Pentagon's 'Potato' UFO Cover-Up: Five US Army Soldiers Furious After Officials Claim Scaly Craft Was Just 'Sunlight'

The Pentagon has released 72 new UFO case files in Washington, including a bizarre 'potato-shaped' craft seen by five US Army soldiers over Colorado Springs in 2022, which officials later suggested might simply have been sunlight reflecting off clouds. The latest batch of documents, published under Donald Trump's transparency drive on unidentified anomalous phenomena, also details glowing red spheres, orange orbs that appear to spawn smaller lights, and a disc sending out beams above an African airport.

These Pentagon UFO papers form the third tranche of material ordered into the open after Mr Trump told his administration to declassify what it could about mysterious objects in the sky and any potential links to extraterrestrial life. Around 300 files from the 1940s onwards have now been made public, according to the releases. They stop well short of confirming alien visitors or a long-running government cover‑up, but they do reveal how seriously US agencies are documenting sightings that often leave seasoned investigators shrugging.

Pentagon UFO Files Detail 'Scaly Potato' Over Colorado

The most striking of the new cases unfolded on a cold February morning in 2022 at Fort Carson, near Colorado Springs. Five US Army personnel stepped out of an office building and noticed an object hanging motionless over Cheyenne Mountain, several miles to the west.

According to an FBI document, the men described it as 'potato' shaped, with sharp, defined edges, painted a creamy, whitish, opalescent colour. It appeared to be clad in what the report calls 'articulating fish scales or panels that were non-symmetrical, non-overlapping and irregular shaped.' It hovered, glinting in the clear air, for roughly two minutes. Then, as all five watched, it vanished.

There are no photographs of the Fort Carson object. None of the soldiers had a phone with them, and no independent footage has since emerged. That absence of hard evidence clearly frustrates investigators as much as it will annoy believers.

An intelligence partner's four‑page report, heavily redacted, concluded with 'low confidence' that the most likely explanation was 'backscattering of sunlight.' The idea was that the rising sun could have bounced off snow on Cheyenne Mountain and illuminated thin, low cloud above it in an oddly sculpted pattern. The document notes that no aircraft or balloons were believed to be nearby and says it did not appear to be foreign adversary technology.

The witnesses insisted it was a bright, cloudless morning. If that is accurate, the sunlight theory begins to look like an attempt to file the potato away in a tidy box that doesn't quite fit. In the absence of radar tracks, sensor data or corroborating imagery, the Pentagon has left the case officially unresolved.

A simple FBI sketch included in the file shows exactly what you would expect from the description: a pale, scaly potato shape hovering above a low mountain line. Crude though it is, the drawing underlines something often lost in online UFO chatter. Serious agencies are logging these encounters in formal, if sometimes clumsy, detail rather than brushing them off.

Orange Orbs, Red Spheres And A Pentagon UFO Office Under Pressure

The Colorado case is not the only head‑scratcher in the new Pentagon UFO bundle. Another file dissects a string of sightings in October 2023 by six unnamed federal law enforcement officers. On several occasions, they reported a brilliant orange orb rising over a ridgeline and apparently generating two to four smaller red orbs.

Most of the time, those lights blinked out quickly. In one reported incident, however, an orb sat motionless in the sky for several hours. Again, there is no video or photography from the officers themselves, which limits how far analysts can push the data. The assessment, dated this month, runs through prosaic options. Military aircraft were conducting training in the area, with some using flares, and there may have been tests of experimental US technology nearby. Those are labelled 'plausible' but not proven explanations.

Crucially, the report does not rule out 'unrecognised technology.' It stops short of saying whose, or what, that might be and calls for more investigation rather than a neat conclusion.

That investigation now falls to the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a unit created by Congress in 2022 to collate and analyse unidentified anomalous phenomena. Earlier statements from the office have been at pains to stress that it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial life. The latest documents stick to that line, but they also keep leaving doors half open.

One of the more vivid new entries is an FBI report from February on a sighting at an undisclosed location in the north-east United States. A resident came home to find an intense light hovering under the trees at the back of their property. They described a 'brilliant and beautiful' red sphere, unlike anything they had seen before.

Inside that red globe, the file says, the witness perceived a 'white plasma sun' about the size of a basketball. A second sphere appeared beside the first, and both then drifted silently out of view. In this case, there is mobile phone footage, capturing two glowing red orbs crossing the night sky. The White House itself posted the clip to social media with only the terse label 'NORTHEASTERN ORB SIGHTING,' 2025,' offering no official interpretation.

The collection also reaches back further in time. A CIA document from 2008, released for the first time, recounts an incident above Zimbabwe's main airport. On a July afternoon, witnesses reported a craft 'disc-like in shape with a hollow center' and rotating lights underneath. At one point, 'beams' of light were seen emanating from it before the object climbed rapidly out of sight, changing colours as it went.

The Zimbabwe file notes debate among officials and observers over whether it might be an advanced foreign platform or whether its origins were 'extraterrestrial.' Nothing in the new Pentagon or CIA paperwork settles that argument. Nothing in the releases proves that anyone, or anything, is visiting from beyond Earth. With no clear answers, and with several key details blacked out, the most honest reading is that much of it remains, in the driest official language, unexplained and unconfirmed which means every claim, hopeful or sceptical, still has to be taken with a grain of salt.