Traces of a Disputed UFO Luring Operation at a Secret U.S. Base
According to the head of a UFO advocacy organization, U.S. intelligence carried out a successful luring operation in late 2025 to attract UFOs over a secret military facility. Recently released government documents confirm the encounters and the photographs, but not the luring itself.
Jordan Flowers, head of the Disclosure Foundation, which campaigns for the disclosure of UFO phenomena, claimed in an appearance on CBS News that the ODNI, or Office of the Director of National Intelligence, carried out a successful luring operation in December 2025 over a sensitive U.S. military testing facility in the southwestern part of the country. According to him, the operation produced infrared camera footage and photographs of the orbs that were observed, an FBI interview record with an intelligence official, and a classified briefing for several members of the House of Representatives, including Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Representatives Eric Burlison and Tim Burchett. Flowers said the incident is regarded as "incontrovertible proof" that accelerated transparency efforts.
Two documents released under President Trump's UFO disclosure initiative partly support this story. One, a record titled USPER Statement about UAP Sighting, is a summary of an FBI interview with an intelligence official, while the other, the document designated ODNI-UAP-D001, is that same official's firsthand account. The Department of War published the former in the first batch of files and the latter in the second batch, released on May 8. The documents describe a series of events at a sensitive testing facility in the western United States in late 2025, but contrary to Flowers' claim, they give neither the exact date nor the location: the name of the facility, the nearby towns, the mountain range and the coordinates are all redacted from the text.
What do the documents show?
According to the official, he set out as a member of a helicopter team to investigate the orbs observed around the facility over several nights and the dull thuds heard in the mountains. The crew searched for debris for hours, but the fragments they found turned out to be remnants of earlier rocket tests and projectiles; they also found an unidentified, deep cave entrance, but continued on without landing. After dark, however, in the official's words, "What followed was a series of close UAP encounters lasting over an hour." A ground observation team using infrared equipment detected an orb that appeared extremely hot near the ground, which broke away at high speed, split in two, and then one part flew a distance of about 32 kilometers and came to about three meters from the helicopter. Later, at an altitude of about 210 meters (700 feet), several orbs appeared around the aircraft, including four or five that arranged themselves in a T formation and then faded in reverse order. At the same time, five fighter jets were also flying in the area as part of a training mission, and according to the official, the orbs at times appeared to be "chasing" these aircraft, matching their speed and direction. On returning to the base, the team was, in the official's words, "virtually speechless" after what they had seen.
The Department of War also attached 24 images to the documents, six of which it published. The black-and-white images, taken with night-vision equipment, show dark, circular objects that were photographed beneath the helicopter from the ground by the personnel present; according to the department, they too could not identify what the objects might have been. The FBI provided the images to AARO, the Pentagon's office dealing with UFO phenomena. Some details, such as the identities of the witnesses and the location of the facility, were redacted, but according to the department, nothing was removed from what is visible of the objects themselves.
What is not proven?
The documents do not openly state that the mission was aimed at luring UFOs. One of the documents reveals only that earlier that same day an unnamed government agency had carried out a "successful test" at the same site; the name of the agency and the nature of the test are redacted. The Department of War refers to the event as part of an "exercise," without explaining what it involved. The documents thus confirm that an FBI interview took place, that photographs were taken, and that several government witnesses and sensors observed the objects, but not that all of this was the result of a deliberate luring operation. The latter is Flowers' own synthesis of the public documents and the statements of members of Congress.
Flowers' claim is consistent with what Representative Eric Burlison said two months earlier on Annie Frey's show: he had been briefed on an event where they "tried to set up a perfect scenario to attract UFOs, and then … to try to document or record them," and this, in his words, was "when the whole conversation changed," because it provided evidence that "no one could deny." Burlison also said that Majority Leader Steve Scalise had been briefed on the incident as well. In April, in a statement to journalist Matt Laslo, Scalise confirmed that he had attended a classified briefing on the UFO topic, but he did not confirm that it concerned the same event Burlison had spoken about. It therefore remains an open question whether the congressional briefings really concern the same incident the documents describe, or whether Flowers wove the story together from two separate threads.
The sober take
The government documents mention the event in the context of an 'exercise' that is not described in further detail and a 'successful test' carried out earlier that day, whose content is likewise unknown, but they do not state that the goal was the deliberate luring of UFOs; this interpretation was put forward by Jordan Flowers, head of the Disclosure Foundation, as a synthesis of the public data.