FBI-UAP-PR004, “Northeastern Orb Sighting,” 2025
In July 2025, at approximately 2100 local time in the northeastern United States, an eyewitness observed an intense bright light in their backyard as they parked their car upon returning home from work. The light was hovering approximately 25 feet off the ground, below a tree line near the center of their backyard, at an estimated distance of 90 feet. The eyewitness exited their vehicle briefly before retrieving their phone to record the event. The spouse of the eyewitness came outside to assess the situation. The spouse also witnessed the light, describing it as a “brilliant red sphere” about one meter in diameter. The center of the red sphere appeared to be a white plasma “sun” about the size of a basketball. The orb slowly rose and moved to the left, and both eyewitnesses observed a second, identical orb, hovering above the other orb. The eyewitness then began recording the event using an iPhone 14 Pro Max, capturing the footage depicted in this video. As the eyewitness began recording, the orbs moved westward together above a nearby tree line. The witnesses described the orbs’ motion as silent and smooth, and as moving in tandem as though they were flying in formation or tethered together. As the orbs moved out of sight, both eyewitnesses saw them appear to merge. The eyewitnesses estimated that the orbs moved from their initial position before disappearing from view at an estimated distance of 75 yards. This observation occurred within 25 miles of the “Triangle Orbs,” “Red Orb Rotation,” and “Orbs Over the Pond,” sightings at a location well known to them, which is sparsely populated. The description above is derived from statements provided to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) by eyewitnesses to the event. The FBI assesses the individuals who reported this event as credible. The subject matter described in files FBI-UAP-D009 through FBI-UAP-D010 and depicted in the video footage FBI-UAP-PR004 corresponds to reports originating from the same general area in the northeastern 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.
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of FBI's 87 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the FBI agency block it ranks #4 of 87 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 334-file archive it ranks #12 of 334.
That places it just above the archive's densest scoring band - the 92 files tied at 66 - among the small group of top-scoring files.
For the broader cluster context, this file is part of FBI Modern UAP Files - the FBI's modern UAP files: the 2022 Colorado Springs interview and the FBI-authenticated northeastern orb videos. The cluster page walks through all 30 member files with regional grouping, sensor breakdown, and standout analysis.
Anomalousness Index: 70/100
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.
This file from the FBI is a single-sensor military capture - one instrumented platform, one modality, time-stamped and recoverable rather than a witness account. The rubric scores it below a multi-sensor capture because cross-modality confirmation (the same object seen by two independent sensor types at once) is the higher bar on this axis, and that confirmation isn't present here.
The witness here is FBI personnel, entering the report into the federal investigative system through standard channels. That's a real credibility tier - trained federal investigative staff - though the rubric ranks it below mission-active military or astronaut testimony because the posture is reactive (responding to a report) rather than an active operational context.
On corroboration, this file from the FBI - 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 FBI 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 FBI's own published conclusion from it, not an absence of one.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 70/100 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 FBI
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
FBI-UAP-PR001, “Triangle Orbs,” Northeastern United States, 2021
FBI-UAP-PR002, “Red Orb Rotation,” Northeastern United States, 2022
FBI-UAP-PR003, “Orbs Over the Pond,” 2024
FBI-UAP-PR005, Digital Recreation, Narrative Statement 3-1, Western United States Event, 2…
FBI-UAP-PR006, Digital Recreation, Narrative Statement 3-2, Western United States Event, 2…
FBI-UAP-D014, Digital Rendering, Narrative Statement 1-1, Western United States Event, 202…
Verification
SHA-256:
This hash is the SHA-256 of the file body war.gov served on the verification date above. War.gov has re-processed some file bodies since first release (re-compression + OCR, no content removed - see /changes); we re-verify and record the change rather than silently serve a stale hash. How to check this yourself →
Source (DVIDS): https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1010269/fbi-uap-pr004-northeastern-orb-sighting-2025
Direct video file: https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/video/2606/DOD_111764177/DOD_111764177.mp4