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FBI September 2023 Sighting - Serial 5

This page summarizes one Release 01 FBI FD 302 PDF. It preserves what the released interview record says, what the graph currently knows about it, and what still needs to be checked. It is not a finding or resolution decision.

Release 01#war-gov#pursue#release-01#official-source#evidence#fbi#fd-302#pdf

FBI September 2023 Sighting - Serial 5

This page summarizes one Release 01 FBI FD-302 PDF. It preserves what the released interview record says, what the graph currently knows about it, and what still needs to be checked. It is not a finding or resolution decision.

Evidence media

  • Official PDF: Open Sky release-file copy — 2-page FBI FD-302 PDF, SHA-256 29ed0fb7cbe0be3c23965212bb83c58d3890a0de9253938ee4e9c9bb2349d5fe.

Derived page render from official PDF: FBI September 2023 Sighting Serial 5 FD-302 page 1

Page 1 is a derived render from the official PDF. It contains the interview setup and the main sighting narrative: September 2023 FaceTime-video interview, LiDAR/drone-test context, morning travel in three vehicles, and a reported linear metallic/gray object with a super-bright white light.

Derived page render from official PDF: FBI September 2023 Sighting Serial 5 FD-302 page 2

Page 2 is a derived render from the official PDF continuation page. It preserves follow-up interview text about the object maintaining size and light intensity, the gate/bridge context, no noticed vehicle interference, restricted airspace for drone tests, and later witness distress/storm/TV-outage narrative.

Investigation reading

The released file is a two-page, heavily redacted FBI FD-302 interview record. Page 1 identifies the interview as an FBI interview conducted by FaceTime video in September 2023, with the date of entry in October 2023. The names of the interviewee, agents, location, file number, and most contextual identifiers are redacted. The visible text says the interviewed person had ten to fifteen hours as a drone pilot.

The narrative places the person at a redacted location with three other contractors and another redacted person for LiDAR tests. After receiving a redacted instruction or item, five people got into three vehicles. The vehicles began driving south at about 7:30 a.m.; the sun was in the east and visibility was good. The vehicles then reached a gate that was giving someone trouble.

The main sighting description appears on page 1. At about three quarters of the way up the windshield, a redacted observer saw a linear object with a super-bright light on the east side of the object. The light is described as bright white and bright enough to see bands within it. The body is described as metallic/gray, with no wings and no exhaust. A high-resolution render of the page reads the size line as: smaller than a 737, one to two Blackhawk helicopters in length, and definitely bigger than a drone. The object is described as approximately 5,000 feet above ground level, moving east to west parallel to the ground. It was visible for five to ten seconds; then the light went out and the object vanished. The sky was clear, and the observer could not find the object again.

Page 2 continues the same account. It says the object stayed the same size and kept the same light intensity during the observation. The observer did not see it while coming over the small bridge at the gate, but saw it while going through the gate. The record says no vehicle interference was noticed. Another redacted person was reportedly annoyed when she first saw the object because the airspace had been restricted for the drone tests they were going to conduct. People in the second vehicle tried to get another person to see the object, but that effort was unsuccessful. The last paragraph says a storm came through that night, a hotel-room TV went out, and the witness was still “freaked out”; it also records weird dreams and trouble sleeping for the first two nights after the sighting.

What the file appears to contain

This PDF appears to contain an FBI FD-302 interview narrative about a short daylight sighting during travel to or through a restricted testing area. The document is not an image-evidence packet. It contains no released object photograph, video frame, radar plot, map, sensor readout, measurement table, or technical exhibit. The evidentiary content is the redacted interview text itself.

The released text is strongest on a few observational details: morning timing, good visibility, a gate/bridge context, LiDAR/drone-test context, a linear metallic/gray object, a very bright white light with visible banding, no visible wings or exhaust, an estimated altitude of about 5,000 feet AGL, east-to-west motion, and a five-to-ten-second duration before the light went out and the object was no longer seen.

The document is much weaker on checkable context. Exact names, the specific date portion, the facility/location, the vehicle occupants, organizational affiliations, and the line-of-sight geometry are redacted. The public manifest gives the incident date as 9/1/23 and location as United States, but the visible FD-302 body preserves only redacted September 2023 date fields and a redacted U.S. location line.

Source custody and provenance

The selected release metadata maps this PDF to Release 01 row 157. The graph also surfaces a same-title, same-URL manifest record at row 160. That looks like a release-catalog/provenance reconciliation lead, not independent corroboration. Public prose should keep the row mismatch visible until the manifest lineage is reconciled.

A rendered-page check corrected one high-signal OCR rough edge: the OCR text read the size phrase as “smaller than a lot one to two Blackhawk helicopters,” while the rendered page reads “smaller than a 737, one to two Blackhawk helicopters in length.” The rendered PDF wording is used in the investigation reading above.

