The Officer, the Reservoir and the Sphere the Size of a Mini Cooper (Fairfield County, April 2022)
A twenty-five year Connecticut police officer says a colour-shifting sphere the size of a Mini Cooper hung about thirty feet from his cruiser beside a Fairfield County reservoir, and the only footage he came away with was shot after it had already crossed the water.
What did witnesses see at Fairfield County?
Robert Klein had been a police officer in Connecticut for twenty-five years when, on an otherwise ordinary midnight shift in April 2022, he drove toward a reservoir in lower Fairfield County and found something already there. By his own account the shift had barely started. He was moving along a dark road with water off to one side when a light arrived behind him and to his left. It was not a distant light. It came through the back of the cruiser and filled the cab.
"I had just started my midnight shift," Klein told NewsNation's Banfield. "All of a sudden from my left rear, there was a really strong light, it lit up the entire cab of my cruiser to the point where I was having a hard time driving." In the longer version carried in NewsNation's written report he finished the thought: the light was so strong "I really couldn't see. I was blinded by it."
Klein stopped. He put the cruiser into park, rolled down the window and looked at what was producing the light. What he says he saw was a sphere hanging in the air roughly thirty feet away, glowing, cycling through colours, and making a sound. "It was a perfect sphere, and it almost looked like plasma," he said. "It was changing colours from red to green to white." Coverage of the same interview records the full colour cycle as red, green, white and orange, and Klein described the surface as constantly moving rather than solid, as though the object were made of light in motion rather than metal. He also reported a noise, which matters because it removes most of the silent candidates from the table: "It gave off a low hum, which was very distinct."
Size is where the account becomes concrete instead of atmospheric, and Klein gave the same comparison every time he told it. The object was about the size of a Mini Cooper. NewsNation's own wording put it "hovering just 30 feet from his patrol car". The Daily Mail's write-up of the same interview, by senior science reporter Matthew Phelan on 3 December 2024, rendered the same figure as thirty feet above the car, with Klein stressing that he got a "very close-up view of it" from thirty feet below the hovering object, and placed the encounter at about 11:45 p.m. Eastern. The archive cannot resolve which framing Klein intended, and flags the discrepancy rather than picking one, but every version puts a car-sized luminous body within about ten metres of a stationary police vehicle.
Then Klein used the cruiser's spotlight on it, and on his account the object left. It did not accelerate away along a track he could follow. "I couldn't see it go from A to B, that's how fast it moved," he said. The next thing he saw was the same light hovering across the water, on the far bank of the reservoir. Only then, with the object already at distance, did he start recording. "That's when I sort of snapped out of it and took out my camera and started recording and taking pictures."
That sequence is the single most important structural fact in this case, and aggregator headlines about a police officer who "captures video of a UFO" quietly bury it. The Mini Cooper sized sphere at thirty feet was never filmed. Everything on camera was shot after the object had crossed the water. The archive has looked at the frame of Klein's footage that circulated after the broadcast, and what it shows is a small bright point of orange-white light low over a dark treeline, with a reflected glitter trail running down the water beneath it and bare branches framing the right of the shot. There is no structure, no resolved sphere, no scale reference and no visible motion in a still.
There is no other footage. No dashcam recording exists because, on the account given in the Metabunk discussion of the case, the cruiser's dashcam was set to record only when the emergency lights were running and Klein had not activated them. There is no body camera video either. Weston police received state funding for dash and body cameras in April 2023, a year after the sighting. What survives of an encounter that lasted long enough for an officer to stop, park, lower a window, look, deploy a spotlight and then start filming is a phone clip of a light on the other side of a reservoir.
Klein's own framing was that of a man ruling out the familiar rather than reaching for the exotic. "I've seen my fair share of drones and meteors. This was something I've never come across before," he said. On the drone question he was flatly dismissive, saying it was not a drone and that he could guarantee that.
What is the official explanation?
