UAP Case Archive

Shapes / Orbs

Orbs

Balls of light are the oldest images in the record and the shape most often seen in today's military reports. They are also the most often explained, because a glowing ball gives a witness almost nothing to judge its size or distance by.

    Over the Rhine, 1944: balls of red fire beside a night fighter. Drawing for reference only.
    Each orb is one case, colored by status. The years before 1940 are compressed. Select one to open it below.

    Start with the foo fighters.

    The first orb case with a named military crew, a newspaper story and a report sent up the chain of command. Eighty years later, no explanation has stuck.

    On the night of November 23, 1944, a crew from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron was patrolling over the Rhine, about 20 miles north of Strasbourg. Intelligence officer Fred Ringwald noticed eight to ten balls of red fire moving very fast to the west. The pilot, Edward Schlueter, turned toward them, and they disappeared.

    Radar observer Donald Meiers named them "foo fighters," after a line in the comic strip Smokey Stover. In an Associated Press story on New Year's Day 1945, he described three kinds: red balls off the wingtips, a vertical row of three, and a cluster of about fifteen flickering lights in the distance. One, he said, followed him 20 miles down the Rhine Valley and turned when he turned.

    Ringwald later sent a report listing 14 incidents from December 1944 into January 1945 to XII Tactical Air Command, which asked Allied headquarters for help.

    What has been tried

    • On recordA named crew, a contemporary AP story and a 14-incident report sent to XII Tactical Air Command.
    • ProposedSt. Elmo's fire, the glow that can form on aircraft in electrically charged air.
    • RejectedThe crews said they knew St. Elmo's fire when they saw it, and that this was something else.
    • OpenNo explanation has been accepted.

    What the record shows.

    Twenty-six cases from 1561 to 2023. These patterns run through them.

    The most common shape in today's military data.

    At a Senate hearing in April 2023, the head of the Pentagon's UAP office said 52 percent of the reports his office was assessing were round or spherical. Triangles and discs dominate the folklore. Spheres dominate the files.

    Three very different kinds of report.

    One-off sightings with named witnesses, like Gorman or Carter. Lights that keep returning to one place, like Brown Mountain, Marfa and Hessdalen. And sensor-only cases since 2004, where no one sees the object with their own eyes.

    Military aircrew anchor the strongest cases.

    The 415th Night Fighter Squadron in 1944. Security staff and a meteor specialist at Los Alamos and Sandia in 1948. The VFA-11 "Red Rippers" off Virginia in 2014, including a near miss.

    A ball of light is the hardest thing to judge.

    It has no edges, no detail and no known size, so a witness can't tell how far away it is. That is why balloons, sky lanterns, planets and distant headlights explain so many of these cases.

    The oldest images are religious prints.

    The 1561 Nuremberg and 1566 Basel broadsheets show balls in the sky around the sun. They were printed for a religious audience, and most historians favor sundogs or similar effects of sunlight in ice crystals.

    In orbit, most orbs were close by.

    John Glenn's "fireflies" were ice and frost from his own capsule. Other astronaut orbs were booster pieces, debris and satellites.

    Often told wrong.

    Several orb stories have drifted from their sources. Here is what the earliest records say.

    The story you may have heardWhat the record shows
    Nuremberg saw a battle of orbs in 1561.
    The account is an illustrated broadsheet by a local printer, written for a religious audience. At Basel in 1566, the printers did not see the event themselves.
    The Marfa lights date to a cowhand in 1883.
    Robert Ellison's own 1937 memoir does not mention them. The first published account is a 1957 magazine article.
    Jimmy Carter saw a UFO in October 1969.
    That is the date on his 1973 report form. Lions Club records place the meeting on January 6, 1969, and the Leary club had disbanded before October.
    A transparent sphere with occupants visited the Canary Islands in 1976.
    That night a U.S. submarine launched Poseidon missiles nearby. Their expanding exhaust, lit by sunlight high above the dark islands, matches what people saw.
    The USS Omaha filmed a "transmedium" sphere in 2019.
    That label is filmmaker Jeremy Corbell's. The Navy's own note called it a possible small drone that appeared to sink.

    All orb cases.

    Listed oldest first. Each card says what kind of evidence the case rests on, from 16th-century prints to infrared video.

      Lights that come back.

      Most orb sightings happen once. A few places see them again and again, and those are the only orb cases studied with instruments for years: Brown Mountain in North Carolina, Marfa in Texas and Hessdalen in Norway.

      At Brown Mountain, a federal geologist plotted the lights in 1922 and traced them to car and train headlights, house lights and brush fires. At Marfa, physics students in 2004 matched the lights to cars on a highway miles away. Layers of warm and cool air bend that light, so it seems to float, bob and change color.

      Hessdalen is different. Instruments there have recorded some events since 1984, and researchers still list part of it as unresolved.

      where the light seems to be headlights Warm and cool layers of air bend the light on its way across the valley.

      Left off this page.

      These are sometimes filed as orbs but belong elsewhere, or fall outside what this archive covers.

      • Tehran, 1976Filed on the Diamonds page.
      • Rendlesham Forest, 1980The "red sun-like light" is part of the case on the Triangles page.
      • Phoenix flares, 1997Part of the Phoenix Lights, on the Triangles page.
      • Washington, D.C., 1952Radar and visual lights, not yet checked against the sources.
      • Ball lightning and ordinary meteorsLeft out as a category, unless they were investigated as UFOs at the time, like the green fireballs.