Case File · FBI · AARO Disclosure Era (2022-present) Released May 2026 · National Archives, Record Group 615

Anoka, Minnesota: Police Watch a 'Tie-Dye' Light for 90 Minutes

UFO Government Report

At 1:17 a.m. on 19 February 2025, Anoka police staff watched a multicoloured light on the western horizon for 90 minutes and filmed it through binoculars. The FBI took the report, interviewed the officer and closed the case.

February 19, 2025
Anoka, Minnesota, USA

What this record is

Three items in the FBI’s UAP series at the National Archives make up one Guardian case, the FBI’s system for logging and assessing tips. The first is an electronic communication from the Cincinnati field office dated 10 March 2025 that opened the matter under the title “Observation of UAP by Anoka Police Department personnel.” The second, dated 9 May 2025, is the Minneapolis field office’s request to close it, with a summary of an agent’s interview with the main witness. The third, dated 15 May 2025, is the full Guardian file of 22 pages: the complaint form, two reports pulled from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), the report submitted by the advocacy group Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA), the case notes and the disposition. A video file is attached to that item. It has not been viewed for this page and is described only from the documents.

Names and personal details are redacted under section 1843 of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which created the collection. The files were listed in the National Archives catalog in late May 2026 and were covered by Minnesota news outlets that week.

What it says

At about 1:17 a.m. on 19 February 2025, an Anoka Police Department employee and colleagues were holding a debrief after training in a pizza restaurant’s car park on 7th Avenue in Anoka, a suburb about 25 minutes northwest of Minneapolis. They noticed a light on the horizon to the west-southwest that seemed to be changing colour or flashing several colours at once. The main witness fetched a pair of Bushnell binoculars and the group moved to the top of the municipal parking ramp for a better view.

In the witness’s own statement to ASA, the object was a sphere that flashed red, blue, green and white light over its whole surface, constantly and rapidly changing, “a ‘tie dye’ shirt in motion.” The group guessed it was 50 miles away and between 10,000 and 30,000 feet up, though he admitted distance was very hard to judge. It descended slowly and drifted southwest until it was almost on the horizon, just above nearby buildings. About 25 minutes in, at around 1:40 a.m., a helicopter crossed between them and the object, and the object seemed to move rapidly north and climb, perhaps 30 to 40 miles in five to ten seconds, to around 40,000 feet. One officer drove about ten miles west on Highway 10 towards Elk River and reported that the object was still far to the west of him. A small private plane later passed between them and the object without any obvious reaction. After that the object’s movement became slow and sluggish, and it drifted west until it was barely visible in binoculars. As they left, the witness thought he saw a second, similar object to the north, closer, but did not stay to watch. The total observation was about 90 minutes.

The ASA interviewer’s notes add that the object looked like six “hula-hoops with lights around each loop,” like a diagram of an atom, and that it “skipped across the sky like a stone on a pond” to a point possibly near the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant. The witness said he had seen a similar object to the west-northwest while on patrol at about 11:30 p.m. on 17 February. He filmed the 19 February object by holding his iPhone to the binoculars and described the result himself as “nearly useless and blurry.” He noted that the viewing site had heavy light pollution; the Big Dipper was barely visible overhead.

When an FBI agent interviewed him at the police station, his account differed in places. He described the object as a multicoloured gyroscope the size of an SUV or school bus, placed it southwest towards Minnetonka and then west towards Monticello, and said it dropped and moved around the path of a private plane, changed position in three bursts and descended “like a leaf floating on a breeze.” He also mentioned an object he had filmed near the Anoka Ice Arena in 2022, an orange orb seen as a child at his parents’ cabin, and a friend’s video of three flashes of light over Champlin. The agent searched NUFORC and attached two reports from January 2025, one from a driver on Highway 10 in Anoka and one describing a multicoloured diamond bouncing around the sky over St. Paul. In April 2025 the witness gave the FBI a thumb drive with four videos. The case notes record that the matter came to Cincinnati through ASA as a “liaison partner.” On 9 May Minneapolis asked to close the case, stating that no further investigative action would be taken, and the assessment was closed as not warranting further investigation.

Context

The FBI’s handling is routine: take the report, interview the witness, check public databases, collect the video and close the file. No agency records any attempt to identify the object. ASA flagged the report because it “might involve nuclear energy infrastructure,” and the Monticello plant is the kind of site the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was then arguing over how to cover in its own flyover reporting (see the NRC’s UAP reporting debate). The FBI files do not say that anything approached the plant, only that the object may have been in that direction some 30 miles away.

There is an ordinary candidate the files do not mention. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, stood about five degrees above the west-southwest horizon at 1:17 a.m. that night in Anoka and set around 1:50 a.m. Seen that low, through thick air and city glow, Sirius twinkles violently in red, blue, green and white, and through binoculars and a phone camera it can look like a spinning, multicoloured ball. It sinks and drifts southwest as it sets, which matches the first half hour of the account closely. The apparent jump north could then be the witnesses switching to another bright object; Capella, which is also notorious for flashing colours, was about 30 degrees up in the northwest, and the second “object” to the north would fit a star as well. The 17 February sighting, to the west-northwest at 11:30 p.m., matches Capella’s position that evening. These positions are straightforward to check, but no investigator in the file did so, and the case cannot be closed on that basis alone.

Status

The documents record what the witnesses reported, not what they saw. The FBI closed the case in May 2025 without an identification, and the Anoka police chief told reporters in 2026 that there had been no further sightings. The detailed, honest account gives investigators a lot to work with, and the timing, direction and colour behaviour fit a setting bright star uncomfortably well. The sighting is best treated as unresolved, with a stellar explanation the strongest candidate.

Sources

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