The declassified record describes not one object but a catalog of forms, and that catalog shifts across eras, theaters, and behaviors. The classic disc dominates the 1947 files and then all but disappears. The luminous orb never does: it is there in the wartime night-phenomena file, in the green fireballs over the 1949 nuclear labs, and it dominates the modern sensor record. Here is every morphology in the corpus, what attests it, and the patterns hiding in the shapes themselves.
Each form is rated by how well the primary documents support it: strong, circumstantial, contested, or historical (era terminology rather than a resolved modern sighting). Where declassified footage exists for a form, it is linked.
Orange and red spheres, often "super-hot" on FLIR; one orb releasing smaller ones. The same luminous family owns the pre-modern record, from the 1948–49 green fireballs over the New Mexico nuclear labs.Western U.S. Event, Oct 2023; USPER helicopter encounter, 2025; green fireballs, New Mexico 1948–49 (DOE-UAP-D004 / DOW-UAP-D017)
The dominant modern form, and the one constant across the whole record: the same luminous orb runs from the 1948–49 green fireballs, which LaPaz argued were not ordinary meteorites, to the modern FLIR orbs. Carries the parent-child and station-keeping behaviors; the strongest-attested shape in the corpus.
A glowing spherical object with a vertical, unwavering cylindrical pole or bar.UAE, 2024 (DOW-UAP-D27); Greece diamond-with-probe (DOW-UAP-D25)
A structured signature: a simple body with a fixed protrusion that does not move relative to it. Recurs across separate theaters.
"Diamond-shaped object with a non-maneuvering probe at the bottom," visible only on SWIR; and a "diamond / round-topped object" watched over a nuclear-weapons plant.Greece, Jan 2024 (DOW-UAP-D25); Pantex Plant, 2015 (DOE-UAP-D005)
In Greece, a shortwave-infrared detection anomaly, invisible to the eye and standard IR. At the Pantex weapons plant in 2015, security officers described the same diamond/round-topped form visually, through camera and binoculars.
A matte white, non-metallic, horizontal oval, completely motionless and silent.Cheyenne Mountain, Feb 2022 (FBI FD-302)
Five Fort Carson soldiers, over the NORAD complex. The shape is strongly described; the IC's backscatter explanation is contested.
FBI rendering only, no footage releasedElongated capsule and cylinder forms; "cigar-shaped or fast spherical."USCG C-144 Tyndall, 2024 (PR065/066); PR053, Oct 2022
The form made famous in 2004; here it appears as IR-hot capsules tracked by Coast Guard sensors.
"Ripples like you were looking at an object that is underwater… the left side of the triangle banked up quickly to an almost vertical orientation, but it did not change path or elevation."FBI-UAP-D026, Colorado Springs, October 2023
A solid dark delta, usually silent, often with a light set at each corner. Distinct from the luminous-orb family. The August 2026 release turned this from the corpus's thinnest form into one of its best-evidenced: five interviews spanning 2002 to 2023, four of them with commissioned renderings, plus a 1964 Navy radar-and-visual case describing a "delta-shaped" object. Two unconnected Colorado Springs witnesses, interviewed nine months apart, independently reported the same two oddities: a refractive haze around the object, and a roll toward vertical that produced no change of course. The one triangle that made a sound, in 2011, hummed.
An ovoid "football" body with three radial projections.INDOPACOM, 2024 (PR046)
A body with fixed structural protrusions, the closest the modern record comes to a "built" appearance.
A fast rectangular object, resolved only on post-flight analysis, tracking opposite the aircraft's flight path.Navy Range Fouler debrief, Eastern US, 2019 (DOW-UAP-D090)
A Tranche 4 Navy “Range Fouler” contact, small at distance; the rectangular form emerged only in frame-by-frame review of the tape.
A dark kite that translates laterally without turning; a transparent one that blocked then released a spotlight beam.Western U.S. Event, Oct 2023 (AARO briefing)
The transparent kite's beam-blocking is the single most optically anomalous detail in the corpus.
Witness + AARO reconstruction, no footageSpherical objects operating near the surface and a submarine; a "USO formation."PR067 (USO near sub); PR052 (USO formation)
Defined by medium-crossing behavior rather than a single shape, usually spherical. Rated circumstantial for a specific reason: both entries are congressional-batch clips whose medium-crossing rests on an uploader-assigned title rather than a mission report, and the chain of custody is unverified. No document in the corpus describes an object entering or leaving water. Several place objects just above a surface, which is a different claim.
The classic flying disc, overwhelmingly the language of the 1947–50 files; one contested modern composite sketch.FBI 62-HQ-83894 (1947–50); 2024 composite sketch (contested)
The defining shape of the early era that the modern sensor record almost never reproduces. Its absence after 1960 is itself a finding.
No modern footage of a classic disc exists in PURSUEThe eleven forms above are ours, derived from the corpus. They are not the first attempt. Released in August 2026, the Air Materiel Command's reply to headquarters sorts roughly 180 investigated incidents into four classes, and it is the earliest morphology in the record.
