A Multicolored Sphere Filmed by Anoka Police, Minnesota (19 February 2025)
Just after 1:17 in the morning on 19 February 2025, a small group of Anoka, Minnesota police employees broke off a debriefing in a Domino’s Pizza parking lot to watch a multicolored sphere hang in the northern sky. They moved to the top of a parking ramp and watched it for roughly ninety minutes. One officer filmed it through binoculars on his phone. The report and the clip now sit in a federal UAP archive, closed with no explanation.
What did witnesses see at Anoka?
According to the FBI records, three or more employees of the Anoka Police Department, at least one of them a sworn officer, were finishing a debriefing after training in a Domino’s Pizza parking lot near the station when one of them noticed an unusual light in the sky toward the northern horizon. The group relocated to the top of the Anoka Municipal Ramp, a downtown parking garage, for a clearer view, and stayed with the object for close to ninety minutes in what they described as clear conditions.
They described a sphere that shifted constantly through red, blue, green and white. One witness account in the file calls the lighting a rapidly changing tie dye pattern that was inconsistent with the navigation lights of known aircraft. Another likened the structure to six hula hoops with lights running around each loop, stacked like the rings of an atomic diagram. Size estimates ranged from an SUV to a school bus, with the witnesses guessing it was tens of miles off and high up, though those are eyeball figures and should be read as such.
The motion is what the officers found hardest to explain. The object hovered, then at moments dropped lower in a slow side to side fall that one of them compared to a leaf floating down on a breeze. At other moments it jumped, appearing to cover thirty to forty miles in a few seconds, a behavior another witness compared to a stone skipped across a pond. One officer got in a squad car and drove toward it, reaching Elk River before concluding it was still too far away to close on. The object drifted in the general direction of the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, which sits northwest of Anoka along the Mississippi.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
The case exists today because the federal government released it. Three documents describing the sighting are part of the National Archives Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection, the federal repository created under the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, and they were made public in 2026 as part of the wider release of UAP files. The records classify the event as an unidentified anomalous phenomenon and reach no conclusion about what the object was. The case is logged as closed with no further investigative action, and no identification or prosaic explanation is offered in the file.
The National Archives also released a short piece of the officer’s video, the blurred glowing point seen above. Anoka Police Chief Andy Youngquist, asked about the matter when the files surfaced, confirmed that one of the witnesses was a sworn officer and said the department had logged no further sightings since February 2025 and held nothing locally beyond what the FBI statements contain.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The path the report took is part of what makes it unusual. The officer first brought the sighting to Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit founded by the former Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves to collect aviation and UAP reports from credible observers. Americans for Safe Aerospace interviewed the officer and forwarded the account to the FBI, which is how it entered the federal collection. Graves, discussing the case publicly, called the report credible and stressed that police officers are trained observers, while being careful to add that he does not take the position that the object was extraterrestrial.
The officers also described two related events. The same reporting officer said he had watched a similar object during a routine patrol two nights earlier, on 17 February 2025 at around 11:30 in the evening, for about ten minutes. And one account points further back to an unidentified object seen near the Anoka Ice Arena in September 2022, recorded on a cell phone. A second clip from the February 2025 night was reportedly shot by another witness about five miles away in daylight, said to show a possible racetrack shaped path, though that footage is not the one the Archives released.
Is the A Multicolored Sphere Filmed by Anoka Police, Minnesota (19 February 2025) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the mundane reading. A brightly colored point that sits low in the sky for an hour and a half, flashes red, green and blue, and slowly drifts has a strong everyday candidate: a bright star or planet low on the horizon. Starlight passing through a thick slice of atmosphere scintillates and splits into shifting colors, which observers routinely describe as a flashing tie dye or a rotating ring of colored lights, and a bright winter star such as Sirius or Capella, or a planet, would hang in roughly the same spot for ninety minutes and appear to ease downward as the sky turned. That a trained officer drove all the way to Elk River and still could not close on it fits something astronomically far away rather than a craft a few miles off. The structured detail, the six stacked rings of an atomic diagram, and the huge thirty to forty mile jumps are exactly the artifacts you get when a point source is viewed through shaking binoculars with a phone camera pressed to the eyepiece: the lens smears a bright point into rings and bokeh, and tiny hand movements read as enormous leaps. Aircraft holding in a pattern, a drone, or a lit high altitude balloon are weaker but possible alternatives. The released clip is too blurred to resolve any solid object.
Pass two, if it is not that. The witnesses were multiple, at least one a sworn officer, and they sustained the observation for ninety minutes rather than a passing glance. The reported second daytime clip from five miles away, if it shows the same object moving on a defined path, would be harder to fold into the twinkling star explanation, and the drift toward the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant echoes a pattern that runs through the rest of the recently released files, of orb reports clustering near sensitive or critical infrastructure. Under this archive’s method, the fact that the FBI accepted the report and that it sits in the federal UAP collection is not evidence against the witnesses; an official body logging a case is a fact about the case, not a debunk of it.
The case is filed as Unknown. The records themselves reach no conclusion, and while the leading ordinary explanation, a bright scintillating star or planet magnified through binoculars and a phone, is stated here plainly, it has not been demonstrated, and the daytime second angle remains unexamined.
Sources
- www.fox9.com/news/fbi-files-ufo-sighting-anoka-police-department
- www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-ufo-sighting-anoka-police-fbi/
- www.kare11.com/article/news/local/anoka-police-reported-seeing-ufo-in-the-sky-newly-unclassified-fbi-documents-show/89-84422569-79ca-4aea-a25f-4330112174cc
- www.pararational.com/minnesota-police-filmed-a-uap-for-90-minutes-the-fbi-has-the-footage/
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
