Are You Seeing This? Pentagon's Orb Files Over Colorado
The Pentagon's newest UFO batch reveals pilots asking 'are you seeing this?' about mysterious orbs—echoing decades of similar Colorado sky reports.
A Familiar Question From the Cockpit
There’s a phrase now sitting inside a federal case file that reads less like a government document and more like the opening line of a ghost story: “Are you seeing this?” According to CBS News, that question was radioed between military personnel during one of the encounters detailed in the Pentagon’s third batch of declassified UFO files, released this year as part of an ongoing effort to catalog and, where possible, explain reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) collected from military and government sources.
Unlike earlier releases that captured public attention with a 100-foot triangular object reportedly filmed over a Colorado military installation — a video the Air Force has so far declined to release, according to an exclusive report from the New York Post — or the strange, elongated “potato”-shaped object image released in June, this newest batch is different in focus. It centers specifically on orbs: small, often fast-moving spherical objects that witnesses across multiple reports struggled to explain in real time.
For those of us who track Colorado’s long, strange relationship with the unexplained, the timing and geography of this release feel significant. Because Colorado — and Colorado Springs in particular — keeps showing up in these files.
Colorado Springs, Again
According to Denver7, the newly released government UFO files include sightings specifically tied to Colorado Springs, adding to a growing list of declassified incidents connected to the region. The Colorado Springs Gazette reported separately that federal authorities declassified two additional UAP sightings that took place above the city — incidents that, prior to this disclosure push, existed only in classified military channels.
This isn’t coincidental geography. Colorado Springs is home to some of the most sensitive military infrastructure in the country, including NORAD and the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, a Cold War-era command center built directly into granite bedrock to survive nuclear attack. It’s also near Peterson Space Force Base and Schriever Space Force Base. Airspace over the area is among the most closely monitored in North America — which makes repeated reports of unexplained aerial objects there either easier to dismiss as misidentified military hardware, or harder to wave away, depending on who you ask.
It’s worth being precise about what’s actually been confirmed versus what remains speculation. The declassified files verify that reports were made, that they were taken seriously enough to be investigated and logged, and that in the orb cases, the “are you seeing this?” exchange was captured as part of the documented record, per CBS News. What the files do not do — at least based on what’s been reported publicly so far — is confirm the identity or origin of the objects. That distinction matters, and it’s one that often gets lost in the retelling.
Not the First Time the CIA Has Weighed In
Colorado’s UFO paper trail doesn’t start with this year’s Pentagon batch. The Denver Gazette reported on a previously declassified document, now hosted on the CIA’s own website, describing what the report itself characterized as a “frightening” UFO sighting that occurred in Colorado. The CIA has maintained a public reading room of declassified UFO-related material for years, a byproduct of decades of Cold War-era surveillance programs like Project Blue Book and, later, more classified efforts that only came to light through FOIA requests and congressional pressure.
What’s notable is the pattern: these documents don’t emerge because someone wants to make a splash. They emerge because oversight requirements, declassification schedules, and increasing congressional interest in UAP transparency — spurred in part by hearings held over the past several years — have forced the release of material the government sat on for decades.
The San Luis Valley Connection
No conversation about Colorado UFOs is complete without the San Luis Valley, a high-altitude basin in south-central Colorado that has earned the nickname “Bermuda Triangle of the West,” according to the Denver Gazette. The valley’s reputation stretches back decades, built on a combination of unexplained cattle mutilations, persistent UFO sightings, and a folklore ecosystem that has made it a pilgrimage site for paranormal enthusiasts, including the roadside UFO Watchtower near Hooper, Colorado.
The valley’s sightings predate any recent Pentagon disclosure by generations, and it’s tempting — though speculative — to wonder whether the orb reports now surfacing in declassified military files connect in any way to the valley’s older, informal history of strange lights and unexplained aerial activity. No official document has drawn that line. But the geographic proximity, and Colorado’s outsized presence across multiple eras of UFO reporting, is hard to ignore.
What’s Actually Different About the Orb Files
It’s worth separating this release from the triangle and “potato” stories that made headlines earlier this year. Those cases involved distinct, describable shapes — a massive geometric craft in one instance, an irregular elongated object in another. The orb files are something else: multiple, sometimes fleeting sightings of spherical objects that pilots and personnel couldn’t immediately categorize, serious enough that the “are you seeing this?” exchange made it into the official case documentation, per CBS News reporting.
Orbs have actually been one of the more consistently reported UAP shapes across decades of military and civilian sightings nationwide, distinct from the more novel triangle and tic-tac shaped objects that dominated 2017-era Navy pilot reports. Their persistence in this newest Colorado-linked batch suggests either a continuing sensor or misidentification pattern the military hasn’t fully resolved, or something else that remains, by the government’s own admission, unidentified.
The Line Between Disclosure and Speculation
It’s easy, writing about this stuff, to let the mood do more work than the facts allow. So let’s be clear about where the solid ground ends. What’s confirmed: the Pentagon released a third batch of UAP files this year focused on orb sightings; a radio exchange asking “are you seeing this?” is part of that documented record; Colorado Springs-linked sightings have been declassified separately, according to Denver7 and the Colorado Springs Gazette; and the CIA has previously published its own account of a Colorado UFO incident it once classified.
What’s not confirmed — and what remains firmly in the territory of theory — is what any of these orbs actually were. Experimental aircraft, drone swarms, sensor artifacts, weather phenomena, or something genuinely unidentified in the fullest sense of the word: the files themselves don’t say, and neither should we pretend to know.
What Colorado does have, undeniably, is a decades-long accumulation of these reports clustering around the same stretch of Front Range airspace and the same high desert valley to the south. Whether that’s a story about military testing, atmospheric quirks, or something the Pentagon itself still can’t explain, the sky over Colorado has apparently been asking its own question for a very long time. We’re only now getting официальные glimpses of the answer — or the lack of one.