FBI 302 Interview, September 2023: Drone Pilot Describes Brilliant Light and Linear Metallic Object (Serial 5)

Source file: fbi-september-2023-sighting-serial-5.pdf (FD-302, Rev. 5-8-10) Originating agency: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Date range: September 2023 (incident) — October 2023 (interview and documentation) Page count: 2 (both read) High-significance pages: page 1 (sighting description), page 2 (after-effects and contextual details)

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Official Blurb (from war.gov)

This is an FBI 302 interview conducted with a US citizen regarding their first-hand account of a UAP encounter at a US test site. USPER described a "bright light over the horizon."

Summary

This document is an FD-302 form — the FBI's standard interview format — with a Date of Entry of October 2023. The interview was conducted via FaceTime video with an FBI Special Agent and two additional attendees. The interviewee is a male U.S. citizen (USPER) who was working at an American test site in September 2023 as part of a five-person contractor crew that had arrived to conduct LiDAR testing. The witness was a drone pilot with ten to fifteen flight hours of experience.

According to his account, on a September 2023 morning at approximately 7:30 a.m., the witness was riding south in a convoy of three vehicles with four other contractors. As the convoy approached a site entry gate, he saw a linear object with a super-bright white light on its eastern side. The light was bright enough to reveal bands within it. The object itself was metallic gray in color, with no wings and no exhaust. It was smaller than a Boeing 737 and larger than a drone — the length of one to two Blackhawk helicopters. The object was approximately 5,000 feet above the ground, moving from east to west parallel to the surface. It was visible for five to ten seconds before the light extinguished and the object vanished. The skies were clear; the witness could not find it again.

This document is one of a series of FBI 302 interviews with different witnesses from the same incident. It is labeled in PURSUE Initiative terminology as Serial 5 (although the filename contains "serial-4," the war.gov CSV classifies it as Serial 5).

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Research Article

Introduction: A Third Witness to the Western U.S. Incident, September 2023

This document is the third link in the chain of FBI 302 interviews tied to a single UAP event at an American test site in September 2023. The series includes at least three publicly identified interviews (Serials 3, 4, and 5), all addressing the same morning and the same object but conducted with different members of the contractor group present at the site.

The series matters for one central reason: it enables cross-witness comparison. Individual UAP reports always suffer from the difficulty of determining whether testimony is accurate or the product of misperception. When the FBI interviews multiple witnesses from the same event independently, their accounts can be triangulated. If the critical attributes — shape, size, color, behavior — recur across witnesses, confidence in the account strengthens. Contradictions, by contrast, prompt methodological questions.

The FBI Laboratory's Composite Sketch of April 30, 2024 visually summarizes the consensus across all witness accounts from the September 2023 incident. It depicts a metallic ellipsoid, bronze in color, approximately 130 to 195 feet (roughly 40 to 60 meters) in length, which "materialized from a bright light" and disappeared instantaneously. Serial 5 is one of the contributing accounts.

The Interview: What the Witness Described

According to the FD-302, the interview was conducted via FaceTime video with an FBI Special Agent and two additional attendees. At the time of the interview, some participants were physically co-located (details redacted) while others joined remotely. The Date of Entry was October 2023 — one month after the incident.

The witness described himself as a contractor at the test site with a drone pilot background, having accumulated ten to fifteen flight hours. That experience is relevant: he was not a civilian observer without aviation training, but someone with hands-on familiarity with unmanned aerial vehicles, altitude estimation, distance judgment, and characteristic aerial shapes.

On a September 2023 morning, around 7:30 a.m., a convoy of three vehicles departed the contractors' staging area heading south. Five people were in the convoy. The destination was a LiDAR testing zone. The sun was to the east and visibility was good.

The vehicles reached an entry gate that "was giving trouble" — apparently failing to open normally. As the front windshield was at approximately three-quarters of its raised height, the witness observed the object from inside the vehicle.

His description, rendered faithfully from the FD-302:

"At about three quarters of the windshield up, [witness] saw a linear object with a super bright light on the east side of the object. The light was bright white and bright enough to see bands within the light. The object was metallic / gray in color. It did not have any wings or exhaust. The object was smaller than a 737, the length of one to two Blackhawk helicopters, and definitely larger than a drone. The object was approximately 5,000 feet above the ground and was moving from east to west parallel to the ground. The object was visible for five to ten seconds and then the light went out and the object vanished. The sky was clear and [witness] couldn't find the object again."

