshair and slightly to the left. If the sensor was in 'black-hot' mode, common on FLIRs, dark would mean an object hotter than the ground, which would fit the 'super-hot' orb the observation post describes; but neither the polarity nor the platform, range or size has been published, so that reading is compatible rather than demonstrated.

This entry does not reproduce the FBI-302 interview, the ODNI-UAP-D001 narrative or the 24 B-series photos (B001–B024), which are in ↗; only frames A001–A008 are analysed here.

The A series was published as if it were a context-free set, and coverage treated it that way: eight FBI photos with no date or place. The official record says otherwise. War.gov's index, by pairing it with the 302 interview, links it to the same exercise as the USPER case, an event with several witnesses from the agencies involved, radar hits relayed by the operations center to the helicopter, an observation post with FLIR and fighter jets in the same airspace. That changes the weight of the images: they stop being orphan frames and become the sensor record of an incident described in detail in two official documents. The contradiction between each photo's caption ('date and location not provided') and the index that dates them and, through that pairing, places them is itself a finding about how the release was assembled, and should not be read as missing context: the context is published, spread across separate records.

Even so, what the eight images allow one to conclude is limited. A few-pixel dot next to a reticle, with no scale, range, time or sensor polarity, does not allow size, altitude or speed to be measured, and no frame shows shape, structure or propulsion. The setting of the event also brings serious prosaic and human candidates. It was a weapons range with years of rocket and projectile debris, where earlier that same day a test whose subject is redacted had been completed successfully; five military aircraft were flying a training mission in the area, and the orange orbs that flared up one after another in a row and dimmed in reverse order above the fighters resemble flares released in sequence. None of that on its own explains the hot object at ground level that the observation post tracked on FLIR, but it rules out treating the series as a confirmed anomaly.

On October 10, 2026, Representative Eric Burlison told the New York Post he would look into whether the intelligence witnesses to this late-2025 encounter, among them a career official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, could testify publicly before Congress, warning that bringing agency personnel forward 'may expose other things'. According to the same account, some witnesses had already met privately with members of Congress without handing over all the video recorded during the mission; as of that date no hearing has been announced and no witness confirmed.

What would move this entry is the release of the video the frames come from, or of the redacted symbology.