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| Core sources | AARO, ODNI, FBI declassified records |
| Also featured | Liberation Times (Christopher Sharp), Jordan Flowers, Rep. Eric Burlison, Rep. Steve Scalise, Sen. Martin Heinrich |
| Framework | Declassified case analysis / government transparency |
| Reading time | ~14 minutes |
In February 2026, the FAA shut down all airspace over El Paso for what was supposed to be ten days, then reversed the order eight hours later — telling the public it was cartel drones while telling Congress a different story entirely. Three months earlier, according to documents the Pentagon has since declassified, a senior U.S. intelligence officer rode a helicopter into a night sky full of orange orbs that seemed to chase fighter jets. A UAP advocacy group now says the second event was not a passive sighting at all, but a successful government operation to deliberately lure the phenomenon into the open. Here’s what the paper trail actually supports, and where the story runs ahead of it.
A Ten-Day Shutdown That Lasted Eight Hours
On the night of February 10, 2026, the FAA issued an emergency order closing all airspace over El Paso, Texas in a 10-nautical-mile radius up to 18,000 feet. The agency classified it as National Defense Airspace, warning that any aircraft violating the restriction could face interception, detention, or deadly force — the most extreme airspace action over a major American city since September 11, 2001. It was supposed to last ten days. It lasted about eight hours.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told the public the closure was a response to a Mexican drug cartel drone incursion that had since been “neutralized.” Local officials, including El Paso’s mayor and its congressional representative, said they’d received no advance warning at all — medical flights were diverted roughly 60 miles to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a shipment of surgical equipment from Dallas never arrived. A parallel, unexplained flight restriction near Santa Teresa, New Mexico stayed in place afterward with no official explanation.
Two Stories, One Senator’s Denial
Members of Congress got a different account in a classified briefing the next morning: that the shutdown actually followed the Pentagon’s premature test of a high-energy laser counter-drone system near Fort Bliss, conducted without properly informing the FAA, the White House, or local officials. CBS News later reported the laser system had been used to shoot down four mylar party balloons that were misidentified as drones; at least one actual cartel drone was reportedly also disabled, though the Pentagon gave no full breakdown.
Senator Martin Heinrich, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said afterward — on the record — that El Paso and its airport were never actually under threat at any point. That statement directly contradicts the FAA’s own “national defense” framing of the closure, and it’s the kind of gap that tends to get filled with speculation. A journalist covering the story pressed Heinrich on whether the event connected to the unresolved December 2023 Langley Air Force Base incident, when unidentified drones swarmed one of the country’s most secure military installations for seventeen straight nights without ever being identified, despite AARO and FBI involvement. Heinrich didn’t deny the connection. No official body has confirmed one exists.
What AARO Actually Declassified: “Orbs Launching Orbs”
Set the El Paso confusion aside, and there’s a real, considerably stranger paper trail that the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has been publishing in stages throughout 2026 under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The clearest example is a June 5, 2026 memorandum, signed by AARO Director Jon T. Kosloski, summarizing an unresolved two-day incident from October 2023 near an unnamed “sensitive national security site” in the western United States.
Six federal law enforcement special agents, working in three two-person teams from separate vantage points, reported watching a luminous orange “mother orb” repeatedly produce clusters of two to four smaller red “orbs” at dusk, over several hours — silent, with one red orb reportedly holding stationary above a ridgeline for hours before vanishing. There’s no video, photo, or sensor recording of the incident, only matching narrative testimony from agents AARO assessed as credible and technically literate.
AARO’s own analysis ruled out misidentified aircraft exhaust and conventional drones (the loiter time alone exceeds any standard battery’s capacity), found military infrared countermeasure flares “partially plausible” for roughly 60 percent of the reported activity, and called an undisclosed U.S. government program “plausible but inconclusive.” Foreign intelligence platforms were assessed as highly unlikely. The remaining 40 percent of the phenomena, AARO concluded, is still officially categorized as potentially “unrecognized technology” — unresolved as of the report date.
