Many unidentified flying objects, or what the government calls “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” are balloons, satellites, birds, or things otherwise explainable. Balloons and satellites account for nearly 85% of the objects in the Pentagon’s resolved UFO investigations. Some UFOs are also undisclosed aircraft belonging to secret military or intelligence units, Russia, or China (the Washington Examiner reported in 2023 on China’s use of drones to spy on U.S. military training areas).
Nevertheless, as I’ve argued previously, a small subset of UFOs is very likely the construct of a highly advanced non-human intelligence.
Take the sphere/orb-type UFOs. This morphology characterizes the largest subset of UFOs in the Pentagon’s unresolved case files. These UFOs have frequently been featured in the declassified videos and reports released by the Department of War over the past few months. I also understand from numerous military sources that numerous high-resolution videos of this type of UFO exist but have not been released. We’ve already seen some very interesting reports, including from last week’s Pentagon disclosure.
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In one 2025 case, a U.S. military drone operator described six sphere UFOs moving with high agility at speeds he estimated at 480 mph. The grainy video is interesting but inconclusive. Could these have been birds, and the drone operator simply have been confused? Perhaps. That said, the drone operator’s systems would likely have enabled him to accurately estimate the spheres’ speed. The sheer scale of reporting on these extreme-performance-sphere UFOs makes their potential non-human origin a necessary line of inquiry.
Most of my fellow journalists will laugh at this assertion. Many readers will do the same. This reflects the UFO subject’s enduring stigma. Similarly, too many others like to sensationalize explainable UFO events as extraterrestrial in nature. It’s a fun way to get lucrative YouTube and Netflix shows. It’s certainly far easier than engaging in the kind of intensive research offered by my friends Robert Hastings and Doug Johnson.
UAP Orb, Department of War media release.
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Still, the evidence to suggest that some kind of unknown intelligence is operating on Earth is significant and growing.
We now have peer-reviewed reports indicating the presence of UFOs in orbit prior to the Space Age. We have a litany of credible eyewitness reports, supported by a further catalog of radar and other advanced sensor data, which point to UFOs in the 1940s and 1950s possessing capabilities far in advance of anything that we fly even today. We also have new scientific consideration as to how faster-than-light travel might be possible (energy requirements notwithstanding). That brings us back to the sphere of UFOs. Because while some are birds etc., others plainly are not.
For a start, some high-fidelity videos clearly show that some spheres lack flight surfaces and visible exhaust, yet can nonetheless accelerate rapidly from stationary flight to more than 1,500 mph. It’s true that sensor recordings can produce poor data returns (balloons are notorious for confusing radar systems). And while it is possible to build sphere-shaped drones, some sphere UFOs exhibit performance characteristics well beyond our conventional understanding of avionics and physics.
The U.S. has several highly classified aircraft, for example, some of which have been recorded by members of the public on multiple occasions. Yet, these aircraft at least have flight surfaces and jet engines. Even if the U.S. had developed an exotic propulsion system that negated the need for jet exhaust systems, we would expect some technical crossover into new aircraft such as the B-21 bomber and F-47 fighter jet.
Equally noteworthy is the behavior of the spheres. Because that behavior suggests they may be designed as a discreet intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platform. Small and highly maneuverable, they do not attract easy attention from the ground or from aircraft that are not using infrared or other emissions sensors. From a passing glance at a distance, they look like balloons. But they also sometimes exhibit avoidance or countermeasure behavior in response to monitoring.
To what end?
Well, this is where we need to get theoretical.
Let’s theorize that a non-human intelligence wanted to monitor humanity while mitigating the risk of its technology (or the originators of that technology) being compromised. This intelligence would surely be aware of the advances in human technology over the past two decades, especially in drones and their onboard sensors. While there are many examples of truly strange UFOs taking evasive action in response to human efforts to record them, imagery from the 20th and early 21st centuries has often been of insufficient quality or credibility to generate widespread public awareness that something truly extraordinary is occurring.
In contrast, today’s smartphone cameras allow for extremely detailed photography. The proliferation of these phones across the population has also made the skies, at least in population-proximate areas, a sensor-saturated operating environment for anything visible from the ground. A disk- or Tic-Tac-shaped UFO would thus risk mass disruption to human society if caught on numerous cell phone cameras doing very strange stuff. But spheres, small things that look like balloons, would not. More than a dozen videos of these sphere-type UFOs have now been released by the Pentagon. The general public reaction has been limited to passing curiosity.
Sphere UFOs would also serve the secrecy of their purveyors for another reason. Namely, that if one of these objects were to crash or were otherwise recovered, their size and apparently simplistic design would be unlikely to generate the kind of attention that a crashed flying saucer might provoke. Indeed, because of the perceivably boring nature of a sphere found on the ground, a crash might be ignored entirely. A passerby would likely assume it was a discarded artwork!
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A sphere-type UFO even offers fraudsters an easier means to create their own similar UFO and muddy the waters. This is almost certainly the case with the so-called “Buga Sphere” that some claim crashed in Colombia last year, for example. UFO fraudsters certainly are real. For a large fistful of dollars, for example, Steven Greer claims he can summon UFOs of extraterrestrial origin. Except that he also summons UFOs in the form of parachute flares dropped from planes.
But even the U.S. military can’t create some of what we have long been seeing and continue to see in Earth’s skies. Does that mean that the videos we’re seeing show drones of an alien construct? No. But neither does it mean the possibility isn’t worth seriously considering.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
