AARO Unresolved Case Analysis Update: Western United States Event, 2023 — Department of War File
This memorandum summarizes the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s (AARO) ongoing analysis of a reported incident near a sensitive national security site in the western United States involving unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) over a period of two days in 2023. As of June 2026, the case…
Incident Overview
AARO gave this case a name of its own: “Orbs Launching Orbs.” Over two days in October 2023, six federal law enforcement special agents — three teams of two, positioned at different vantage points — reported watching a luminous orange “mother orb” appear near a sensitive national security site in the western United States at dusk, hold for one to two seconds, release a cluster of two to four smaller red orbs, and vanish. The cycle repeated multiple times over several hours, on both nights. The red orbs displayed what the agents described as coordinated horizontal motion and altitude changes before disappearing after several seconds — except in at least one instance, when a red orb reportedly remained stationary above a ridgeline for several hours. Every account described the phenomena as completely silent.
The June 5, 2026 case-analysis memorandum released here — published as part of the third PURSUE tranche on June 12, 2026, alongside five sworn witness narratives, a notional site map, and a dozen digital reconstructions — is the most analytically transparent document the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has ever made public. It shows the office’s working method in full. AARO cross-correlated the agents’ narratives against commercial and military flight logs, radar, spatial estimates, and ADS-B transponder data, then walked through six hypotheses on the record. Military aircraft exhaust: ruled out — aircraft in the area were too high, and exhaust is neither silent nor capable of loitering. Drones: unlikely — a multi-hour loiter exceeds the battery limits of known multi-rotor systems. Military infrared countermeasure flares: partially plausible, and this is the memo’s most striking finding — historical flight and radar data align well enough that AARO attributes approximately sixty percent of the reported activity to military aircraft deploying flares during a standard exercise. The agents, professionally familiar with flares, insisted the phenomena did not look like them; AARO notes the specific flare types carried differ visually from standard illumination flares.
That leaves the other forty percent, and here the memo’s language is careful: for those observations, radar and ADS-B indicate no known aircraft were active within the agents’ line of sight, and the stationary multi-hour red orb is, in AARO’s words, physically incompatible with the burn time and descent rate of any known military flare. A classified-program explanation (Blue Force) was investigated and came back inconclusive — some characteristics align with certain U.S. military technologies, but records cannot place those technologies at the site that night, and no single known capability accounts for everything reported. Foreign platforms were assessed highly unlikely; ball lightning, atmospheric refraction, and misidentified celestial objects were each examined and discounted, the last because the agents’ diverse viewing angles rule out the geometry a celestial misidentification requires. The case remains open, and AARO states the contextual factors — trained federal observers, multi-angle consistency, and alignment with other reported incidents in the same western region — warrant continued investigation.
What the government released
This memorandum summarizes the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s (AARO) ongoing analysis of a reported incident near a sensitive national security site in the western United States involving unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) over a period of two days in 2023. As of June 2026, the case remains unresolved.
Primary-source excerpt
Drawn directly from the released document: “UNCLASSIFIED OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF WAR 5000 DEFENSE PENTAGON WASHINGTON, DC 20301 5000 INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY 05 JUNE 2026 MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD SUBJECT: All domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Case Analysis Update: Western U S. This memorandum summarizes the All domain Anomaly Resolution Office s (AARO) ongoing analysis of a reported incident near a sensitive national security site in the western United States involving unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) over a period of two days in October 2023. Incident Summary 1 Over a period of two days in October 2023, six”.
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.