Glowing Orbs Over Colorado: The Pentagon File You Haven't Heard
Beyond the viral 'potato,' new Pentagon UAP files describe glowing orbs and flying discs over Colorado Springs. Here's what the documents actually say.
The Files Beneath the Potato
By now, you’ve probably heard about the potato.
In June 2026, a Pentagon release of newly declassified UAP case files gave the internet exactly what it wanted: a grainy, faintly comedic image of an unidentified aerial object over Colorado Springs that looked, more than anything else, like a hovering root vegetable. FOX21 News Colorado and The New York Times both covered it. Late-night hosts had a field day. It became the meme of the month, and understandably so — it’s not every day the U.S. government hands the public a UFO photo that inspires more jokes than dread.
But buried in the same batch of records, and largely ignored in the potato pile-on, are entries describing something else entirely: glowing orbs and disc-shaped objects reported in the skies above Colorado Springs. Chicago Star Media’s coverage of the release specifically flagged these cases alongside the potato, noting that the files described “glowing orbs, flying discs and one very strange potato” — three very different phenomena lumped into a single document dump, two of which have barely made it into the news cycle.
This is the file you haven’t heard about. And it might be the more interesting one.
What the Documents Actually Describe
According to Denver7’s reporting on the release, the new government UFO files include multiple Colorado Springs sightings, part of a broader tranche of case records tied to the Pentagon’s ongoing UAP disclosure efforts through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Alongside the now-infamous potato image, the files reference sightings characterized by luminous, spherical objects and disc-shaped craft observed in the airspace around the city — the same stretch of sky that sits beneath NORAD’s watchful radar, Peterson Space Force Base, and Schriever Space Force Base.
That detail matters. Colorado Springs isn’t an incidental backdrop for these reports — it’s arguably the most heavily monitored airspace in the country outside of Washington, D.C. Between NORAD’s continental air defense mission, Space Force satellite tracking operations, and the sheer density of radar and sensor coverage packed into that corridor, any anomalous object passing through has a statistically better chance of being noticed, tracked, and documented than almost anywhere else in the nation. Some researchers and commentators have pointed to this as a straightforward explanation for why the city keeps surfacing in UAP files — more eyes and more instruments simply means more sightings get recorded, not necessarily more objects in the sky.
Others find that explanation unsatisfying, especially given how long this pattern has held. Colorado Springs’ relationship with the unexplained isn’t new, and it isn’t limited to this year’s release.
Not the First Colorado File
The 2026 releases arrive alongside a separate, older thread of Colorado-linked UFO history that resurfaced this year: the Denver Gazette reported in May on a “frightening” UFO sighting from Colorado that is featured on the CIA’s own website, part of the agency’s public archive of historical UAP-related material. The CIA has long maintained declassified files touching on unexplained aerial phenomena as part of its broader FOIA reading room, and Colorado cases have appeared in that archive before — a reminder that government interest in the state’s skies didn’t begin with this year’s Pentagon disclosures.
Around the same news cycle, a separate and unrelated account drew headlines: the New York Post reported on a former Pentagon employee who described witnessing a translucent triangle-shaped craft flying overhead in a 2023 encounter. That story, along with the potato photo, dominated coverage of the broader 2026 file release. But it’s worth being precise here — the triangle account and the orb/disc entries are different cases, from different reports, describing different shapes and behaviors. Conflating them does a disservice to what’s actually in the files. This particular investigation is about the orbs and discs specifically — the entries that got a passing mention in a listicle-style headline and then vanished from the conversation.
What We Don’t Know
Here’s where honesty matters more than intrigue: the publicly available reporting on these glowing orb and disc cases is thin. We know they exist within the released file set. We know Chicago Star Media’s coverage grouped them with the potato as part of the same document release. We know Denver7 confirmed Colorado Springs sightings were part of the broader tranche. What we don’t have — at least not yet, in public reporting — are the granular details researchers would want: exact dates, sensor types, altitude estimates, or whether these orb and disc sightings were captured on video, infrared, radar, or through visual witness testimony alone.
That’s an important distinction from the potato image, which came with an actual photograph the public could scrutinize, joke about, and pick apart pixel by pixel. The orb and disc cases, by contrast, appear to exist right now mostly as case-file descriptions — text entries in a bureaucratic record, not viral images. That may be exactly why they didn’t break through the news cycle. A blurry potato is shareable. A line item in a Pentagon spreadsheet describing a “glowing orb” is not — even though, arguably, it deserves just as much scrutiny.
AARO’s mandate, since its creation, has been to investigate reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena affecting military readiness and airspace safety, and the office has periodically released summaries and historical case reviews to the public as part of that effort. Officials have not, in connection with these Colorado Springs entries, offered a public explanation for the orbs or discs — no confirmed identification as balloons, drones, aircraft, or natural phenomena has been reported alongside these particular cases, at least not in what’s currently public.
Why It Keeps Coming Back to Colorado Springs
Whether you lean toward the mundane explanation — dense radar coverage plus heavy military air traffic equals more anomalies flagged — or you find yourself drawn to something stranger, it’s hard to ignore how often this particular stretch of Colorado turns up in these files. NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Peterson’s airspace operations, and Schriever’s satellite command functions all converge in a relatively small geographic footprint. It’s a place built, quite literally, to watch the sky. Maybe that’s exactly why the sky over Colorado Springs keeps giving officials something to write down.
The Mystery That Didn’t Trend
The potato had its moment. The translucent triangle had its moment. Somewhere in the same government file, though, sit glowing orbs and flying discs over Colorado Springs — phenomena with far less internet appeal, and far less public detail, but arguably no less strange. As AARO continues its disclosure process and more of these files potentially surface, they’re worth watching. Not every mystery needs a viral image to be real. Sometimes the most unsettling reports are the ones nobody’s laughing about — because nobody’s talking about them at all.