Mother + sub-objects

Between 1948 and 1950, 209 sightings of green spheres were logged over the Albuquerque–Los Alamos nuclear corridor, investigated under military sponsorship and acknowledged by AARO in the PURSUE R02 release: the first documented wave over US nuclear infrastructure.

Before dawn on 19 September 1976, two Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantoms tried to intercept a luminous object over Tehran; both lost communications and weapons systems on approach, recovering them as they pulled away. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officially validated the case from multi-sensor data.

On 17 November 1986, the crew of Japan Airlines cargo flight 1628 tracked two luminous objects over Alaska for some 50 minutes, plus a third described as "twice the size of an aircraft carrier". FAA radar at Anchorage correlated the contacts, and the agency officially logged the event as "unidentified".

During the 1989–1990 Belgian wave, two F-16s chased a triangular object that produced nine radar locks and computed accelerations of 46G; General De Brouwer presented the data publicly. The best multi-sensor dataset documented by a NATO air force.

Thousands of witnesses watched a triangular formation drift over Phoenix; a second event that night was explained as military flares, while the first remains unexplained. Governor Symington mocked the case in 1997 and years later said he had seen the object himself.

USS Princeton's Aegis radar tracked objects dropping from 80,000 to 20,000 feet in under a second; Cmdr. Fravor and seven other military witnesses observed the 'Tic-Tac', and the ATFLIR video was officially released by the Pentagon. The modern benchmark case.

A US Customs and Border Protection DHC-8 filmed with its thermal camera, for over three minutes, an object crossing from air to water with no apparent deceleration and splitting in two. Analysed as the only FLIR record of sustained transmedium behaviour, until AARO resolved the case as two objects drifting with the wind whose apparent speed came from parallax — a technical dispute that remains open.

The first PURSUE drop released the Department of War's series of UAP operational reports: mission reports (MISREP), 'range fouler debriefs,' internal correspondence, and sensor footage covering five commands —CENTCOM (Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, Syria, Iraq), INDOPACOM (East China Sea, Japan), EUCOM (Greece), AFRICOM, and the Department of the Army— between 2016 and 2026. It is not a single incident but the documentary set: each report tersely and mostly redactedly records that a crew reported an unidentified phenomenon. Its value lies in the pattern —reporting was sustained operational routine for nearly a decade across five theaters— not in resolving any particular sighting.

The 'USPER Statement' is an FBI-302 interview with a currently serving senior U.S. intelligence-community official —identity protected under source rules— about a first-hand orb encounter at a sensitive Western US test installation in 2025. After searching by helicopter the area where orbs had previously been seen, the team found a 'super-hot' orb hovering over the ground that traveled 20 miles at a speed impossible for the pursuing helicopter; a 'swarm' of lights then appeared, and four or five orbs flared up and down over half an hour. The official saw it with the naked eye alongside two pilots on night vision; other pilots and ground observers with NVG also witnessed it, and ground personnel took photos through night-vision devices. Declassified in the first PURSUE release (FBI-302) and expanded in the second (ODNI-UAP-D001 narrative).

In October 2001, hundreds of residents of the Chulucanas district (Piura, northern Peru) reported a wave of orange spheres maneuvering silently, splitting into smaller spheres and recombining; the Peruvian Air Force's Department for the Investigation of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (DIFAA) opened an official study.

In November 1968, a French physician (anonymized as 'Dr. X') saw from his window two luminous disks that merged into one and emitted a beam. After the encounter an axe wound and an old war injury vanished, and weeks later a triangular rash appeared on him and on his fourteen-month-old son. Documented by Aimé Michel and Jacques Vallée and published in Flying Saucer Review (1969), it is one of the most cited — and hardest to close — 'physical effects' cases.

On June 29–30, 1954, BOAC's Boeing Stratocruiser 'Centaurus', with Captain James Howard —a former RAF squadron leader— in command, was escorted for about 18 minutes and ~130 km over Labrador by a large dark object that changed shape, trailed by six or seven smaller objects in formation. All 11 crew and some of the 51 passengers saw it; it was reportedly tracked on radar at the USAF Cartwright station, and a fighter was reported scrambled from Goose Bay. On the ground, USAF intelligence interviewed the crew. A Tier A case: multiple professional witnesses, object with no firm explanation.

In the early hours of August 23, 1954, in Vernon (Normandy, over the Seine), industrialist Bernard Miserey and other witnesses —including a gendarme— said they saw a huge vertical cigar-shaped object, perhaps a hundred meters, hovering in the sky, from which several smaller luminous discs descended and moved off separately. It is one of the emblematic 'mother ship' cases of the great French wave of 1954, documented by ufologist Aimé Michel. Tier B: multiple night witnesses, no physical evidence, in the middle of a national wave.

Over two days in October 2023, six federal agents (three two-person teams) observed near a sensitive national security site in the western U.S. an orange 'mother' orb that appeared for 1-2 seconds and released clusters of 2-4 red orbs. AARO published the report on 5 June 2026 (director Jon Kosloski): ~60% correlates with IR flares and radar; ~40% remains unexplained.