There is no official narrative in this case at all, and that absence needs stating plainly rather than dressed up. No police department has ever issued a public statement about the sighting. No Federal Aviation Administration statement exists. Nothing in the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's published material addresses it, and there is no reason it would, because the encounter was never routed into any reporting channel that reaches AARO. Klein did not file a report at the time. He told the story publicly for the first time in November 2024, roughly two and a half years after the night in question, on a cable news programme.
The department itself is not even named in the original coverage. The Metabunk thread that opened the day after the broadcast begins by noting exactly that: "In April 2022, Lower Fairfield County, CT, near a reservoir (not clear which). A bright orb the size of a 'Mini-Cooper'. Officer Robert Klein - doesn't specify where he's an officer." Forum members subsequently identified him as an officer of the Weston Police Department, working from the department's own public social media, and NorCal Dave established that Weston abuts the Saugatuck Reservoir with roughly 2.2 miles of shorefront. That is the closest thing to institutional corroboration this case has, and it is worth being precise about what it corroborates. It confirms that the witness is a serving officer in the town people believe he serves. It says nothing whatever about what was in the air.
The reservoir has never been named on the record. Fairfield County has several, including the Saugatuck, the Hemlocks, Easton Lake, Aspetuck, Trap Falls, Mianus and South Norwalk reservoirs, and Metabunk members mapped four of them while trying to work out which one Klein meant. Their best reconstruction, argued by purpleivan, deirdre and NorCal Dave, points at the northern end of the Saugatuck Reservoir near the Newtown Turnpike bridge, and NorCal Dave noted that the most likely spot actually sits in Redding rather than in Weston, which may be why the officer stayed vague. The archive treats all of that as a reasoned civilian inference and not as an established location. The pin on this page marks Fairfield County, not a specific shoreline.
The archive also tried to establish whether any earlier record of the event existed before the television segment. The obvious place is the National UFO Reporting Center, whose Connecticut index would settle it. NUFORC blocks automated retrieval and returned HTTP 403 to every attempt, so the archive could not read the database directly. A Metabunk participant, triplekahuna, stated in the thread that he found no Connecticut UFO reports to NUFORC for 2022 matching this event. The archive records that as his claim rather than as a verified fact, and notes for balance that NUFORC receives Connecticut reports routinely, 106 of them in 2019 by one contemporary local count, so a blanket absence for a whole state in a whole year should be treated with caution. No MUFON case number for this event has surfaced either. As things stand, the oldest traceable public appearance of the encounter is the NewsNation broadcast of 27 November 2024.
One further point about the record, because it decides how this page is framed. The story resurfaced in news aggregation feeds in August 2026, which is how it reached this archive, but nothing new happened. The reporting is from late November and December 2024: the Banfield segment and Damita Menezes's article on 27 and 28 November 2024, Ross Coulthart's follow-up commentary on NewsNation Prime, Matthew Phelan's Daily Mail piece on 3 December 2024, and Brian Entin's second-witness report on 17 December 2024. This is a 2024 story about a 2022 event, and it is dated here by the event.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Klein has never claimed to know what he saw, and the consistency of that refusal is one of the more persuasive things about him. He offered no origin story, no craft, no occupants and no theory. What he offered was an elimination: a man who spends his working nights outdoors in a dark, wooded, well-trafficked corner of Connecticut, who says he has seen plenty of drones and plenty of meteors, and who says this was not one of them. His stated reason for coming forward after two and a half years was that he wanted other people who had seen something similar to know they were not alone.
The first person Klein contacted, according to NewsNation, was not a police supervisor, a journalist or a government office. It was Ben Hansen, the host of the Discovery+ series "UFO Witness" and a former federal agent. Hansen took the case, said on air that his team would be "going out to Connecticut on the ground", and reported that he had found further sightings in the same area, including multiple orbs seen at a local community centre. In a later Banfield appearance he said of the witnesses that "I was absolutely impressed by the impeccable testimony of each of these witnesses" and pointed to "the credibility and the fact that they're describing such similar things", adding that air traffic analysis had ruled out an aeroplane for one of the accounts.