Several features deserve elaboration:

1. Size: Between a drone and a Boeing 737. Length of one to two Blackhawks (roughly 50 to 130 feet). This is on the smaller end of the FBI Lab sketch range (130 to 195 feet), though the difference may reflect viewing angle, viewing distance, or uncertainty in estimation.
2. Color: "Metallic / gray." The FBI Lab sketch describes "metallic bronze." The difference is subtle and explicable: an eastern morning sun falling on a gray-metallic surface can impart a warmer bronze cast; observers at different angles to the object's reflective surface will perceive different tones.
3. Shape: "Linear." This differs from the sketch's "ellipsoid" but does not necessarily contradict it. An ellipsoid viewed from the side appears as an elongated linear form. Furthermore, the intense light on one end may have obscured three-dimensional cues, causing the witness to perceive the visible lit face as a line rather than a solid.
4. No wings or exhaust: This is a meaningful affirmative exclusion — not a commercial aircraft, not a propeller plane, not a helicopter. The object also produced no contrail or thermally visible exhaust.
5. Movement: East to west, parallel to the ground. No vertical or erratic maneuvering — a "normal" direction of travel in aircraft terms. This distinguishes the object from UAP reports involving physically impossible maneuvers, while remaining inconsistent with a meteorological balloon or debris.

Serials 3, 4, and 5: A Cross-Witness Comparison

Based on available context, the FBI 302 series for the September 2023 incident includes at least three interviews:

• Serial 3: Witness who saw a bright stationary white light that began moving and disappeared.
• Serial 4: Witness — a fifteen-year test-site veteran — who observed the full metallic bronze cigar-shaped object.
• Serial 5 (this document): A drone pilot who observed both the intense light and the metallic object within it.

The war.gov CSV summary for Serial 5 reads: "USPER described a bright light over the horizon." This characterization is somewhat misleading relative to the actual interview text. This witness saw the full metallic object, not merely a light. The most plausible explanation is methodological: the CSV summary authors foregrounded the witness's initial perception (the brilliant light) as the headline description, perhaps because it was the optically most immediate element or the one most prominent in the witness's own account. But the full interview reveals the witness also perceived the metallic body inside the light.

The "Light-Only Phase" Hypothesis: Does It Hold?

The task requires examining the hypothesis that Serial 5 captured only the "light phase" of the event — not the solidification of the object into a visible solid form. The FBI Composite Sketch frames the sequence as: (1) a bright light appears; (2) an ellipsoid object materializes within it; (3) the object disappears instantaneously.

A close reading of the FD-302 does not fully support this hypothesis. The witness clearly saw the metallic object, its gray color, and the absence of wings and exhaust — indicating he perceived both phases 1 and 2. However, several nuances merit consideration:

1. Order of perception: According to the interview, as the vehicle approached the gate the witness first registered the light (the "super bright" quality is the first attribute mentioned). Only on sustained observation did his perception add the metallic object. This mirrors natural perceptual processing: a brilliant spotlight seizes attention; the metallic form is recognized in the next moment.
2. The reversed sequence at termination: The witness described the ending as "the light went out and the object vanished" — meaning even at conclusion, the light "leads" the object. This suggests the light and the object are coupled but not identical phenomena: the light may be a product of propulsion or cloaking, and when the mechanism disengages, both the light and the object disappear.
3. Support for the Composite Sketch: The sketch uses the phrase "materializes from a bright light" — implying the light is temporally prior and the object becomes visible within or through it. Serial 5's account fits this model: light > object > simultaneous extinction.

In summary, the "light-only" hypothesis does not match the full text, but there is a genuine signal within it: the light is dominant in this witness's experience, and the metallic identification is secondary. This supports the model — "light first, object second" — that may point to an unconventional physical mechanism.

After-Effects: Sleep, Dreams, Television Failure

Page 2 documents an element that occasionally appears in modern UAP accounts but is rare in formal records: post-event effects on the witness.

The evening after the sighting, a storm passed through the area and the television in the witness's hotel room stopped working. Still "freaked out" by the incident, he went down to the lobby to confirm that all the hotel's televisions were affected, not only his. He reported strange dreams and difficulty sleeping for the first two nights after the observation.

