The object was there for between thirty seconds and three minutes, depending on which of the five witnesses you ask. It hung in the saddle of Cheyenne Mountain, the low point between the peaks, approximately three hundred to five hundred feet above the ridgeline and six miles to the west of where the soldiers stood. Beneath it, inside the mountain, sat the operations centre of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
The soldiers had walked out of a building at Fort Carson on the morning of 15 February 2022. The sky was clear and blue. One of them noticed the object first, and then all five were pointing at it. None of them had a phone. Fort Carson’s security protocols do not permit personal devices in many operational areas. They watched it, tried to decide who should go back to the vehicle to get a camera, and in the moment they looked away, the object was gone. They searched the western skyline but could not find it again.
What they had seen, as described in the FBI interview conducted three years later, was a matte white or off-white object, non-metallic in appearance, oval and horizontal. It had a curved indentation on the bottom. One witness called it “bean-shaped.” Its surface was covered in intersecting lines or ridges which formed what he described as “an abstract polygon pattern.” The object was completely motionless and completely silent.
That witness, identified in the FBI’s forensic sketch document as a former US Army intelligence officer, sat with an FBI Operational Projects Unit forensic artist at 26 Federal Plaza in New York in July 2024, two and a half years after the sighting. The OPU is the FBI division that produces forensic portraits of criminal suspects. The same methodology was applied here: a structured interview, iterative sketch drafts, refinement through dialogue between artist and witness until the image converges on what the witness remembers.
In the forensic session, the intelligence officer refined his description. The object was “potato shaped” with distinct edges. Its colour was “creamy, whitish opalescent.” It was “somewhat translucent with a slight shimmer.” And its surface was not static. It was “made up of what can best be described as articulating fish scales or panels that were non-symmetrical, non-overlapping, and irregular shaped. The object itself was perfectly still but each panel on the object shifted in slow waves starting at different points of origin but at the same time.”
A stationary object whose surface moved. Panels rippling independently in slow waves from multiple points simultaneously, like the scales of a resting fish catching light beneath the surface of a stream.
When it disappeared, the witness used a specific word. He said it “cloaked.” Not faded. Not departed. “In the space of time it took to turn a head and there was no shadow.”
The five soldiers gathered afterwards and discussed what they had seen. Each independently drew the object from memory. All five drawings were consistent: a horizontal, white, bean-shaped object with abstract lines crossing on it. One witness believed an official Army report was made. The witness interviewed by the FBI stated he was contacted by AARO in early 2024 about the observation but was never interviewed by anyone until the FBI reached him in March 2025.
The Intelligence Community’s analysis of this incident, released as part of the PURSUE programme’s third tranche on 12 June 2026, proposes an explanation. The document’s subject line states it plainly: “An Airborne Object Over Cheyenne Mountain in February 2022 was Possible Backscattering of Sunlight.”
The analytical basis: at 0945 Mountain Time on 15 February 2022, the sun was positioned at approximately 27.5 degrees above the horizon in the southeast sky. Snow depth on Cheyenne Mountain likely ranged from six to twelve inches. Sunlight reflecting off the snow-covered ground could, in theory, illuminate low-level clouds in the vicinity, creating a luminous effect that might account for what the witnesses saw.
The analyst rated this assessment low confidence. The reasons for the low confidence are stated in the document: uncertainty in the field of view of each witness, the amount of snow cover, and the exact elevation and amount of cloud cover. The witnesses reported clear blue skies. Multiple weather reports, including data from the Air Force Weather Agency, indicated partly to mostly cloudy conditions that morning. The analysis depends on clouds the witnesses say were not there.
It also depends on the object being a cloud. The witnesses described defined edges. A surface of articulating panels that shifted in slow waves. A creamy, opalescent sheen. A curved indentation on the bottom. A shape that slowly changed. And an instantaneous disappearance they characterised as cloaking.
One further line in the Intelligence Community analysis cuts against the hypothesis. After proposing the backscattering hypothesis and rating it low confidence, the analyst wrote: “No aircraft or balloons were noted active in or around Cheyenne Mountain during the time the witnesses saw the airborne object.”
The proposed explanation does not fit what the witnesses described. The analyst knows this. The confidence rating says so. And the documentary record, as released through PURSUE, preserves both the testimony and the attempt to explain it, leaving the reader to weigh the distance between the two.
