ICA-UAP-D001, Analysis: Colorado Springs UAP Incident, 2022
This document contains analysis by an All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Intelligence Community (IC) partner to account for a 2022 incident involving an airborne object near Colorado Springs, Colorado. U.S. military service members reported the incident to AARO in 2023. AARO’s IC partner assessed, with low confidence, that the reported phenomenon, which observers characterized as resembling an “angular, non-symmetrical potato,” was attributable to sunlight backscattering, where sunlight reflecting from mountain snow cover illuminated the underside of low-altitude clouds. This low-confidence assessment contributes to AARO’s consideration of the incident, which remains unresolved as of June 2026.
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 ICA's 1 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the ICA agency block it ranks #1 of 1 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 334-file archive it ranks #333 of 334.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (333 of 334 by score), typical of investigative-record style files where the report is paper-based rather than instrumented.
Anomalousness Index: 47/100
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 Intelligence Community, 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.
A civilian account, routed into the federal record via the Intelligence Community's investigative channels rather than an operational mission report. The rubric scores this tier below uniformed personnel specifically because of that remove - the witness wasn't reporting from within a federal mission context when the observation occurred.
On corroboration, this file from the Intelligence Community - 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 from the Intelligence Community is catalogued as unresolved, with no formal review process having concluded - logged into the system, but not yet finalized by any review. The rubric treats that differently from 'open after review,' because the absence of a completed review is itself part of the file's status, not a placeholder for one.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 47/100 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 ICA
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
ODNI-UAP-D001, USPER Narrative, Senior USIC Official
CIA-UAP-002, Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, Report, 1952-1953
CIA-UAP-003, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; The U-2 and OXCA…
CIA-UAP-004, CASE 17708 (CLOSED) and DR. Leon Davidson
CIA-UAP-005, German Scientist's Article on 'Flying Discs'
CIA-UAP-006, Sighting Of Unconventional Aircraft
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 →