The connection between the television malfunction — most likely attributable to the natural storm — and the UAP sighting is not direct. But the witness's psychological response is notable. His impulse to verify whether the failure was uniquely his suggests a state of heightened vigilance typical of witnesses to inexplicable UAP events. Strange dreams and sleep disturbances following UAP encounters appear in other witness accounts and have attracted academic interest as indicators of the psychological impact of anomalous experiences.

Operational and Strategic Context

The context of the event is significant: this was not a random civilian sighting. The contractor crew was at the test site to conduct LiDAR experiments — a sensitive measurement technology. The team also had restricted the airspace over the area in preparation for the drone tests they planned to run. One female member of the crew was "annoyed" when she first saw the object because she believed it was violating the restricted airspace.

This information is meaningful for three reasons:

1. Sensitive site: The sighting occurred at an American test site, almost certainly in the western United States (the traditional zones for operational-technological testing — Nevada, Utah, California).
2. Restricted airspace: The airspace had been operationally closed, yet an unauthorized object still appeared — ruling out conventional civil or military aviation traffic.
3. Professional witnesses: All five crew members were technical contractors, some of them drone pilots. They are individuals accustomed to identifying aircraft and estimating size and distance. Their reports carry greater interpretive weight than a typical civilian account.

Comparison with Other Cases

The characteristics described in Serial 5 — linear, metallic, intense light on one side, sudden appearance and disappearance, no wings or exhaust, parallel ground-level travel — share features with other UAP reports:

• USS Nimitz incident, 2004: A white "Tic Tac" object, fast, roughly the size of an airliner, without visible propulsion surfaces, performing abrupt maneuvers. The key difference is that the Nimitz object maneuvered in physically impossible ways; the Serial 5 object moved linearly.
• Western U.S. reports, 2025: Additional incidents documented in the Western US Event Slides (May 2026) indicate a recurring pattern of UAP observations in the region.

Significance of This Document

This document is a documented contribution to the cross-referenced witness accounts of the September 2023 incident. The combination of an official FBI record, a technically trained witness, an operational defense-testing framework, and a pattern of corroborating testimony makes this series one of the most noteworthy clusters to emerge from PURSUE Initiative Release 1. The FBI Lab's production of the Composite Sketch in April 2024 confirms that the agency treated these accounts with formal seriousness and viewed them as a sufficient evidentiary basis for a combined visual reconstruction.

Operative conclusion: even if the gap between the CSV summary ("bright light over the horizon") and the full interview text reflects a methodological simplification that fails to capture the richness of the testimony, the primacy of the light as an initial phenomenon in this account — combined with the sketch's language of "materializes from a bright light" — points to a physical pattern worth examining: light first, object second, both extinguishing simultaneously. This pattern does not match any conventional aircraft and resists explanation as simple optical confusion or hallucination.

Key People

No personal names are specified in the document — all are redacted under FOIA. The few identifiable categories:

• Witness (USPER): Male, U.S. citizen, technical contractor, drone pilot with 10–15 flight hours.
• FBI Special Agent: Interviewing agent; name redacted.
• Female contractor in the lead vehicle: Annoyed by the apparent airspace violation.
• Three additional contractors: Members of the test crew.

Locations

• United States — interview conducted within the U.S. via FaceTime.
• Western United States — approximate geographic region of the test site, inferred from the broader event pattern.
• American test site (U.S. test site) — name and details withheld by redaction.
• Site entry gate — the witness's specific point of observation.

Incidents

Incident	Date	Location	Pages
Observation of a linear metallic object with an intensely bright white light, approximately 5,000 feet altitude, east-to-west movement, visible for 5–10 seconds, then instantaneous disappearance	September 2023, approximately 7:30 a.m.	U.S. test site, near entry gate	Page 1
Post-event psychological effects: strange dreams and difficulty sleeping for two nights	Night following the incident	Witness's hotel room	Page 2
FD-302 interview via FaceTime with an FBI Special Agent	October 2023	Remote (U.S.)	Pages 1–2

Notable Quotes

"At about three quarters of the windshield up, [witness] saw a linear object with a super bright light on the east side of the object. The light was bright white and bright enough to see bands within the light. The object was metallic / gray in color. It did not have any wings or exhaust." — page 1

"The object was visible for five to ten seconds and then the light went out and the object vanished. The sky was clear and [witness] couldn't find the object again." — page 1

"[Witness] had weird dreams and had trouble sleeping for the first two nights after he saw the object." — page 2

"[Witness] was annoyed when she first saw the object because the air space had been restricted for the drone tests they were going to conduct." — page 2