President Trump interviewed Air Force pilots who were utterly baffled by the objects. They seem to chase Navy fighter jets and have been captured on radar and video. The Pentagon’s UFO analysis office is perplexed by them.
What is behind the enigmatic “orbs” reported by countless credible observers since at least World War II?
The scientific community must abandon the nearly century-long anti-scientific stigma surrounding UFOs — which the Pentagon likes to call “unidentified anomalous phenomena” — and investigate this enduring mystery. This is especially so since the Pentagon now admits openly that it is baffled by “several dozen” “true anomalies” and “really peculiar” UFO incidents, including some involving unknown “orbs.”
On July 24, the Senate confirmed former Air Force fighter pilot Matthew Lohmeier as the under secretary of the Air Force, the department’s second-highest civilian position. While in high school, Lohmeier had a remarkable UFO encounter.
According to Lohmeier, a “ball of light” descended upon him and a friend as they were in the wilderness outside of Tucson, Ariz. The object came so close that Lohmeier recalls that “it seemed to be buzzing with life, but it wasn’t man-made.”
“It was very well-organized, very spherical,” Lohmeier said, “and it seemed to be very conscious of the two of us that were sitting there in the Arizona mountains, like it was observing us … there was a level of interest from the orb to us.” Frightened, the two ran to their car. The object “zipped up and disappeared in the sky.”
Lohmeier is not the only Air Force fighter pilot left baffled by such an object. In a September appearance on Fox News, Trump stated that he interviewed several Air Force pilots who encountered spherical objects performing extraordinary maneuvers. According to Trump, the pilots told him, “All I know, sir, there was a round object that was going four times faster than my F-22.”
“Four or five guys [that] I’ve interviewed, solid people, great pilots for the U.S. Air Force,” Trump continued, have “seen things that they cannot explain, so there’s something.” Trump also told podcaster Joe Rogan that the pilots observed objects “like a round ball, but it wasn’t a comet or a meteor.”
Timothy Phillips, the former deputy director of the Department of Defense’s UFO analysis office, stated in June that the Pentagon is perplexed by “fiery orbs.”
Such phenomena have been reported since at least World War II. “Balls of Fire Stalk U.S. Fighters” read the headline of a frontpage Jan. 2, 1945, New York Times article describing the mysterious “foo fighters” that toyed with American pilots in the European and Pacific theaters.
The late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), as a wartime transport pilot in Asia, encountered such an object, which conducted extraordinary maneuvers around his plane. The experience led him to enthusiastically support then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) establishment of a secret Pentagon UFO program in 2008. A 2017 New York Times story revealing that program spurred a sweeping congressional investigation into the UFO phenomenon. This led to the introduction of extraordinary legislation and the establishment of the Pentagon’s analysis office.
Beyond frequent appearances of such objects in official documents, “balls of fire” feature prominently in one of the earliest surviving U.S. government UFO assessments. The 1948 Air Force analysis states that “in most instances, balls of fire have been observed at night.” “Silver balls,” on the other hand, have “been observed in daylight and a number under clear weather conditions with visibility unlimited.”
Not only were observations of strange silver spheres widely reported in the media during World War II and afterwards, but the former director of the Pentagon’s UFO analysis office stated in a 2023 presentation to NASA that the military has tracked “metallic orbs” “all over the world” “making very interesting apparent maneuvers.” A brief video of such an object accompanied his presentation.
More recently, litigation under the Freedom of Information Act forced the public disclosure of footage of a metallic sphere captured by a surveillance aircraft flying over Iraq in 2016.
Similarly, the well-known “GoFast” video, which accompanied the 2017 New York Times article, shows fighter pilots reacting in astonishment as a seemingly spherical object moves over the ocean.
The Pentagon debunked the video, but it did so prematurely. Had investigators bothered to interview the aircrew, they would have learned that the “GoFast” UFO was one of four objects flying in “precise” formation 300 miles off the coast of Florida. This is hardly compatible with the Pentagon’s suggestion that the object was a balloon. Moreover, the incident occurred just minutes before the “Gimbal” event, which resulted in the most recognizable publicly available UFO footage.
For his part, Vice President JD Vance says he is “obsessed” with this topic — and the recently released videos in particular.
The two 2015 incidents happened as Navy fighter pilots routinely observed spherical objects demonstrating seemingly physics-defying flight characteristics off the East Coast of the U.S. Similarly, Navy fighter pilot Jack Stewart described how a “spherical” object rapidly changed direction to follow his jet.
But that’s not all. In July 2019, sailors aboard an advanced Navy warship tracked roughly a dozen objects on radar as they swarmed their vessel. The incident occurred amid months-long UFO incursions, often well over 100 miles off the coast of California. During the incident, the crew captured infrared video of a spherical object moving against strong winds before descending slowly into the ocean. A similarly perplexing incident occurred the following day.
A rigorous, multidisciplinary scientific investigation of the “orb” phenomenon is long overdue. Thankfully, a group of trailblazing scientists has begun serious, unbiased work studying UFOs. Some of their initial findings are potentially paradigm-shifting.
Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the Department of State’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the Department of Defense. He is a contributor to the Sol Foundation.
