The Northeastern Orb Sightings (FBI PURSUE Files)
On June 12, 2026 the U.S. Department of War published its third tranche of declassified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena records under PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. For the first time the release was dominated not by military sensor data but by handheld civilian footage. Four of the videos, gathered and authenticated by the FBI, show luminous red and orange orbs recorded between 2021 and 2025 over the same sparsely populated area of the northeastern United States. The Bureau assessed the eyewitnesses as highly credible. The government released the files as unresolved cases, meaning it could reach no determination about what the objects were.
What did witnesses see at Northeastern United States (exact location withheld by the FBI)?
The clearest footage, logged as FBI-UAP-PR004, was shot in July 2025 at about 2100 local time. A resident parking their car after work saw an intense bright light hovering roughly 25 feet off the ground, just below a tree line near the center of their backyard, about 90 feet away. Their spouse came outside and also saw it, describing a brilliant red sphere about one meter across with a white plasma sun at its center about the size of a basketball. As the witness began filming on an iPhone 14 Pro Max, a second identical orb appeared hovering above the first, and the two drifted westward over the tree line together, silent and smooth, moving in tandem as though tethered.
An earlier clip, FBI-UAP-PR002, was recorded in March 2022 at about 1920 local time on an iPhone 12 Pro. It shows two bright red luminous sources near the horizon at an estimated 2,500 feet. Both held generally stationary, while the lower of the two slowly rotated relative to the upper, swinging from roughly a 6 o’clock position to past 9 o’clock. The witness heard nothing.
A third clip, FBI-UAP-PR003, was captured in October 2024 at about 1851 local time. It shows a light source below the horizon hovering above a pond at an estimated 2,700 feet. The Bureau’s description calls it a plasma-like sphere that intermittently changed shape and luminosity and at times appeared to separate into smaller luminous points; one point hovered just above the water in a way the analysts judged inconsistent with a surface reflection. The object stayed generally stationary for about 45 minutes before disappearing. The footage was cropped to protect the witness’s privacy, but the Government states no other edits or enhancements were made. A still earlier 2021 recording in the same area, FBI-UAP-PR001, rounds out the series.
More footage and images of this sighting
What is the official explanation?
There is no resolving official explanation, and that is the point of the release. The Department of War published these records in response to a 2026 executive order from President Donald Trump directing the government to find, declassify and release unresolved UAP material on a rolling basis. The third tranche, cleared for release on June 12, 2026, contained about 70 files: 53 documents, 10 images, six videos and three NASA audio recordings drawn from the FBI, CIA, NASA, the Department of War and other agencies. The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, said the materials were being released amid unprecedented public interest.
What the FBI did commit to was the credibility of the people who filmed the orbs. The Bureau interviewed the eyewitnesses, derived the written case descriptions from their statements, and assessed each reporting individual as highly credible. It also linked the recordings to one another: files FBI-UAP-D004 through FBI-UAP-D008 and the footage FBI-UAP-PR001 through PR003 are noted as corresponding to reports originating from the same general area. The objects themselves were left officially unidentified.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The witnesses are private citizens whose names and exact location were withheld to protect their privacy; the area is described only as a well known, sparsely populated part of the northeastern United States. They are not a single observer but several, across at least four years and at least two different iPhones, including a husband and wife who watched the July 2025 pair of orbs together. That recurrence, multiple independent witnesses and devices capturing similar luminous spheres in one rural locale over time, is the kind of corroboration-by-independence the archive weighs most heavily.
None of the witnesses offered an extraterrestrial claim. They reported what they saw: silent red and orange spheres, sometimes paired, sometimes structured with a bright core, that hovered and moved without sound. The interpretive weight was left to the FBI, which recorded the accounts, authenticated the footage, and declined to identify the objects.
Is the Northeastern Orb Sightings (FBI PURSUE Files) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the mundane candidates. Red and orange lights low over a rural horizon at night are the bread and butter of misidentification: aircraft and helicopter lights, the navigation strobes of distant drones, sky lanterns, flares, or bright planets and stars refracting and scintillating near the horizon. The slow rotation in the 2022 clip could be autokinesis, the illusory drift the eye gives a fixed point light in a dark field. The plasma-like sphere that hung over a pond for 45 minutes is harder to wave away, but a brilliant planet near the horizon can shimmer, bloom and appear to split through atmospheric turbulence, and 45 minutes of apparent stillness against a tree line is not impossible for an astronomical source. As of the June 12, 2026 release no named independent analyst had published a frame-by-frame, method-shown debunk of these specific clips, so every mundane explanation here remains a hypothesis rather than a demonstration.
Pass two, if the footage shows what the witnesses describe. A self-luminous red sphere roughly a meter across, with a white plasma core the size of a basketball, that pairs with an identical twin and flies in silent tandem, is not a navigation light or a lantern. The recurring signature across years in one locale, paired spheres, internal structure, shape and luminosity modulation, and a sub-point that hovered above water without a matching reflection, is internally consistent in a way recycled hoax imagery rarely is.
That the United States government itself retained this footage, had the FBI authenticate it and rate the witnesses highly credible, and then formally logged the cases as unresolved, is an affirmative indicator that there is a real and unexplained signal here, not a reason to dismiss it. Verdict: Unknown. The government holds no explanation, and no independent analysis has resolved the objects.
Sources
- www.war.gov/UFO/
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1010269/fbi-uap-pr004-northeastern-orb-sighting-2025
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1010267/fbi-uap-pr003-orbs-over-pond-2024
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1010264/fbi-uap-pr002-red-orb-rotation-northeastern-united-states-2022
- www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-pentagon-3rd-release-documents-videos/
- www.christianpost.com/news/pentagon-releases-third-batch-of-ufo-files-civilian-videos.html
- www.theepochtimes.com/us/discs-orbs-heavenly-phenomena-and-more-revealed-in-3rd-batch-of-declassified-ufo-files-6047307
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