“The objects described fall into the following general classification groups, according to shape or physical configuration:
a. Flat disc of circular or approximately circular shape.
b. Torpedo or cigar shaped aircraft, with no wings or fins visible in flight.
c. Spherical or balloon shaped objects.
d. Balls of light with no apparent form attached.”
Air Materiel Command, 1st Indorsement to HQ USAF, 8 November 1948 (DOW-UAP-D100)
Three of those four classes are still in the modern sensor record, seventy-eight years later, under different names. The flat disc is the form that vanishes. The cigar becomes the tic-tac. The sphere stays a sphere.
The fourth class is the one worth sitting with. “Balls of light with no apparent form attached” is not a shape at all; it is an explicit admission that the most commonly reported thing in the file had no resolvable morphology. That is the same category this site calls the luminous-orb family, drawn independently from the same records, and it is the form the chart below shows never leaving. The Air Force drew that boundary in 1948, from unaided human eyes, before radar tracking and long before infrared. It has not needed redrawing.
The same document is candid about the limits of a taxonomy built from witnesses: AMC arranged a study with the Aero-Medical Laboratory to test hallucination, optical illusion and deliberate hoax, and attributed a great many of the round objects in class (c) to weather balloons. A shape list assembled from what people say they saw is a record of reports, not of objects, and the compilers said so.
Sort the shapes by era and two patterns appear. The disc and saucer own the 1940s at 71% of the era's documents, hold 45% through the 1950s, and then collapse: two records in the whole of the 2020s. The luminous family runs the entire span, attested beside the earliest disc reports, in the 1949 green fireballs, and across 35% of the 2020s record, where every structured modern form joins it. Bars cover all 241 analysed documents, binned by the same eras used on The Atlas; the muted segment is the unresolved share, and undated files are shown rather than dropped.
Where a shape appears is not random, but the honest version of that claim is narrower than it looks. Counted across all 241 documents, only the United States has enough resolved shapes to carry a pattern: 29 discs and 26 orbs, the two eras stacked on one map. The Middle East is the densest modern military theater and yet 22 of its 28 documents describe no shape at all, because sensor contacts frequently resolve to nothing describable. The largest bucket in the corpus is the one with no location at all. Read the geography as a map of where the record is detailed, not of where the objects are.
87 documents in this theater.
28 documents in this theater.
4 documents in this theater.
7 documents in this theater.
4 documents in this theater.
1 document in this theater.
9 documents in this theater.
15 documents in this theater.
86 documents in this theater.
Cross all eleven forms against the behaviors documented for them. The orb is the generalist, carrying five of the six; the structured forms cluster on infrared and SWIR detection anomalies; the silent motionless hover belongs to the bean. The triangle gained its third behavior in the August 2026 release, when two unconnected Colorado Springs witnesses independently described a refractive haze around the object. A blank cell means the behavior is not documented for that form, which is not the same as its being absent, and the transmedium row is blank throughout for the reason given in the catalog above. Shape and behavior are not independent.
| Form | Parent-child / split | Sharp maneuver | Silent | IR / SWIR anomaly | Station-keeping | Optical effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orb / Sphere | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | |
| Sphere + appendage | ● | ● | ||||
| Diamond | ● | ● | ||||
| Oval / Bean | ● | ● | ||||
| Triangle | ● | ● | ● | |||
| Tic-Tac / Cylinder | ● | ● | ||||
| Kite | ● | ● | ||||
| Football / multi-projection | ● | |||||
| Rectangle | ● | |||||
| Disc / Saucer | ● | ● | ||||
| Transmedium / USO |
Declassified DoD footage for the forms that were captured on video. Full catalog on The Video Record.
One object, two instruments, two shapes. Before the footage, the clearest thing the release says about morphology is not a video at all. In 2026 two witnesses in the western United States watched the same lights over a ridgeline. To the naked eye they were dull red dashes. Through night optical devices the same objects were circles, wrapped in the halo an image intensifier puts around any point source. The FBI commissioned an artist to draw both views and published them side by side.
The interview goes further and undercuts its own witness: he saw dashes where the man standing beside him saw triangles or diamonds, and the Bureau records his astigmatism as the likely reason. Same objects, same night, three different reported forms depending on the optics in front of the eye.
This is the government supplying, in pictures, the caution this page opens with. Reported shape is partly a property of the sensor, and any morphology drawn from a corpus of reports inherits that. It does not dissolve the pattern — the same 2026 objects were invisible to thermal while bright to both eye and night optics, which is a fact about the objects rather than the observer — but it sets the error bars.
Every form in this catalog is drawn from the PURSUE tranches — nothing here is sourced from social media or outside the release. Use this index to jump from a shape straight into the primary document that attests it. Where a page scan or sensor still has been declassified, you can open it inline.
The Tic-Tac/cylinder and transmedium/USO sets have no released page scan or sensor still — they are documented through the PURSUE video reductions, linked from each card above and gathered on The Video Record.