Narrative Statement 5, Western United States Event, 2023

Witness 5’s statement reads like a field log. Where the other agents in the 2023 western United States case wrote narratives, this federal special agent listed events in numbered steps with clock times — and it is the only statement in the set marked as redacted. Names, exact dates, road numbers, coordinates and place names are blacked out throughout.

The evening and the early morning

The log has the team driving into a wildlife area at dusk and seeing, at 1858, a large orange light that seemed to hang just above a peak for about a minute. On foot at 1918, the agent saw a larger red orb release two smaller ones, followed by a white flash in the western sky; the large orb appeared again at 1937 with another flash, though the agent did not recall smaller orbs that time. The team set up a camera, and noted later that other teams had not heard their radio replies.

Driving back around 0430, they saw a red round light and a white square light hovering over the pavement, which drifted off the road into the brush as another car approached. Through NVGs the agent saw the lights switch off, leaving a thin horizontal line, roughly 4 feet wide, that moved away. Returning with thermal binoculars, the agents found only false leads until about 0530, when — among drifting cobwebs — they saw faint lights moving together in formation. Later that day they found fresh, sharp scrape marks in the dirt around one plant.

Matching accounts

The red-and-white light pair and the cobwebs also appear in Witness 1’s statement. AARO’s analysis of the case is DOW-UAP-D077.