UFO Orbs Explained: What People Are Seeing, from the Yemen Video to the Jersey Drones

An orb, in current UFO usage, is a small spherical or point-like object, often glowing or metallic, that moves in ways aircraft do not: hovering, darting, holding station in formation, or flying through weapons fire unharmed. Orbs have overtaken discs and triangles as the shape people report, partly because that is what infrared and phone cameras resolve at a distance: almost anything far away and bright renders as a ball of light.

The word covers three different things that get mixed together: the "metallic sphere" category the Pentagon's AARO office says dominates its reports; the lights the public films at night; and the round artifacts that appear in flash photographs. Sorting them is most of the work.

In April 2023 AARO's director, Sean Kirkpatrick, showed a Senate subcommittee a short clip from an MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Middle East in 2022: a metallic sphere transiting the frame, which he said remained unresolved because there was too little data. It became the reference image for the "metallic orb" category, which AARO has said accounts for a large share of its cases, typically one to four meters across, seen at altitudes up to 30,000 feet and speeds up to Mach 2.

In September 2025 a House Oversight hearing screened footage, provided to Rep. Eric Burlison, of a Hellfire missile fired from a drone striking an orb off the Yemeni coast and the orb continuing on apparently intact. In November 2025 former Navy chief petty officer Alexandro Wiggins testified about orbs seen and recorded from the USS Jackson in 2023, and Ukrainian military units have published thermal footage of spherical objects in formation since 2024. None of these has a public resolution.

From mid-November 2024, residents of New Jersey and then the wider Northeast reported large drones and glowing orbs at night, night after night, and the story ran for weeks. Federal agencies said the sightings were a mix of lawful commercial and hobby drones, manned aircraft, helicopters, and stars, and in January 2025 the White House said many of the drones had been FAA-authorized for research and other purposes. Analysts who reviewed the most-shared clips found airliners on approach, planets, and Starlink satellites, but the episode showed how quickly "orbs" became the public's word for anything unidentified overhead.

At distance, at night, most orbs are aircraft lights, planets low on the horizon, satellites flaring in sunlight, or drones. In daytime footage they are often balloons, birds, or out-of-focus insects near the lens. In flash photographs, "orbs" are almost always dust, pollen, or moisture close to the camera, lit by the flash and rendered as translucent circles by the lens; that kind of orb has been explained for as long as digital cameras have existed.

The residue is what makes the category interesting: metallic spheres tracked by military sensors, and objects that seem to shrug off ordnance. That is the part AARO says it cannot resolve, and the part Congress keeps asking about.

Ask what the sensor was: a thermal camera shows heat, not shape, so a warm round blob can be a plane's engine. Ask about distance: without a known reference, size and speed are guesses. Ask whether the object is in focus and whether the camera is moving, since a shaking handheld phone turns a fixed light into a darting one. And ask whether anyone else recorded it from another angle, which is the single thing that separates the resolved cases from the unresolved ones. Our guide to the best UFO videos applies the same tests to the famous clips.