Mystery Potato Hovering Over Colorado Is Reported in Latest U.F.O. Files

Potatoes have featured in sightings before, and in real and fictional space travel.


This image is an artistic interpretation of a 2022 incident potentially involving unidentified anomalous phenomena, or U.A.P., reported near Colorado Springs. U.S. Department of Defense

By Danny Hakim
This is Danny Hakim’s first story on flying potatoes.
June 13, 2026

The giant potato was sighted at 9:35 a.m. hovering over the Cheyenne Mountains. ...The year was 2022. It was mid-February, about 50 degrees. The sky was blue. The flying spud, or what looked like one, was sighted by an Army intelligence officer and four members of his unit from Fort Carson in Colorado, according to documents that were among a new tranche of U.F.O. files released by the Trump administration on Friday.

“The witnesses describe the object as roughly the size of a large jet and resembling an angular, non-symmetrical potato made of uneven panels,” according to the documents. Whatever it was, it “was completely stationary about 300-500 feet above” the mountains but “slowly appeared to change shape” and “had a slightly translucent, shimmering white appearance, with defined edges and a milky shimmer that reflected sunlight.” ... Then, it disappeared. ... A couple of years later, during an interview at the F.B.I.’s field office in New York, one of the witnesses described what they saw to a special agent and a forensic sketch artist, who created a picture of what looked like a potato floating over the mountains.

An F.B.I. account of the interview included some new details. This time the sighting was said to take place at “approximately 11:25 a.m.” The object was said to be “made up of what can best be described as articulating fish scales or panels that were non-symmetrical, non-overlapping, and irregular shaped.” And it was “perfectly still” though the panels on it seemed to shift “in slow waves starting at different points of origin but at the same time.”

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The phenomenon of space potatoes is not entirely new. They played a central role in keeping the fictional astronaut Mark Watney alive in “The Martian,” which was an inspiration for an actual astronaut, Don Pettit, who nurtured real floating potatoes on the International Space Station. (He dubbed one of them Spudnik-1.) ... This is also not the first potato-related U.F.O. sighting on record. ... In 1950, someone standing in front of a gas station in the small city of Piggott, Ark., reported what looked like a “100-pound sack of potatoes” drifting with the wind at an elevation of about 8,000 feet, according to declassified Department of Defense records. (An investigator writing the matter up at the time suggested that it might have been a balloon of some kind.)


There were also theories related to the big potato. ... The government suggested that it could have been an optical illusion. When it was sighted, the mountains were said to have six to 12 inches of snow. A government analysis in the provided documents said that “the positioning of the sun in relation to Cheyenne Mountain would allow for backscattering of sunlight reflecting off snow-covered ground” and that “reflection could illuminate low-level clouds in the vicinity.” But it concluded by suggesting there was “low confidence” in that theory.

Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.