Graph context

The graph has a primary Document node for this PDF asset and release-record nodes for the same title/canonical URL. The semantic extraction currently preserves 51 extracted source-text claims, 36 entity mentions, 0 sensor-event records, and 0 table rows for this asset. The claim categories are mostly observation, witness testimony, object descriptor, motion/measurement, time, agency, and redaction/context claims.

The graph context supports this as a source-text interview packet. It does not turn the account into an adjudicated case finding. No candidate crosslinks were returned for this asset. Related graph records include the FBI September 2023 composite sketch and the same-title release records; those are leads for source-set comparison, not proof that the object description has been independently verified.

Leads to check

  • Reconcile the row 157 / row 160 manifest duplication for the same title and PDF URL.
  • Compare this Serial 5 account against the other FBI September 2023 sighting serials and the composite sketch for shared witnesses, scene geometry, object wording, and catalog mismatches.
  • Seek less-redacted source context for the exact date, facility, location, vehicle route, gate/bridge location, and sightline before attempting aircraft, drone, astronomy, launch, or weather correlation.
  • Check whether site records exist for the restricted airspace, LiDAR tests, drone-test schedule, gate/fob behavior, vehicle logs, or any reported communications/electrical anomalies.
  • Treat the “no vehicle interference noticed” line separately from the later hotel TV outage story; the PDF does not provide technical evidence tying those events together.
  • Preserve rendered-page wording where it differs from OCR, especially the size comparison to a 737 and one to two Blackhawk helicopters.

Lead check notes

  • Partial — Source wording and OCR: derived page renders support the size phrase “smaller than a 737, one to two Blackhawk helicopters in length.” OCR can distort this line, so the page image should control future quotations.
  • Partial — Provenance: release metadata maps the selected PDF to row 157, while another same-title/same-URL release record appears at row 160. This is a catalog reconciliation lead, not independent corroboration.
  • Blocked — Aircraft, drone, astronomy, weather, or launch correlation: the released PDF redacts the exact date, facility/location, gate/bridge position, route, sightline, and range context needed for those checks.
  • Partial — Site operations: the source mentions restricted airspace, LiDAR tests, planned drone tests, three vehicles, a gate/bridge, and no noticed vehicle interference, but it includes no site logs, drone schedule records, route data, or technical incident records.
  • Needs external source — Later storm and TV outage: the storm/TV-outage passage is preserved as witness narrative only. The PDF does not provide technical evidence connecting it to the sighting.

Deep investigation — graph + web reconnaissance

Source reread

The controlling source remains the WAR.GOV/PURSUE PDF URL recorded above: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/serial-4-redacted_redacted.pdf. The verified release-file copy is a two-page, unencrypted, optimized PDF 1.6 file, 237,155 bytes, SHA-256 29ed0fb7cbe0be3c23965212bb83c58d3890a0de9253938ee4e9c9bb2349d5fe. pdfimages sees one page-1 raster image; the released packet does not contain a separate object photograph, video frame, radar plot, map, sensor display, measurement table, telemetry record, or technical exhibit.

Rereading the OCR together with the two page renders matters because the OCR damages one high-signal size phrase. Page 1 visually supports the wording smaller than a 737, one to two Blackhawk helicopters in length, while the OCR can read the same line as smaller than a lot one to two Blackhawk helicopters. The source-visible account is therefore: a redacted September 2023 FaceTime FD-302 interview; a LiDAR/drone-test setting; three vehicles driving south around 7:30 am; good visibility with the sun in the east; a gate/bridge context; and a reported linear metallic/gray object with a bright white east-side light, visible bands in the light, no visible wings or exhaust, approximate 5000 feet above ground level, east-to-west motion, and a five-to-ten-second duration before the light went out and the object vanished.

Page 2 adds source-context rather than new instrument data. It says the object stayed the same size and light intensity while observed, that it was not seen while coming over the small bridge but while going through the gate, that no vehicle interference was noticed, and that one person was annoyed because the airspace had been restricted for the planned drone tests. The later storm, hotel TV outage, weird dreams, and sleep difficulty are preserved as witness narrative only; the PDF does not technically connect those later events to the sighting.

Graph connections

Read-only graph checks found one exact official Document asset for this PDF by URL and SHA-256, plus Release 01 row-record context. The exact asset is the stable identity for this page: title FBI September 2023 Sighting - Serial 5, agency FBI, PDF URL above, related CSV row 157, and the verified byte/hash pair above. The graph also preserves a same-title same-URL release-record row 160 and row/file-pointer drift in the September 2023 cluster, including a current row-record title that can point at the composite-sketch PDF. Treat those as catalog/provenance cleanup leads, not as additional corroborating observations.

