PURSUE Record — FBI September 2023 Sighting: FBI · United States · 9/1/23

Among the 120 PDF documents included in PURSUE Release 01, one stands out for its source agency and its proximity to the present day: the FBI September 2023 Sighting, a declassified record released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on May 8, 2026. Unlike the historical materials in this release that stretch back to the late 1940s, this document originates from a September 2023 incident — placing it firmly within the current generation of U.S. government UAP reporting infrastructure. It is one of the more recent firsthand-witness records in the entire release.

What this record contains

The document is an FBI Form 302, the Bureau's standard format for memorializing witness interviews. Form 302s are not investigative conclusions — they are structured summaries of what a subject stated during an interview, recorded by the agent conducting it. In this case, the subject is described as a U.S. citizen (designated "USPER" in accordance with standard FBI handling of U.S. person information) who provided a firsthand account of a UAP encounter at a U.S. test site. The official description blurb reads: "USPER described an object 'metallic bronze in color.'" That single quoted phrase is the only specific physical descriptor in the public-facing metadata. The record has been released in three parts, which is consistent with how longer or redacted FBI 302s are sectioned for declassified delivery — they represent one continuous case file, not three separate incidents.

The incident date is recorded as September 1, 2023, and the location is listed broadly as the United States. The reference to a "U.S. test site" in the description narrows the geographic context somewhat — federally managed test and evaluation ranges exist across the American Southwest and other regions — but no specific facility is named in the public metadata. Beyond the description blurb, the full content of the three-part document is not summarized in the release index.

Historical & documentary context

The FBI's involvement in UAP-adjacent investigations is not new, but the nature of that involvement has shifted significantly across decades. During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, the Bureau collected and forwarded reports from civilian and military sources under an informal arrangement with the Air Force's Project Sign and later Project Blue Book. That era's FBI files — some of which also appear in PURSUE Release 01 — were largely passive repositories of public correspondence rather than active investigations. A September 2023 Form 302 is a different animal entirely. It reflects the post-2021 legislative environment in which Congress mandated formal UAP reporting pathways and encouraged federal agencies, including law enforcement, to document credible sightings rather than dismiss or suppress them. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), stood up in 2022, created the bureaucratic architecture within which a record like this would be processed and eventually referred for archival or declassification review.

The setting — a U.S. test site — adds operational weight. Test and evaluation ranges are among the most restricted airspaces in the country, with layered radar coverage, ground observers, and documented flight schedules. A sighting at such a location, by a U.S. person with presumed access, carries inherent credibility in the sense that the witness is embedded in a controlled environment where known aircraft are logged and tracked. That context does not verify the account, but it does distinguish it from an open-sky civilian sighting with no corroborating infrastructure.

What this does and does not prove

What this record documents is narrow and precise: a U.S. citizen made a statement to the FBI describing a UAP encounter, and an agent recorded that statement using the Bureau's standard interview format. The single confirmed physical detail in the public metadata — "metallic bronze in color" — is a witness perception, not a sensor measurement. There is no radar track, no corroborating imagery, and no analytical conclusion attached to the description blurb. The record does not prove the existence of an anomalous object; it proves that an interview occurred and that a description was given. Whether the underlying three-part document contains additional detail — sensor data, corroborating witnesses, or an investigative assessment — is not determinable from the release metadata alone. As with all materials in this release, "unresolved" means the case has not been explained, not that anything extraordinary has been confirmed.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

The FBI September 2023 Sighting sits within the FBI archive strand of PURSUE Release 01, which spans nearly eight decades of Bureau involvement in UAP documentation — from Cold War-era correspondence files to this comparatively recent Form 302. It is among the most temporally current records in the entire 162-document release, and its inclusion signals that the declassification effort encompasses active-era reporting, not just historical cleanup. For readers tracking the FBI thread across the release, this case is worth reading alongside the older Bureau materials covered elsewhere in the SkyLens PURSUE series — the contrast between how a 1950s field office handled a sighting report and how a 2023 Form 302 handles one illustrates how the institutional posture toward these incidents has evolved, even if the fundamental uncertainties have not.

Editorial note: This analysis is independent commentary on a publicly released document. The original record, source links, and full release metadata are catalogued on the SkyLens UAP files page alongside every other case in the PURSUE Release 01 set.