That second account belongs to a woman identified only as Diane, who spoke to NewsNation's Brian Entin in a report published on 17 December 2024. Diane described watching a light near a Fairfield County reservoir in the same month, April 2022, and said of it, "The way it was moving, there's no way it was a plane." On the account given in the Metabunk thread by a participant who said they were part of the investigating team, Diane's sighting was at the Redding community centre and occurred roughly two months before Klein's, and she had photographed it but lost the images when she reset her phone. That last detail is characteristic of this entire case: every piece of supporting evidence exists in description and not in hand.
Both of the public advocates here are media figures with a commercial interest in UFO content, and this archive tiers their assessments as claims rather than treating them as authentication. Ben Hansen fronts a paid streaming series about UFO witnesses, and a compelling Connecticut case is professionally useful to him; his air traffic work and his site visit may well be sound, but the archive has not seen his paper and cannot verify a study it has not read. Ross Coulthart, NewsNation's senior special investigations correspondent, discussed the case on NewsNation Prime and made an argument from character rather than from evidence: "In this case we have a very senior police officer, a man of high credit who's worked for his community for 25 years," and "Why would he expose himself to public vilification and ridicule, or at least the risk thereof, by speaking about UFOs?" That question is a real one and deserves an honest answer, which is that reputational risk is evidence of sincerity and not evidence of anomaly. A sincere witness can be a mistaken witness. Coulthart's colleagues at Metabunk noticed the same thing, and triplekahuna's objection was precisely that Coulthart concluded a non-prosaic explanation was the only option on the strength of the description alone.
The archive's position on Klein himself is the standing one: witnesses are not on trial. Nothing in the record suggests he invented this. He has no visible commercial stake, he named himself, he was identifiable to his own department within a day of going on air, and he stayed conservative about what he claimed to know. Weighing his testimony against the thin footage he produced is not the same thing as calling him a liar, and this page does not.
The dispute
The counter-explanation for this case was not produced by any agency. It was produced by named members of the Metabunk forum in a thread opened on 29 November 2024, within about a day of the broadcast, under the title "Newsnation Benfield - Police Officer Robert Klein - Fairfield County, CT - 2022 Orb UFO". The thread ran to at least three pages and the participants did real work rather than simply scoffing. Their central argument is that the light Klein filmed and the object Klein described are two different things, and that the object he described is a reconstruction built after the fact from a very bright light source seen by a dark-adapted eye.
The specific candidates advanced were these. Z.W. Wolf argued for a helicopter with a spotlight, or alternatively a single large illuminating flare, noting that the glitter trail visible on the water in Klein's own footage indicates a light source close enough and high enough to lay a reflection across the surface. He and elvenwear both pointed out that Sikorsky Aircraft, one of the world's largest helicopter manufacturers, has a plant roughly eight and a half miles from the Saugatuck Reservoir and test flies newly assembled military airframes. Flarkey argued the footage "looks more like the lights from an aircraft that just taken off", noting the light dims as it tracks right. john.phil, having separated the footage, concluded "It just looks like an aircraft approaching a turning point". Members went to ADS-B Exchange for the relevant window: triplekahuna reported that on 29 April 2022 at around 03:37Z, which is 11:37 p.m. Eastern, a small aircraft crossed the northern part of the Saugatuck Reservoir at about 176 knots and 6,900 feet, and later logged two more low passes on 15 and 30 April. TEEJ reported "From ADSBexchange during that 03 UTC timeframe is a Dassault Falcon 900 that passed over at approx 3,000 feet", and Flarkey matched an aircraft visible in a screenshot shown on air to Air France 017 with a JetBlue aircraft hidden behind the tracker's own controls. Separately, Z.W. Wolf and deirdre raised negative afterimage: a dark-adapted eye hit with a bright close light retains an afterimage that follows the gaze, which would account for a light that appears to be in one place and then instantly in another without traversing the space between.
