Analysis: Colorado Springs UAP Incident, 2022 — Intelligence Community File
This document contains analysis by an All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Intelligence Community (IC) partner to account for a 2022 incident involving an airborne object near Colorado Springs, Colorado. U.S. military service members reported the incident to AARO in 2023.
Incident Overview
At 9:35 on the morning of February 15, 2022, five U.S. Army service members leaving their office building at Fort Carson, Colorado looked west and saw something hanging over Cheyenne Mountain. Their descriptions, gathered in the documents released with this analysis, are unusually specific: an object roughly the size of a large jet, shaped like “an angular, non-symmetrical potato made of uneven panels,” creamy white and slightly translucent with a milky shimmer that caught the sunlight, its surface composed of irregular, non-overlapping plates one witness later compared to articulating fish scales — each panel seeming to shimmer independently. It hovered completely stationary three to five hundred feet above the mountain’s silhouette, slowly changing shape, for somewhere between thirty seconds and three minutes. The sky was cloudless — a “blue bird” day, one witness called it. Then, while they watched, it disappeared.
The location is the report’s gravitational center. Cheyenne Mountain houses the hardened command complex most associated with NORAD — the joint U.S.–Canadian command responsible for detecting exactly the kind of thing the witnesses were describing. An unidentified object reported hovering over that particular mountain by soldiers at the adjacent Army post lands this case squarely in the longest-running documented pattern in the government’s UAP record: anomalous reports at sensitive defense and nuclear sites, a thread the PURSUE corpus traces from Sandia Base in 1948 forward.
The analysis released here, produced by an Intelligence Community agency whose name is redacted, concludes the object “was possibly backscattering of sunlight” — and immediately undercuts its own conclusion by assigning it low confidence, citing uncertainty about each witness’s field of view, the snow cover on the mountain, and the cloud and elevation geometry. Both halves of that judgment deserve to travel together. The agency found no anomalous instrument data, no recorded characteristics, and no indication of an adversarial capability; it also could not convince itself that the optical explanation actually fits. The FBI’s involvement deepened the file rather than closing it: in July 2024 — nearly two and a half years after the sighting — Bureau agents and a forensic artist from the Operational Projects Unit interviewed one witness, a former Army intelligence officer, at 26 Federal Plaza in New York to produce a forensic sketch of the object, the same investigative machinery the Bureau applies to fugitives and bank robbers, here applied to a shape over a mountain. A memory rendered in detail thirty months later is testimony, not measurement, and the analysis treats it accordingly. The case file, released across multiple documents in the third tranche of the Department of War’s PURSUE program on June 12, 2026, remains unresolved.
What the government released
This document contains analysis by an All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Intelligence Community (IC) partner to account for a 2022 incident involving an airborne object near Colorado Springs, Colorado. U.S. military service members reported the incident to AARO in 2023. AARO’s IC partner assessed, with low confidence, that the reported phenomenon, which observers characterized as resembling an “angular, non-symmetrical potato,” was attributable to sunlight backscattering, where sunlight reflecting from mountain snow cover illuminated the underside of low-altitude clouds. This low-confidence assessment contributes to AARO’s consideration of the incident, which remains unresolved as of June 2026.
Primary-source excerpt
Drawn directly from the released document: “No anomalous data or characteristics were recorded or /assessed, and the event did not represent an unknown adversarial /capability. Army service /members On 15 February 2022, an airborne object was observed /approximately 6 miles to the west over and slightly behind the /Cheyenne Mountain silhouette for approximately 30 - 180 seconds. /The witnesses describe the object as roughly the size of a large /jet and resembling an angular, non symmetrical potato made of /uneven panels, which was completely stationary about 300 500 feet /above Cheyanne Mountain while slowly changing shape. It had a /slightly translucent, shimmering white”.
Status of the case
Records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which means the federal government has not concluded the events were anomalous, has not concluded they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Where AARO has offered a likely source for an item — an infrared sensor aboard a military aircraft, a commercial camera, or a known optical effect — that attribution is the agency’s working assessment rather than a final determination. Conventional candidates such as drones, balloons, flares, satellites, parallax and forced-perspective artifacts, and ordinary aircraft remain on the table for any unresolved case absent better data than a single sensor pass or a witness recollection.