Semantic graph coverage for the exact asset is 51 machine-extracted Claim nodes and 36 EntityMention nodes, with 0 SensorEvent records and 0 table rows. The claim samples repeat source-text anchors such as the FaceTime FBI interview, redaction context, LiDAR/drone-test setting, bright white light, metallic / gray body, 5000 feet above ground level, east-to-west motion, restricted airspace, and no noticed vehicle interference. They remain machine-extracted source indexes requiring human review; they are not findings, hypotheses, or resolution decisions.

The graph/source-family sweep points to the adjacent official Release 01 set: Composite Sketch, Serial 3, and Serial 4. That comparison is useful but must stay source-level. Serial 3 carries a bright-white-light/meteor-possibility lane; Serial 4 visibly carries the metallic bronze cigar-shaped account and gate/fob details; this Serial 5 page carries a separate metallic / gray linear-object account with the smaller than a 737 / Blackhawk comparison. The composite sketch is a rendered FBI Lab visual aid over a site photo, not raw object imagery. Do not merge those details into one resolved narrative without a source showing the witness relationship, scene geometry, and catalog lineage.

A secondary UFO-USA GitHub markdown conversion exists for this same official asset and can be useful as a derivative transcription lead, but it is not the custody source. The official WAR.GOV URL, the verified release-file bytes, and the Internet Archive official-URL capture are the relevant provenance anchors.

External provenance and official-source checks

Direct official WAR.GOV probes for the PDF, the UFO release landing page, and both current/legacy CSV paths returned 403 Access Denied during this check. That is an access condition, not evidence against the document, because the verified access copy and source metadata match the official URL and hash lineage.

Internet Archive availability reports an exact-URL official snapshot at timestamp 20260513053134: http://web.archive.org/web/20260513053134/https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/serial-4-redacted_redacted.pdf. Fetching the raw archived PDF returned application/pdf, 237,155 bytes, PDF magic bytes, and the same SHA-256 29ed0fb7cbe0be3c23965212bb83c58d3890a0de9253938ee4e9c9bb2349d5fe. That is strong custody support for this exact official PDF container, but it does not add new unredacted witness content.

The best external context is therefore still the official Release 01 source family, not social-media amplification or a secondary retelling. The public manifest description says the U.S. person described a bright light over the horizon; the FD-302 text is more specific and should control this page's source reading. The related composite sketch may be associated with this witness cluster, but the sketch page itself has no printed measurement method, scale, timestamp, or raw-object image.

Prosaic checks and follow-up leads

The source supplies useful prosaic-control anchors — daylight/morning timing, good visibility, LiDAR/drone-test activity, restricted airspace for planned drone tests, a gate/bridge/vehicle convoy setting, no noticed vehicle interference, and a very short five-to-ten-second observation — but it withholds the exact day, facility, location, route, gate position, sightline, elevation angle, range, platform/drone schedule, and local traffic context. The release-row metadata 9/1/23 / United States is too broad for a defensible astronomy, weather, launch, satellite, aircraft, drone, or meteor exclusion.

The first responsible checks, if less-redacted material becomes available, are mundane ones: test-site airspace restrictions, scheduled drone/LiDAR operations, local aircraft/drone traffic, gate/access-control logs, vehicle route timing, communications logs, weather/visibility at the exact site and time, and whether the composite sketch's site photo can anchor geometry. The source's later storm/TV-outage paragraph should stay in the witness-testimony lane unless an independent utility/weather/source record ties it to the sighting environment.

Audit note

No graph writes were performed for this check. This page remains an evidence/source-review draft, not a finding, hypothesis, or resolution decision. Machine-extracted graph material is treated as unreviewed unless the released source text or page render directly supports it.

Limits

This page is limited by redaction and by the format of the released file. The PDF gives testimony, not sensor data. It does not include a photograph or video of the object, does not provide coordinates, does not identify the aircraft/drone operating area, and does not provide enough sky geometry for a robust prosaic correlation check. The FBI form itself states that it contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI.

The manifest’s short description — that a U.S. person described a “bright light over the horizon” — is a catalog summary, not a separate observation. The graph’s extracted claims are useful indexes into the source text, but they remain source-text extractions requiring human review.

Sources

  • WAR.GOV / PURSUE Release 01 official PDF URL: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/serial-4-redacted_redacted.pdf
  • Open Sky release-file copy: /api/explore/war-gov/release-file/war-gov-fbi-september-2023-sighting-serial-5-83aa4397
  • SHA-256 verified release-file identity: 29ed0fb7cbe0be3c23965212bb83c58d3890a0de9253938ee4e9c9bb2349d5fe
  • Release manifest title: FBI September 2023 Sighting - Serial 5
  • Release manifest description: 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."