DOW-UAP-D081, Narrative Statement 3, Western United States Event, 2023
This memorandum presents the first-hand narrative from Witness 3 provided to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Witness 3 was one of several United States (U.S.) federal law enforcement special agents who reported observing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) over a period of two days in October 2023 in the western United States.
The summary above is sourced from the released file metadata as published to war.gov. The analysis sections below are original to this tracker.
Text of the document
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UN CLASSIFIED OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF WAR 5000 DEFENSE PENTAGON AND SECURITY MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD SUBJECT: Nairntive from Witness 3 -Western U.S. Event This memorandum presents the first-hand naiTative from Witness 3 provided to the All domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Witness 3 was one of several United States (U.S.) federal law enforcement special agents who reported observing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) over a period of two days in October 2023 in the western United States. ill response to AARO 's request to provide a free-fo1m naiTative of the sequence of events exactly as they remember them, Witness 3 submitted the following text: "ill mid-Oct 2023, I was with agents from our office at our work location. We were out of the office conducting work related activities. Traveling and working with one other agent, at approximately 1900, roughly dusk with a cleai· sky, I was looking east when I saw a large orange orb in the sky seemingly coming in my direction. I recall my paitner asking, "are you seeing this?" I couldn't tell how large the orb was because I could not dete1mine how far away it was. I recall that it was alternating between cleai· and orange with maybe two or three seconds in each colored cycle. When it was orange, the outline was well defined, but when it was clear, it did not seem to disappeai· as I vaguely recall still being able to see an outline of the orb although it was cleai·. ill tenns of speed, I'd estimate the orb moved approximately 20 degrees in the sky in about three to five seconds. When the orb was at approximately 45 degrees (halfway between the horizon and directly overhead), it expelled three smaller red orbs. The expulsion appeared to be mechanical. The red orbs then moved to the south in a straight line spaced about one second apart, also at 45 degrees (from directly overhead to the horizon) until I could no longer see them. I did not pay attention to what the orange orb was doing after it released the red orbs. However, I don 't recall seeing it any longer. I do not recall any sound associated with what I saw. Also, there were no exhaust trails coming from either the orange or the red orbs. Although I could not tell how lai·ge the orange orb was, the red orbs were a lot smaller than the orange orb. Compai·atively, I'd say the red orbs were like grapes being expelled from a basketball. The time fraine for this explanation was maybe 30-45 seconds. ill a second occunence, also in mid-Oct 2023, either the same night or the next night, I was out with my paitner again but at a different location. It was nearing full darkness, so I'd say the time was probably ~2000-2030 and the sky was cleai·. I was using NVGs to scan the sky when I saw
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red lights coming from the north, heading south. Their speed was difficult to gauge but I’d say they moved from right to left in my vision in about five to ten seconds covering roughly 90 degrees across the sky. These four red lights stopped above an airfield and hovered in what appeared to be a square over each corner of the airfield. At about the same time, looking south, I also observed orange orbs (possibly two) coming from the same direction (east) I saw the first orange orb (in the para above). They seemed to be hovering near a slope of a west facing ridgeline as the four smaller red orbs hovered over the airfield. I don’t recall if the orange orbs released red orbs in the same manner the first orange orb did. Looking back toward the four hovering red lights, I noticed what appeared to be a vehicle down below me and my partner. We were sitting higher up on a road that sloped upward so the vehicle was below us. As the red lights hovered, the vehicle was flashing its headlights at a slow, methodical tempo, possibly two- three seconds between switching off and on. Again, I don’t recall there being any sound associated with any of this. My partner and I decided to speed down the hill toward the vehicle as it seemed evident that it was involved with whatever was happening over the airfield and with the other light orbs. I turned off the lights in our vehicle to hide our approach. (I used NVGs to drive down the road.) The vehicle appeared to be sitting still, and I recall my heart beating heavily as we approached it. As we approached the vehicle, its lights remained on. As we approached, it seemed like we could get no closer than what seemed to be about 100 yards away so it seemed like the vehicle was responding to our approach. As we thought we would overtake the vehicle, it managed to keep its distance from us. Just as we thought we were at the closest point, the vehicle then seemingly floated off the road to the south, across rough terrain. There were no roads and later we searched for tire tracks but didn’t find anything. We stopped where we thought the vehicle had originally been and saw it out in the brush in the rough terrain with a single light on. The light then faded out and we didn’t see it anymore. At that point, we were fixed on the vehicle so I didn’t notice the lights any longer. I am not sure what they did as we tried to catch up with the vehicle. When the vehicle was gone, so were the orbs. The time frame for this occurrence was about 2-3 minutes.” Jon T. Kosloski Director, AARO
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of DoD's 257 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the DoD agency block it ranks #142 of 257 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 450-file archive it ranks #266 of 450.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (266 of 450 by score), typical of investigative-record style files where the report is paper-based rather than instrumented.
Anomalousness Index: 56/100
Evidentiary weight that this encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. Not a probability of extraterrestrial origin - that number is not honestly computable from the released files and this tracker refuses to publish it.
🤖 AI-ASSISTED SCORING · methodology
The six rubric components break down for this file as follows. Each component has a weighted contribution to the final score; the per-component explanation below describes what this file's particular value on that component means in the rubric's framework.
No sensor, camera, or instrument backs this observation - it is testimony, relayed through the Department of War, and scored on the rubric's lowest sensor-quality tier for that reason. That doesn't bear on the witness's credibility (a separate axis); it reflects only that nothing beyond human perception recorded the event.
Reported by trained U.S. military personnel during an operational mission (October, 2023) - a high witness-credibility tier, ranked in the rubric below astronaut, trained-aviator, and federal-agent testimony. This profile is shared across the AARO-submitted infrared-capture cluster that anchors the archive's densest scoring band, at 66.
On corroboration, this file from the Department of War - like every single-tier file in the PURSUE archive - is a single-witness or single-instrument capture per the released metadata. The rubric doesn't infer multi-witness confirmation the summaries don't actually establish; this score reflects the honest limit of what was released, not a judgment about the underlying event.
The released file contains no speed, acceleration, or vector data precise enough to score on the kinematic axis - and that's true archive-wide, not specific to this file. The rubric declines to infer kinematic anomaly from a witness's narrative estimate of how fast something moved; that itself says something about what PURSUE actually released: descriptive accounts, not flight-path telemetry.
Every file in the archive, including this one, scores this tier: a conventional explanation was considered in the released record but isn't treated as dispositive. That's a pattern in how war.gov's own summaries are written - they consistently hedge against strong conclusions either way - and the rubric takes that hedging at face value rather than resolving it for them.
This file was released as open by the Department of War after a formal review process concluded - not simply logged and left pending. That's a stronger disposition signal than 'unresolved, no review': a review actually happened, and remaining open is the Department of War's own published conclusion from it, not an absence of one.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 56/100 reflects evidentiary weight that this specific file's encounter remains structurally unexplained by the rubric's six axes - it is not a claim that the underlying event involved anything non-conventional, and it is not comparable across rubrics that use different weights. For the full per-axis weights and the rubric JSON, see /methodology.
Related files in DoD
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
DOW-UAP-PR024, Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2023
DOW-UAP-PR072, "ADMINISTRATIVE REVISION: IIR 1777 J0032 22 Kazakhstan - UAP in the vicinit…
DOW-UAP-PR106, Unresolved UAP Report, Eastern United States, 2020
DOW-UAP-PR108, Unresolved UAP Report, Western United States, 2020
DOW-UAP-PR109, Unresolved UAP Report, Eastern United States, 2015
DOW-UAP-PR110, Unresolved UAP Report, Eastern United States, 2020
Verification
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