PURSUE Release 01: USPER Statement about UAP Sighting

  Redacted FBI Interview

PURSUE Release 01 identifies this as Department of State material from a late 2025 incident in the United States, released as a redacted PDF titled usper-statement-redacted.pdf.¹² The release metadata describes it as an FBI 302 interview with a senior U.S. intelligence official about a first-hand UAP encounter at a U.S. military facility.²

The public PDF does not name the witness, the facility, the mountain range, the operations center, the coordinates, or the partner organizations. It labels the primary narrator as WITNESS 1, a senior U.S. intelligence official, and places that person in a helicopter with pilots, another senior intelligence official, and federal and state partners.³

  Helicopter Search and Orb Reports

The statement begins around 1700 hours, when WITNESS 1 and the partner team departed by helicopter to conduct a daytime aerial search west of a redacted site after personnel had reported orbs or lights and heard thuds as if something had fallen and struck the ground.³ After a later landing, refueling movement, and night search, the helicopter was directed toward coordinates associated with a report from a listening post or observation post using FLIR and night-vision equipment.³

At about 2202 hours, the helicopter crew saw a possible aircraft on the horizon, while the listening post reported an orb under FLIR, called it "super-hot," and described it hovering near ground level before moving at high speed.³ The listening post then reported the orb changing direction and breaking into two objects. The helicopter moved to intercept but did not locate the orb directly; the statement says the orb came within ten feet of the helicopter and later moved far enough away that the aircraft could not match its speed.³

The next phase is a sequence of repeated visual reports. Around 2218 hours, the pilots using night vision and WITNESS 1 by naked eye saw a swarm of lights moving in many directions.³ Around 2227 hours, two large orange oval orbs with white or yellow centers appeared west of and above the helicopter's rotor disk, then additional orbs appeared beneath them until four or five were visible, flaring up and then down in reverse order.³

Similar formations were reported over the next half hour: four or five orbs west over the mountains, another formation east toward a redacted nearby town, a flare-up west of the site, a swarm with three distinct orbs in a triangle, five to six orbs near a local town, and four orbs over military aircraft as they descended to land.³ The helicopter returned low on fuel at 2316 hours.³

  What the Statement Can Support

The statement is valuable because it preserves a timed, multi-observer operational narrative rather than a loose anecdote. It separates several vantage points: WITNESS 1's naked-eye observations, pilot observations through night vision, and listening-post reporting through FLIR and night-vision equipment.³

It is still a redacted witness statement, not a resolved technical finding. The released file withholds the site, coordinates, aircraft identities, partner units, and much of the sensor context. WITNESS 1 also cautioned that some sightings were outside the helicopter camera angle and that some things the pilots called out were not visible to the witness with the naked eye.³

The record therefore supports a careful claim: a senior intelligence official told FBI interviewers that a helicopter search team and ground observers saw repeated orb-like lights near a U.S. military facility in late 2025, including formations that appeared, flared, moved, and disappeared. It does not establish what the lights were, what caused them, or whether any one observation shared the same origin as another.²³

  References

  References

1. war.gov ↩

2. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²