FBI September 2023 Sighting - Serial 3

Evidence media

Open the official PDF through the Open Sky release-file copy

Derived official PDF page render: FD-302 interview page 1

Page 1 is a derived render from the official PDF. It is the substantive FD-302 interview page: a redacted Facetime interview, a LiDAR test-site transit, a convoy including an F150, GMC AT4, and sprinter van, and a short bright-white light observation over the horizon.

Derived official PDF page render: FD-302 continuation page 2

Page 2 is a derived render from the official PDF continuation page. Its only visible substantive line says a redacted person thought the light might have been a meteor coming straight toward them and burning up in the atmosphere; this is a source-stated possibility, not a resolved explanation.

Investigation reading

This Release 01 file is a short FBI FD-302 interview packet, not an imagery packet. It contains two pages: page 1 is a scanned FD-302 interview page with the substantive account, and page 2 is a continuation page with one additional line about a possible meteor. The Open Sky release-file copy verifies at 227,126 bytes with SHA-256 c38d267441b19350df557d9f3bfbd689fb5ba0619366373a7b9e6f8dce84bb8c. The PDF reports two letter-size pages. The available OCR covers both pages, but the page render is important because the OCR/graph text has two high-signal misreads: the rendered page says the light moved "to the right," not "to the light," and the third vehicle is a "sprinter van," not an SUV.

The release row gives an incident date of 9/1/23 and location United States; the FD-302 itself redacts the exact September day and the precise test-site location. The document is heavily redacted for names, identifiers, locations, and some dates. It does not contain object photographs, maps, radar plots, sensor frames, video stills, measurement tables, or a technical exhibit.

What the file appears to contain

Page	Source reading
1	FBI FD-302, page 1 of 2. The visible text says FBI personnel interviewed a redacted person via Facetime Video in September 2023. The account describes a group driving east to a test site to acquire data for LiDAR testing. The convoy included an F150, a GMC AT4 with a passenger, and a sprinter van. After driving through a couple of gates, a redacted witness saw a bright light over the horizon through the top-right area of the vehicle windshield. The light was stationary, then moved to the right, then disappeared. It was described as bright white, visible for about ten seconds, and apparently unchanged in size. The witness estimated it as ten to twenty miles away and reported no vehicle interference. One person looked in the wrong direction, and another was not well positioned to see it; at the first test site, two redacted people reportedly said they saw it too.
2	FBI FD-302a continuation page, page 2 of 2. The visible continuation line states that a redacted person thought the light might have been a meteor coming straight toward them and burning up in the atmosphere.

Page

Source reading

FBI FD-302, page 1 of 2. The visible text says FBI personnel interviewed a redacted person via Facetime Video in September 2023. The account describes a group driving east to a test site to acquire data for LiDAR testing. The convoy included an F150, a GMC AT4 with a passenger, and a sprinter van. After driving through a couple of gates, a redacted witness saw a bright light over the horizon through the top-right area of the vehicle windshield. The light was stationary, then moved to the right, then disappeared. It was described as bright white, visible for about ten seconds, and apparently unchanged in size. The witness estimated it as ten to twenty miles away and reported no vehicle interference. One person looked in the wrong direction, and another was not well positioned to see it; at the first test site, two redacted people reportedly said they saw it too.

FBI FD-302a continuation page, page 2 of 2. The visible continuation line states that a redacted person thought the light might have been a meteor coming straight toward them and burning up in the atmosphere.

The public record therefore preserves a redacted witness interview about a short bright-light observation during a LiDAR test-site transit. It is useful testimony/provenance, but it is not enough by itself to establish what the light was.

Source custody and provenance

Official WAR.GOV source URL as released: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/serial 5 redacted_redacted.pdf
Open Sky release-file copy: open PDF
Agency: FBI.
Release row: 155.
Source/container type: PDF.
Verified size: 227126 bytes.
Verified SHA-256: c38d267441b19350df557d9f3bfbd689fb5ba0619366373a7b9e6f8dce84bb8c.
OCR coverage: two pages with text.
Direct access to the WAR.GOV media URL can return 403; the Open Sky release-file copy preserves the verified PDF hash while the official URL remains the source of record.