On 17 October 1952, many residents of Oloron-Sainte-Marie (southwest France) described a tilted cylinder preceded by about 30 'red spheres with a ring' moving in zigzagging pairs, while a white filamentous substance —'angel hair'— fell on wires and roofs and vanished when touched. Ten days later it recurred almost identically in Gaillac.

On 7 August 1968, two employees of a camp on Lake Champlain (Vermont), Michael Lapp (16) and Janet Cornell (19), saw a light that split into smaller ones 'like pearls'; they woke on the dock with a 'lost' hour. Ten years later, investigator Walter Webb reconstructed under hypnosis two abduction accounts that matched each other.

On 4 October 1960, the Anglican minister Lionel Browning and his wife observed from the Cressy rectory (Tasmania) a large cylindrical object —a 'mothership' some 30 m long— from which several smaller discs emerged, coming out of a curtain of rain. A second witness described it as 'little ships around a bigger one'. The RAAF investigated and judged the witnesses credible.

Over the course of one night in 2026, two employees of a federal site in the western U.S. —on area-reconnaissance duty— spent hours observing a sequence of red lights: one that split into 6 to 10 synchronized lights, three-light clusters in a triangular pattern that 'never separated, as if attached to the same object,' and ground-level lights that closed to within 200 meters. Both witnesses, interviewed separately by the FBI, corroborated the account — and one unusual detail: one man's mechanical watch, which had never drifted more than a minute in five years, ended the night 25 minutes fast relative to every digital clock nearby.

A four-minute clip carries the title '29 October 2020 [CALLSIGN] (Mission) observes 3 fast moving UAP' — but the Department of War did not assign that title: it is the label of whoever uploaded the file to a classified network in October 2020, part of the same 50-video batch AARO located while responding to a FOIA request from eight members of Congress for 51 UAP-related records with no substantiated chain of custody. AARO's own timestamped visual description records only TWO simultaneous areas of contrast on screen —not three— for about 15 seconds around the clip's midpoint, and much of the rest is footage with no visible content while the sensor cycles its zoom. It was released in PURSUE's second drop.

In 2023, an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in the INDOPACOM area recorded nearly two uninterrupted minutes of three objects that, per AARO's official visual description, 'maintain a fixed position and orientation relative to one another' throughout the observation. Unlike most multi-object cases in the corpus —where objects typically appear and disappear, cross paths, or lose distinctiveness against the background— here the three contrast points remain stable relative to each other long enough that the analyst himself flagged it as a distinctive feature of the footage.

Between November 2021 and July 2025, civilian witnesses filmed on their phones four sightings of spherical lights within a 25-mile radius of a rural area in the northeastern United States. The FBI assessed the witnesses as 'highly credible' (the first three) or 'credible' (the fourth, with two independent witnesses), and the U.S. government authenticated at least one of the videos. The four clips —'Triangle-Orbs' (2021), 'Red Orb Rotation' (2022), 'Orbs Over the Pond' (2024) and an untitled fourth (2025)— were released in PURSUE's third drop (June 12, 2026) under a distinct series ('FBI-UAP-PR', not 'DOW-UAP-PR'), with supporting documents (FBI-UAP-D004 through D010) not publicly available outside DVIDS. It is, within the corpus, one of the few multi-year geographic recurrence patterns with an explicit FBI credibility assessment.

A mere 20-second clip circulates under the title '4 UAP Formation Iran 26 Aug 2022 over water' — suggesting a four-object formation off Iran. AARO, however, only assesses as 'likely' that the footage comes from a sensor within CENTCOM's area of responsibility in 2022, without confirming Iran as the specific location. The official visual description does support the title's core claim: four areas of contrast cross the frame together within about three seconds, followed by a fifth entering separately. Part of the 50-video Release 02 batch (FOIA/classified-network origin).

An 8-minute-16-second clip —notably longer than most videos in this batch, typically seconds to a couple of minutes— circulates under the title 'UAP USO Formation [CALLSIGN] (Mission),' suggesting an unidentified submerged object in formation. AARO's official visual description does show four areas of contrast crossing the frame together at the start, but warns the video was digitally altered before being uploaded to the classified network, with multiple internal cuts, and that its final five seconds are likely a repeat of an earlier segment rather than a chronological continuation. Part of the 50-video Release 02 batch (FOIA/classified-network origin).

In 2019, an event over the Pacific Ocean was documented in five separate recordings —catalogued DOW-UAP-PR123 through PR127—, captured contemporaneously and transferred by the Navy's Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) to AARO in 2022. Three are secondary captures of an infrared sensor display (someone filmed the screen, not the direct feed); the other two are hand-held recordings by a service member in low-light conditions showing 'several apparent light sources' entering and exiting frame as the camera chases them. It is the only file in this session's sweep with more than two independent documentary sources of the same event, and its provenance —a direct UAPTF transfer, not a find on a classified network via FOIA— is more traceable than the Release 02 batch's.