Digital Rendering, Unresolved UAP Report, Colorado Springs, 2022

This image is the FBI’s visual reconstruction of a 2022 sighting by soldiers near Colorado Springs, based on the account in FBI-UAP-D002. That record describes a forensic sketch interview, held in New York two years after the event, in which a former Army intelligence officer worked with an FBI forensic artist; the artist planned to send further drafts back to him to refine the final picture. The released version has no caption or text of its own.

What the picture is meant to show

According to the sketch interview, the officer and four members of his unit saw the object over the Cheyenne Mountain area as they walked out of their office building, on what he called a perfect “blue bird” day with no clouds. He described a potato shape with distinct edges and a creamy, whitish, opalescent finish, slightly translucent and shimmering. It seemed to be made of irregular, non-overlapping panels, like articulating fish scales, which shifted in slow waves while the object itself stayed perfectly still. After about two minutes, he said, it “cloaked” in the time it took to turn his head, leaving no shadow.

The same event, read differently

Another FBI interview about the sighting, FBI-UAP-D001, calls the object matte white and “bean-shaped,” watched for several minutes. An intelligence-community analysis, ICA-UAP-D001, suggested with low confidence that sunlight bouncing off mountain snow lit up low cloud. A rendering shows one witness’s memory, not a photograph of the object.