Pentagon’s newly declassified UFO files include a ‘potato’ hovering over Colorado
Jun 16, 2026, 8:14 AM
Somewhere in the Pentagon’s latest batch of declassified UFO files is a report about five U.S. Army members who walked out of a building at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs on a clear February morning in 2022, looked west toward Cheyenne Mountain and saw what they described as a giant potato floating in the sky.
The sighting was part of 72 new Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena case files released Friday (June 12) by the Department of War — the third such release since President Trump directed his administration to disclose what it knows about unexplained objects in the sky. The partially redacted FBI report describes the object as “‘potato’ shaped with distinct edges” that “appeared to look painted in a creamy/whitish opalescent color” and was “somewhat translucent with a slight shimmer.” The witnesses, led by a former Army intelligence officer, said the object was covered in what “can best be described as articulating fish scales or panels that were non-symmetrical, non-overlapping, and irregular shaped.” It hung motionless for about two minutes, then vanished — as if it had “cloaked,” the report says. None of the five had phones on them, so there’s no photo or video.
The Department of War released an artistic rendering of the object based on the witnesses’ description, and it does, in fact, look like a potato hovering over the mountain. The image has since gone viral, spawning a thread on the Colorado Springs subreddit where locals have chimed in with their own sighting stories. Investigators concluded with “low confidence” that the object may have been “backscattering of sunlight” — low light from the rising sun reflecting off the mountain’s snow and illuminating clouds above. The witnesses apparently weren’t buying it.
Cheyenne Mountain, of course, is home to the massive underground military bunker operated by NORAD and U.S. Northern Command — the kind of place where a floating potato overhead tends to raise more questions than a sunlight explanation can answer. The war.gov/ufo site, which has hosted the declassified releases, has received more than 1.7 billion hits worldwide since its launch on May 8.