There is a custody/description issue to preserve for review: the release/graph description says a U.S. person described an object as "metallic bronze in color," but this two-page PDF text and rendered-page review describe a bright white light and do not contain the words "metallic" or "bronze." That may indicate adjacent serial context, a row-description mismatch, or a missing/related page rather than a contradiction to resolve on this page.

Graph context

The graph currently models this item as an official Release 01 FBI PDF asset plus its release-record row. It preserves 51 source-text claim records, 32 entity mentions, zero sensor-event records, and zero table rows for this asset. Those counts are navigation context only; they should not be read as findings.

The extracted claims mostly repeat the FD-302 interview text: September 2023 timing, Facetime interview context, LiDAR test-site travel, the brief bright-white light, estimated distance, no noticed vehicle interference, other redacted observers, and the page-2 meteor possibility. Because the current graph text inherited OCR wording, review should correct or annotate the two important rendered-page readings: "moving to the right" and "sprinter van."

The graph also surfaces candidate crosslinks and related records, including unrelated-looking FBI Vault/Mexico anchors and a Western US Event release record. Treat those as audit leads, not evidence that this two-page FD-302 is connected to those materials. The candidate crosslinks need human review before any cross-case page or merged case narrative is created.

Leads to check

Compare this FD-302 against the neighboring FBI September 2023 release items and the composite-sketch item to determine whether the "metallic bronze" description belongs to a separate serial, a companion record, or a manifest-row mismatch.
If exact time/location can be lawfully recovered from less-redacted material, run astronomy and meteor checks for the redacted September 2023 date, around 9:00 a.m., from the relevant United States test-site area.
Check whether the convoy/LiDAR-testing context generated any logs, sensor files, route records, or site notes that could anchor the witness estimate of ten to twenty miles.
Review whether "bright white," ten-second duration, constant apparent size, motion to the right, and a witness-raised meteor explanation fit any prosaic candidates before escalating the item.
Clean up the graph/OCR discrepancy for "moving to the right" and "sprinter van" so future summaries do not repeat the less reliable OCR wording.

Lead check notes

Partial — Neighboring-record comparison: release metadata for this PDF includes a "metallic bronze" description, but the visible text and page renders for this two-page FD-302 describe a bright white light and do not show the words "metallic" or "bronze." Assigning that phrase needs comparison against the neighboring FBI September 2023 items and any companion sketch/serial pages.
Blocked — Meteor/astronomy check: page 2 preserves a meteor possibility from the source text, but the exact September day, precise test-site location, and sightline are redacted. A defensible meteor/astronomy check needs a less-redacted source or another authoritative location/time record.
Blocked — Convoy/LiDAR context: the PDF identifies LiDAR data-collection travel and a three-vehicle convoy, but it does not include route logs, site notes, sensor files, or coordinates that could anchor the ten-to-twenty-mile estimate.
Partial — Prosaic screening: the released pages support a bright-white light visible for about ten seconds, apparently constant in size, moving to the right, with no noticed vehicle interference and a witness-raised meteor possibility. That keeps meteor, ordinary aerial, and optical/environmental checks open, but the released PDF does not resolve them.
Checked — OCR cleanup: rendered page 1 supports "sprinter van" and "moving to the right." Future summaries should prefer those page-render readings over the noisier OCR variants.

Deep investigation — graph + web reconnaissance

Source reread

The controlling source remains the exact WAR.GOV/PURSUE PDF URL recorded above. A ranged official fetch of the encoded PDF URL returned 206 Partial Content with Content-Range: bytes 0-63/227126, and the verified Open Sky release-file copy matches SHA-256 c38d267441b19350df557d9f3bfbd689fb5ba0619366373a7b9e6f8dce84bb8c. The PDF is a two-page, unencrypted, optimized PDF 1.6 file on letter-size pages. It is an interview record, not a sensor-media packet: no object photograph, video frame, radar plot, map, telemetry table, or technical exhibit is present.

