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Five cases from the UFO files – and five different answers

7 min read

In May 2026, the U.S. government released another batch of UFO files: military footage, audio recordings, classic cases letters and reports from the 1940s almost to the present day. The batch explains nothing; it only publishes. We picked five cases from it and looked into each one. The result: among them is a case solved long ago, one that was probably natural, one cleared up after the fact, and two that are genuinely open.

What's in the batch?

On May 22, 2026, the U.S. government made public the second batch of its files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, formerly known as UFOs). Most of the material comes from the Department of Defense: footage recorded from military aircraft, audio recordings and notes. Seven files came from NASA, one from the CIA. The documents span from the 1940s to roughly half a year before the release, with passages redacted to protect witnesses, locations and sensitive information.

The most important sentence, however, is not in a case description but in the government's statement: the documents should not be regarded as analysis, investigative conclusions, or findings of fact regarding the reality, nature or significance of the events.

In other words, the batch is raw material. Cases solved more than sixty years ago and genuinely unexplained sightings ended up in the same pile, without labels. We selected five cases and looked at what we know about them today.

1. "Snowflakes" around the Earth, 1962

In the batch: an audio recording of astronaut Scott Carpenter, in which he talks about tiny particles that, he says, look exactly like snowflakes.

What we know: Carpenter solved the mystery on the same flight. When he tapped the wall of the capsule, every knock released a new cloud of particles. The "snowflakes" were ice crystals coming off the outside of the capsule. We covered the details in our article Snowflakes in space.

2. Green lights over Los Alamos, 1948–1951

In the batch: a handwritten letter dated 1970 from a Los Alamos scientist, stating that between 1948 and 1951 he regularly saw green lights over the mountains, between nine and eleven in the evening, once in some kind of formation.

What we know: the letter is connected to one of the most famous UFO waves of the Cold War, the green fireballs. In 1949 a conference was even held about them in Los Alamos, with Edward Teller taking part, and the Air Force launched an observation program. The investigation concluded that the phenomenon was probably of natural origin, most likely extremely bright meteors. The full story can be read in our article Edward Teller and the green fireballs.

3. The object shot down over Lake Huron, 2023

In the batch: footage of a fast-moving object that was shot down over Lake Huron in 2023. The footage does not reveal whether it was found.

What we know: on February 12, 2023, an F-16 fighter jet shot down the object, which was drifting at an altitude of roughly 6,100 meters, with a Sidewinder missile, one week after a Chinese balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. The first missile missed. According to reports, the object was octagonal, had strings hanging from it, had no propulsion of its own, and emitted no radio signal. The search was suspended on February 16 due to bad weather.

The story, however, has a sequel that was left out of the batch. According to documents made public in November 2024, the debris was eventually found, and the object came from a company that sells weather-monitoring equipment. As early as February 2023, the White House said there was no indication of a spy program and that it may have been a harmless balloon for commercial or research purposes.

4. A green circle over a Soviet missile range, 1973

In the batch: a CIA report on a sighting at a Soviet military facility.

What we know: the source of the report was a former Soviet citizen who served at the Sary Shagan range. The range lies in Kazakhstan, near Lake Balkhash, and was set up to test Soviet missile defense weapons. One evening in late summer 1973, during a Canadian–Soviet sports broadcast, the source stepped outside and saw a bright green, circular object or patch in the sky to the west, at an angle of roughly 70 degrees. The circle widened over 10–15 seconds, then over a few minutes concentric green circles formed around it, and finally the color disappeared. No sound was heard.

Neither the report nor later analyses offer an explanation. Based on the location and the description, however, the obvious hypothesis is that he may have seen the trace of a missile test. Rocket exhaust released at high altitude can still catch sunlight after sunset and paint expanding, ringed, colored clouds across the sky. Soviet missile launches caused several famous UFO reports in the 1970s. We state this only as a hypothesis, however: no document confirms it.

5. Orange orbs around a helicopter, 2025

In the batch: a memo from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In late 2025, a senior intelligence officer was investigating booms near a mountain range on a helicopter mission. The ground team reported by radio that an orange orb rose from the ground, came within three meters of the helicopter, then dropped beneath them and sped away. The orb split in two and changed direction. With the fighter jets that were sent out, according to the officer's notes, the orbs matched the aircraft's speed and trajectory. He wrote that they were almost at a loss for words.

What we know: almost nothing. The memo does not name the location, does not give the size of the orbs, and contains no conclusion or follow-up. The officer wrote only that he filed a report that evening and then went home.

What do the five cases show together?

If we put them side by side, a pattern emerges:

The older a case, the more likely it already has an answer. Behind the snowflakes of the 1960s and the fireballs of the 1940s stand decades of investigation.
The batch does not contain the answers. In the case of the Lake Huron object, the solution had already been public a year and a half earlier, yet the footage appears without explanation.
The most interesting cases are the least documented. For the helicopter orbs and the Soviet green circle, precisely the data that would let us decide what they were is missing.

The most common objections

"If the government released it, it's a mystery." The government itself wrote that the documents contain no conclusions. Release is not a verdict.
"They only include the old cases to divert attention." Possibly, but there is a simpler explanation: the batch is an extract from a database, and everything that was ever logged as a UAP report went into it.
"The solved cases could actually have been UFOs too." For the snowflakes, the eyewitness himself ruled this out, and for the Lake Huron object, the debris did.

The sober take

The five cases fall at five different points on the "how much do we know about it" scale, and that is also the most important lesson of the entire batch of files.

The batch does not filter. The documents come from a reporting database into which solved and unsolved cases alike were entered. So a single file on its own says nothing about whether it is a mystery.
The answer is often somewhere else. The solution to the snowflakes is preserved in the astronaut's own recollection, that of the Lake Huron object in later documents, and that of the green fireballs in the investigation of the time. None of these is in the batch.
The open cases consist of little data. For the orange orbs and the Soviet green circle, the exact location, the size, measurements and the result of an investigation are missing. This does not prove that they were extraordinary phenomena, only that it cannot be decided from the published material.

What should you do when a "new UFO file" comes your way? Check when the case happened, look for the later investigation or account, and only then decide whether it is a mystery. That is how we solved three of the five cases.

What was that?

A fireball in the sky? A bright meteor or reentering space debris