The Colorado Springs "Potato" Over Cheyenne Mountain (FBI PURSUE Files)
On June 12, 2026 the U.S. Department of War released its third tranche of declassified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena records under PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. Among them was the strangest single object in the batch: a silent, opalescent, potato shaped craft that five U.S. Army personnel say hovered over Cheyenne Mountain, above one of the most heavily defended pieces of ground in North America, on a cloudless morning in February 2022. There is no photograph, because none of the witnesses had a phone on them. What survives instead is an FBI forensic sketch, reconstructed two years later from one soldier's memory by the same kind of artist the Bureau uses to draw criminal suspects, and a heavily redacted intelligence analysis that could only offer a low confidence guess. The government filed the case as unresolved.
What did witnesses see at Cheyenne Mountain?
On a clear winter morning in February 2022, five members of a U.S. Army unit stationed at Fort Carson walked out of an office building in Colorado Springs and looked west toward Cheyenne Mountain, a few miles away. One of them was a former Army intelligence officer. According to the FBI's later account, the day was a perfect "blue bird" sky: no clouds, little humidity, and a temperature of about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Hanging motionless over the mountain was an object none of them could explain.
The witnesses described it as roughly the size of a large aircraft, shaped like an angular, asymmetrical potato. It was a creamy, whitish, opalescent color and looked almost painted, slightly translucent with a faint shimmer that caught the sunlight in a milky glow. Its surface, in the most distinctive detail of the whole account, was made up of what the lead witness could only describe as articulating fish scales, or panels, that were non-symmetrical, non-overlapping and irregularly shaped. The body of the object stayed perfectly still, yet each panel shifted in slow waves, the ripples starting at different points of origin but moving at the same time.
The object made no sound and held its position for about two minutes. Then it was gone. The lead witness stated that it "cloaked" in the space of time it took to turn a head, vanishing instantly and leaving no shadow on the mountainside. By the time anyone thought to reach for a camera, there was nothing left to film.
The records carry a small internal discrepancy about the exact time. One government document logs the sighting at about 9:35 a.m.; the FBI interview report gives it as approximately 11:25 a.m. The archive notes the difference rather than papering over it.
What is the official explanation?
This is one of the rare UAP cases where the official paper trail is the case. There is no resolving explanation in it.
The Department of War published the file on June 12, 2026 as part of PURSUE, the disclosure program created by a 2026 executive order from President Donald Trump directing the government to find, declassify and release unresolved UAP records on a rolling basis. The third tranche held about 72 files spanning the 1940s to the present, drawn from the FBI, CIA, NASA, the Department of War and other agencies. The Pentagon's chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, framed the release as part of the administration's commitment to transparency. By the government's own definition, every record in the archive is an unresolved case, meaning officials could not make a definitive determination about the nature of the phenomenon.
The Colorado Springs incident was worked through the formal UAP reporting process; the military personnel reported it to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2023. The released material includes a heavily redacted four page analysis attributed to an intelligence community partner. Its subject line, visible on the cover page, reads: "USA/Colorado: An Airborne Object Over Cheyenne Mountain in February 2022 was Possible Backscattering of Sunlight." The proposed mechanism was that sunlight reflecting off snow cover on the mountain illuminated the underside of low altitude clouds, producing the glowing shape. The assessment was made with low confidence, and the same partner concluded the object did not appear to be the technology of a foreign adversary.
That low confidence guess runs straight into the witnesses' own testimony. The soldiers were emphatic that it was a cloudless "blue bird" day, so there were no low clouds for snow glare to light up, and no aircraft or balloons were thought to be in the area. The government did not adopt the backscattering idea as a finding. It left the file in the unresolved pile.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The five witnesses were members of a single Army unit, led in the account by a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, a category of observer trained to watch the sky and report it precisely. The FBI interviewed all five separately, and their descriptions of the potato shaped, panel skinned object lined up. Multiple trained military observers, questioned independently, converging on the same unusual object is exactly the corroboration by independence the archive weighs most heavily.
The most unusual part of the official response came years later. In July 2024, one of the eyewitnesses sat down at the FBI's New York field office, 26 Federal Plaza, with a Special Agent and a forensic artist from the Bureau's Operational Projects Unit, the same unit that reconstructs the faces of criminal suspects from witness memory. Over the interview the artist produced a sketch, and from it a digital rendering: a pale, scaly, potato like object suspended in a clear sky over a low mountain range, with the Colorado Springs suburbs spread out below. That rendering, file FBI-UAP-D003, is the only image the public has of the object, and it is the hero of this page. The fact that the FBI committed forensic-artist resources to a UAP at all, treating a soldier's memory of a sky object the way it would treat a witness to a crime, is itself part of the record.
None of the witnesses claimed the object was extraterrestrial. They described what they saw and let it stand: a silent, still, shimmering thing made of moving panels that hung over Cheyenne Mountain for two minutes and then cloaked out of existence.
Is the Colorado Springs "Potato" Over Cheyenne Mountain (FBI PURSUE Files) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the mundane candidates. The intelligence community's own low confidence offering was sunlight backscattering: glare from snow on the mountain lighting the bottoms of low clouds into a bright, shifting shape. It is the most serious conventional hypothesis on the table, and it has a fatal problem in the witness statements, which insist the sky was completely clear, leaving no clouds to illuminate. Other ordinary explanations strain too: a lenticular cloud can look smooth and metallic, but not articulate into independently rippling panels; a distant balloon or aircraft does not hold dead still for two minutes and then vanish in the blink of an eye without drifting; a mirage or optical artifact would not be seen identically by five separate observers questioned apart. The strongest honest mundane case is that trained but unaided human memory, recalled and re-drawn two years later, is fallible, and that with no photograph there is no instrument record to test against. As of the June 12, 2026 release no named independent analyst had published a method-shown reconstruction that resolves the object.
Pass two, if the account is close to accurate. A motionless, silent, large object whose entire skin moves in slow non-overlapping waves while its body stays fixed, that throws no shadow and then "cloaks" instantly, does not match any catalogued aircraft, drone or balloon. The location compounds the strangeness: Cheyenne Mountain is one of the most sensitive air-defense sites on the continent, and the witnesses were Army intelligence personnel, not casual passers-by.
That the United States government itself worked this case through AARO, tasked the FBI to forensically reconstruct the object, could only attach a low-confidence and internally contradicted explanation, and then formally logged it as unresolved, is an affirmative indicator that there is a real and unexplained event here, not a reason to dismiss it. Verdict: Unknown. No official determination exists, and no independent analysis has resolved what five soldiers watched hover over Cheyenne Mountain.
Sources
- www.war.gov/UFO/
- www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/061226/release_03/documents/FBI-UAP-D002_FD-1057_Unresolved-UAP-Report_ColoradoSprings_2022.pdf
- www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/us/mystery-potato-hovering-over-colorado-is-reported-in-latest-ufo-files.html
- www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2026-06-12/new-ufo-files-describe-spinning-discs-glowing-orbs-and-one-object-shaped-like-a-potato
- www.the-express.com/news/science/209525/ufo-files-released-colorado-springs-2022
- unknowncountry.com/headline-news/pentagon-releases-new-uap-case-files-including-colorado-springs-potato-shaped-object/
- ufotransparency.com/files/fbi-uap-d002-fd-1057-unresolved-uap-report-colorado-springs-2022
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