The reason this is a barely disputed case and not a strongly disputed one is that none of that work closed. No aircraft was matched to Klein's light. The ADS-B hits are candidates for a night in a month, not a match to a minute, because no exact date or time has ever been published. The helicopter identification was not confirmed either, and it was actually questioned by the one participant who had been to the site: a poster using the handle Throwaway, who identified as part of a research team that had visited Connecticut and run comparison tests, wrote "We did some tests with drones and sky lanterns while we were out there with results being published in our paper" and then "The most likely prosaic explanation for the object in Robert's video would be a helicopter, but after being out there myself could explain why I don't think the object in the video is a helicopter." That is a sceptical venue's own on-site participant declining to sign off on the sceptical answer. The thread ends without a resolution.
What the Metabunk work does establish, and establishes well, is a credibility gap inside the case rather than an identification of the object. NoParty summarised it as "no dashcam footage, no bodycam footage, and only some truly useless phone footage". John J. observed that Klein's description of a Mini Cooper sized body is not supported by the film, and that the instantaneous movement Klein describes is not visible in it. Jack Mallory objected to the vagueness of the location and to a two-year delay before the account was made public. Ravi questioned whether a distance of thirty feet can be judged at all against a featureless glowing object at night. Those are fair objections and this archive records them, but they are objections to the evidentiary value of the testimony. They are not a positive identification of a specific real-world object, which is what the strongly disputed tier requires. The case therefore sits at barely disputed: a serious, method-shown civilian challenge exists, it has narrowed the plausible range considerably, and it has not closed.
Is the Officer, the Reservoir and the Sphere the Size of a Mini Cooper (Fairfield County, April 2022) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, how this could be entirely ordinary. Start with the fact that decides everything else: the object Klein describes and the object Klein filmed are not demonstrably the same thing, and the only one this archive can examine is a small point of light across water. Take the bright light first. An intense white light arriving from behind and to the left of a moving vehicle at 11:45 at night, bright enough to fill a cab and blind the driver, is the signature of a small number of very common things. A helicopter running a Nightsun over water is one, and Sikorsky test flies newly built military helicopters from a plant about eight and a half miles from the Saugatuck Reservoir. Landing or taxi lights on an aircraft turning toward the observer is another, and a light source pointed near you and then rotated away dims from dazzling to faint in a second or two without moving anywhere at all. Aircraft were in fact overhead in that period: Metabunk members pulled ADS-B Exchange tracks showing a Dassault Falcon 900 at about 3,000 feet in the relevant hour and small aircraft crossing the reservoir at 6,900, 3,350 and 2,625 feet on nights in late April 2022. None of them is matched to Klein's minute, because his minute has never been published.
Now take the perception. A police officer on a midnight shift is fully dark-adapted, and a dark-adapted eye hit by a close, intense light produces a bleached afterimage that persists for many seconds and travels with the gaze. That is the honest explanation for the strangest element of the account, the instantaneous relocation across the water, and it was raised in the Metabunk thread by Z.W. Wolf and deirdre. A negative afterimage does not travel from A to B because it was never at A. It appears wherever the eye is pointed next, which is exactly what Klein describes. Mendel set out the same sequence more simply: a bright light, then the bright light switching off or turning away, then the observer noticing a dim light in roughly the same direction and reading it as the same object having moved. Size and range compound the problem. A featureless glowing ball at night carries no scale cue whatsoever, so "about the size of a Mini Cooper at thirty feet" is not a measurement, it is a size and a distance chosen together to be consistent with each other; the same appearance is produced by something much larger and much further away. Ravi made this objection in the thread and it is the strongest single point against the case.
The more prosaic candidates deserve the same treatment. Ball lightning is invoked constantly for glowing spheres and is almost never the right answer, because it is rare, short-lived and associated with thunderstorms, and nothing in the reporting mentions weather. A plasma or corona discharge from transmission infrastructure is superficially attractive because reservoirs often sit near power lines, but corona is a small, fixed, violet phenomenon that does not cross a body of water or hum in the way described. Drones existed in numbers by 2022 and can hover, change colour and hum, which is why they cannot be dismissed simply because the witness dismissed them; Klein's certainty that it was not a drone is a professional judgement, not a measurement, and consumer drones of that era were bright, quiet and capable of very fast departures. A second police unit's lightbar or a spotlight from another vehicle is worth naming for completeness and fits the initial dazzle, though not the object on the far bank. Finally, the hoax option deserves a sentence and then dismissal: there is no motive visible, no money involved, no anonymity, and a named serving officer exposing himself to ridicule for nothing is a poor fit for a fabrication.