Source reread used the OCR text and the derived page renders together because the text layer is incomplete: ordinary pdftotext primarily surfaced the continuation page, while Frontier OCR and the page renders carry the substantive page-1 account. Visual review confirms the two important corrections already preserved in the page: the third vehicle was a Sprinter van, and the bright light moved to the right before disappearing. Page 2 preserves only the continuation line that a redacted person thought the light might have been a meteor coming straight toward them and burning up in the atmosphere.

Graph connections

Read-only graph checks found one exact official Document asset for this PDF by URL/hash, plus the source/release-row neighborhood. The asset has four text chunks: the manifest-description chunk, the original source chunk, and two Frontier-OCR chunks. Semantic coverage for this exact asset is 51 machine-extracted Claim nodes and 32 EntityMention nodes, with 0 SensorEvent records and 0 table rows. Those graph records remain machine_extracted_needs_human_review; they are indexes into source text and release metadata, not findings.

The graph and adjacent wiki pages keep an important provenance distinction visible. A machine claim repeats the release-manifest wording that the U.S. person described an object as metallic bronze in color, but this Serial 3 PDF's visible pages describe a short bright-white light and do not contain metallic or bronze. In the neighboring source family, Serial 4 visibly carries metallic bronze in color, Serial 5 carries a separate metallic/gray linear-object account, and the Composite Sketch is a rendered visual aid rather than a raw object photograph. Do not merge those descriptions into Serial 3 unless a source-level relationship is established.

A title sweep across the FBI September 2023 cluster also showed release-row/file-pointer drift: the current graph row record for Serial 3 shares the title and row context, while exact source identity is best controlled by the asset URL, size, and SHA-256. The direct graph neighborhood includes the official row record, a Western US Event row-context neighbor, and a secondary UFO-USA GitHub markdown conversion. Those are provenance/navigation leads only, not corroborating observations.

External provenance and source-family context

The exact official PDF is still range-readable from WAR.GOV, while the WAR.GOV release landing page and release CSV returned 403 Forbidden during this check. Internet Archive availability reports an exact-URL WAR.GOV PDF snapshot at timestamp 20260508200723. That supports custody/retrieval history for the official URL, but it does not add new witness content beyond the released PDF.

The best external context is therefore not a public news or social claim; it is the adjacent official Release 01 source set. Serial 4, Serial 5, the Composite Sketch, and the Western US Event slide packet should be compared at the source level for row-order, witness-cluster, and catalog-description cleanup. Until that comparison is done, Serial 3 should remain a narrow FD-302 testimony page about a short bright-white-light observation during a LiDAR test-site transit.

Prosaic checks and follow-up leads

The only prosaic explanation stated in the released pages is the page-2 meteor possibility. It is plausible enough to preserve as a lead, but the PDF redacts the exact September day, precise location, route, site, viewing direction, elevation, and environmental context. Because those fields are absent, astronomy, meteor/fireball, aircraft, drone, launch, satellite, and weather checks would be underconstrained and should not be presented as exclusions.

The next useful checks are source-custody and scene reconstruction: identify any less-redacted FBI or site record for the exact date/time/location; compare the convoy/LiDAR account against test-site logs, gate/access-control records, vehicle route notes, LiDAR/drone schedules, and any contemporaneous airspace restriction; then run meteor/astronomy/weather/traffic/launch/satellite screening only after the sightline and location are anchored. The witness estimate of ten to twenty miles and the unchanged apparent size remain testimony, not a measured range.

Audit note

No graph writes were performed for this check. The 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 draft does not identify the light. The source is a redacted interview summary, not a direct sensor record or object image. The exact day, precise location, names, route, direction of travel beyond "east," and environmental context are redacted or absent. The witness estimate of distance is not independently measured in the released PDF. The page-2 meteor language is a stated possibility from the source text, not a completed explanation.

Sources

WAR.GOV/PURSUE Release 01 official PDF URL: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/serial 5 redacted_redacted.pdf
Open Sky release-file copy: /api/explore/war-gov/release-file/war-gov-fbi-september-2023-sighting-serial-3-b03309df
Release metadata and verified PDF hash: c38d267441b19350df557d9f3bfbd689fb5ba0619366373a7b9e6f8dce84bb8c
FBI FD-302 page rendering and Frontier OCR text for the two-page PDF.