The Helicopter Account: A Senior Intelligence Officer’s Own Words
A separate, and separately declassified, case describes an even closer encounter. In late 2025, a senior U.S. intelligence officer was a passenger on a helicopter that left a Joint Operations Center with a colleague and two pilots to investigate unexplained “thuds” heard in a mountain range, which had coincided with several nights of reported orb sightings near a sensitive government test facility. The crew spent hours flying low through the mountains, repeatedly finding nothing but decades-old rocket and weapons-test debris — and, at one point, a large cave entrance with no visible end, which they marked and left unexplored because there was nowhere safe to land.
After dark, with the pilots switched to night vision and infrared, ground-based federal personnel reported a “super-hot” orb hovering near the ground before it split into two objects that moved off at high speed. The helicopter crew couldn’t match its pace. What followed, in the officer’s own account, was “a series of close UAP encounters lasting over an hour”: a swarm of countless lights over the mountains; two large, oval, orange orbs with pale centers that appeared stationary just off the rotor blades, joined moments later by a third and fourth orb stacking into a “T” formation below them; and, when five fighter jets arrived to assist, similar orb formations appearing directly above the aircraft, seeming to match their speed and flight path before fading in sequence. The officer wrote that it looked as though the orbs were “chasing” the fighters, and closed the account by noting that the crew was “virtually speechless after these observations.”
A companion FBI Form 302 — the standard written record agents produce after a witness interview — corroborates the same timeline from a second angle, including ground personnel’s own infrared sighting of the initial “super-hot” orb and its split into two objects. Both documents note, almost in passing, that an unnamed government office had completed a “successful test” at the same facility earlier that same day. What that test involved is redacted in both records.
The “Luring Operation” Theory
That redacted detail is the hinge of a claim now circulating well beyond the documents themselves. Jordan Flowers, executive director of the UAP advocacy group Disclosure Foundation, said publicly that the helicopter encounter wasn’t a passive sighting at all — that ODNI had deliberately engineered a scenario designed to draw the phenomenon out over a sensitive test site, and that the operation worked. According to Flowers, the same event produced the FLIR footage and photographs referenced in the declassified files, triggered the FBI interview, and led directly to classified congressional briefings for House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Representatives Eric Burlison and Tim Burchett.
The declassified records themselves don’t use the phrase “luring operation,” and they don’t give a date, location, or the name of the office that ran the redacted “successful test” — Flowers’ framing is his own synthesis of public documents and congressional statements, not an official conclusion. But two members of Congress have independently described something that fits the same shape. Representative Burlison has said he was briefed on an event in which officials “set up a perfect-case scenario” intended to attract UAP activity, calling it the moment “the whole conversation changed” because of how many credible witnesses were involved. Scalise separately confirmed, when asked directly by a journalist, that he attended a classified briefing he described only as “eye-opening” — without confirming it was the same incident Burlison referenced.
What’s Actually Confirmed, and What Isn’t
It’s worth being precise about where the solid ground ends. Confirmed, on the record, by the government’s own declassified paperwork: the helicopter encounter happened, involved a named category of senior intelligence witness, produced ground-based infrared photography now in AARO’s possession, and coincided with an unspecified “successful test” at the same facility hours earlier. Also confirmed: two sitting members of Congress independently describing a briefing about an apparent UAP-attraction effort, in terms that align with, but don’t explicitly name, this specific event.
Not confirmed by any official source: that the “successful test” was a UAP-luring operation as opposed to something unrelated; the exact date, location, or facility involved; and that El Paso’s airspace shutdown three months later has anything to do with either story. That last link exists only because a reporter raised it and a senator declined to shoot it down — which is a real and reportable fact, but a different kind of fact than confirmation.
The Paper Trail: What’s Actually Been Declassified
Each button below links directly to the PDF at its original official host — click to download, no landing page in between:
FBI Form 302: USPER Statement About UAP SightingPDF · Dept. of War, PURSUE Release 1
ODNI-UAP-D001: Senior USIC Official’s NarrativePDF · Dept. of War, PURSUE Release 2
AARO Memo: “Orbs Launching Orbs” Western U.S. EventPDF · Dept. of War, PURSUE Release 3
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