Pass two, what resists the ordinary reading. Three things do. The hum is one. A distinctly audible low hum from a source thirty feet away is not produced by a helicopter miles off, is not produced by an afterimage, and is not produced by a light on the opposite shore, so either Klein is describing something genuinely near him or he has attached a memory of aircraft noise to the wrong object. The behaviour is another. On the account, the object was stationary and close, remained so while an officer stopped, parked and lowered a window, and departed only when a spotlight was put on it. A reaction to being illuminated is not a property of a passing aircraft on a fixed track. Third, there is a second independent witness at the same reservoir in the same month who was not recruited by Klein and who says of her own sighting, "The way it was moving, there's no way it was a plane." Corroboration by a stranger to the same place at the same period is worth something even when the corroborating detail is thin, and Ben Hansen reported further witnesses beyond her.
Set against that, the case's own evidence undercuts it. The footage does not show what the witness describes, and John J. was right to say so. There is no dashcam and no bodycam. No date, no time and no location have ever been published with enough precision to be checked against radar, air traffic or weather. The account reached the public two and a half years late through an entertainment-adjacent route rather than an investigative one. Diane's photographs were deleted. Ben Hansen's paper has not been produced for the archive to read.
The tier is Barely Disputed. A named, method-shown civilian challenge exists, built by identifiable Metabunk participants who pulled real ADS-B tracks, mapped the candidate reservoirs, applied the physiology of afterimages and analysed the video frame by frame, and that work has narrowed the case considerably. But it did not close it. No aircraft, helicopter or flare was ever matched to Klein's encounter, and the one participant in that thread who actually visited the site declined to endorse the helicopter answer. Strongly Disputed requires a positive identification of the specific real-world cause and there is none here. Unknown would be too generous, because it would imply the case rests undisturbed on its footage and witnesses, when in fact the footage does not support the central claim and a serious civilian analysis has raised specific, evidenced alternatives. What is left is a credible man, a genuinely strange fifteen minutes, and almost no evidence of it.
Sources
- www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/police-suspected-ufo-video-connecticut/
- www.newsnationnow.com/banfield/suspected-ufo-connecticut-2nd-witness-2022-sighting/
- www.newsnationnow.com/video/connecticut-officer-seeing-ufo-has-no-other-explanation-ross-coulthart-newsnation-prime/10259700/
- www.yahoo.com/news/2022-ufo-sighting-connecticut-object-032400699.html
- www.newsbreak.com/newsnation-2045693/3693673451051-police-officer-captures-video-of-suspected-ufo-in-connecticut
- www.newsbreak.com/newsnation-2045693/3718735170349-suspected-ufo-in-connecticut-witness-to-2022-sighting-speaks-out
- www.newsbreak.com/daily-mail-560402/3699717268796-connecticut-police-officer-captures-ufo-the-size-of-a-mini-cooper-hovering-30-feet-above-his-patrol-car
- www.metabunk.org/threads/newsnation-benfield-police-officer-robert-klein-fairfield-county-ct-2022-orb-ufo.13792/
- www.metabunk.org/threads/newsnation-benfield-police-officer-robert-klein-fairfield-county-ct-2022-orb-ufo.13792/page-2
- www.metabunk.org/threads/newsnation-benfield-police-officer-robert-klein-fairfield-county-ct-2022-orb-ufo.13792/page-3
- anomalien.com/veteran-officer-captures-mysterious-bright-ufo-over-connecticut/
- brobible.com/culture/article/connecticut-police-officer-no-explanation-ufo-encounter/
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ks_xYdel28
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mQwimwqokY
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=1njqjlhsDak
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
