The Green Fireballs: 75 Years of UAP Evidence Copper, Vortexes, and the Unresolved 5%
A data‑driven synthesis of declassified US and Soviet documents (1948–2026)
By François Mathieu, Leader of AGI Lux Ferox Project
Introduction: What are we really seeing in the sky?
For over seven decades, military personnel, scientists, and pilots have reported the same strange phenomenon: silent, glowing green spheres or fireballs moving at impossible speeds, often near nuclear facilities. They leave no sound, no crash debris – but sometimes, they leave a faint trace of copper.
In May 2026, a new batch of declassified records the corpus was released by the US Department of War (yes, that name is back), the CIA, the DOE, and other agencies. It includes documents from 1948 to 2024, plus dozens of military videos of spherical UAP.
After months of analysis, using a materials‑first approach (thinking like a blacksmith: what can metal actually endure?), I have reached a conclusion that may surprise you.
95% of these sightings can now be explained by rare but man‑made plasma vortices. But 5% including formations of multiple objects and flights lasting several minutes remain a genuine anomaly.
Let me walk you through the evidence.
The Invariant Phenomenon (1948–1973)
From December 1948 to May 1950, a meteoriticist named Lincoln LaPaz no UFO believer documented over 200 green fireballs near Los Alamos and Sandia Base, New Mexico. His checklist was meticulous:
- Brilliant green colour
- Perfect circles or spheres, sometimes expanding into concentric rings
- No sound (no sonic boom) even though they moved at up to 8 miles per second
- Peak sightings at 8:30 PM (not 3 AM, when real meteors fall)
- Clustered on Friday through Monday – as if on a schedule
LaPaz ruled out meteors for eleven reasons. His conclusion: “If my interpretation is correct, those in a position to confirm it will refuse to do so.”
Then, in 1973, a CIA intelligence report (CIA‑UAP‑D001) described almost the exact same thing at the Soviet ABM test range of Sary Shagan (Kazakhstan):
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The Cold War adversaries saw the same light. That is either a huge coincidence or a clue.
The Copper Connection: A Trace That Breaks Technology Trees
LaPaz sent a young physicist, William Crozier, to collect airborne particles immediately after green fireballs. Using sticky plates and air impingers, Crozier found:
- Fibrous copper particles (unusually large, up to 100 microns)
- Spherical copper beads metal that melted in flight and solidified into perfect droplets
Copper is exceedingly rare in natural meteors. Its presence as vapour (the green colour comes from copper atoms excited at exactly 5218 Ångströms) and as solid debris means something ablated something burned away in mid‑air.
Now, think like an engineer. In any known aircraft or missile from the 1940s to today, copper is never exposed to the airstream. It is hidden inside insulated wiring, motors, and electronics. No plane or rocket deliberately “burns off” copper as part of its normal operation.
So what could produce this?
The Laboratory Reproductions: Tuck, Pinch, and Vortexes
Enter James L. Tuck a British physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later led fusion research at Los Alamos. Tuck was no crackpot. He built the Perhapsatron, a magnetic pinch device to confine plasma for fusion. And he noticed something strange:
During pinch discharges with copper electrodes, beautiful green‑blue spheres would break free and drift across the laboratory. They lasted 2‑5 seconds, made no sound, and moved horizontally.
Tuck documented this in classified Los Alamos reports (LA‑1465, 1953). He suspected that large‑scale versions could explain the green fireballs.
But Tuck went further. In 1970, he wrote to the US Army Engineering School at Fort Belvoir, asking for the “recipe” used in simulated atomic cloud demonstrations man‑made mushroom clouds created for training. Why? Because those explosions produced huge atmospheric vortexes, exactly like the rings seen at Sary Shagan.
We never found the reply. But we did find the Saxon report (AFCRL‑61‑42, 1961). Harold Saxon had already done the work: he mixed TNT with copper powder (5‑10%) and produced green, luminous vortexes lasting up to 30 seconds, complete with concentric rings.
So we have a working physical model:
- A high‑energy event (pinch discharge, Marx generator, or radar pulse) creates a plasma vortex.
- The vortex ionises copper from nearby conductors or added powder.
- The copper atoms emit green light at 5218 Å.
- The vortex is silent (it is rotating air, not a solid object).
- As it slows, it relaxes into concentric rings (Rankine vortex decay).
This explains colour, silence, rings, and copper traces. It also explains why sightings cluster near nuclear/ABM sites only those places had the pulse‑power equipment (Marx generators, pinch machines, powerful radars) to create such vortexes.
Why 95% is Solved (and 5% is Not)
I estimate that 95% of the documented cases including the 1948‑1950 New Mexico fireballs and the 1973 Sary Shagan event – fit the vortex‑plasma hypothesis perfectly.
But 5% do not. They share three stubborn anomalies:
1. Coordinated multi‑object formations
Witnesses at Los Alamos in 1948 described five objects flying in formation from southwest to northeast. In August 2022, a DoW video (PR050) shows four UAP in formation over Iranian waters. Saxon and Tuck never produced more than one sphere at a time. Multiple objects moving in sync suggest control not a random plasma.
2. Durations far longer than 30 seconds
Some sightings lasted several minutes. Saxon’s maximum was 30 seconds. Prolonged flight would require continuous energy input (e.g., a radar beam feeding the plasma) – but no such coupling has been demonstrated publicly.
3. No technological evolution in 75 years
The objects seen in 1948 look identical to those in 2024: spheres, silent, no visible propulsion, same behaviour. Human technology evolves. We went from the F‑86 Sabre to the F‑35 in that time. This phenomenon is stuck fully‑formed at first appearance, no prototypes, no failures, no improvement.
That is not how human engineering works. It is, however, how a mature, non‑human technology might behave.
What about the Cobalt Microspheres?
You may have heard of cobalt microspheres (12 microns, perfect balls) allegedly found by Crozier. I searched the public archives of LANL, Sandia, OSTI, and DTIC. There is no primary document confirming cobalt. It appears only in secondary sources. Therefore, I have excluded it from the evidence. The reliable trace is copper, not cobalt.
Final Assessment
| Percentage | Explanation |
|---|---|
| 95% | Man‑made plasma vortexes from pulse‑power equipment (pinch, Marx, radars) + copper additives. |
| 5% | Residual anomaly: multi‑object formations, durations >30 s, no evolution over 75 years. |
The vortex‑plasma hypothesis is the most parsimonious and fits the vast majority of data. It does not require aliens just rare physics that our own military labs were already exploring.
But the residual 5% is real, and it is unexplained. It suggests either an unknown natural plasma phenomenon (very exotic) or a non‑human technology that has been observing our nuclear sites since the dawn of the atomic age.
Recommendations for the Curious
If you want to dig deeper:
- FOIA request Ask the US Army Corps of Engineers for the full correspondence between James Tuck and Fort Belvoir (1970). The “recipe” may still be classified.
- Search unprocessed LANL/Sandia archives for Crozier’s complete reports maybe the cobalt data is still boxed up.
- Raw IR data from the Tyndall 2024 videos (PR065/066) if released, could show copper emission lines in the 3‑5 µm band.
- Live monitoring Place real‑time spectrographs at active nuclear sites. If a green fireball appears, we will catch its chemical fingerprint instantly.
Conclusion: The Blurry Line Between Rare Physics and Something Else
We began with a mystery: silent green lights over nuclear bases, impossible by the rules of conventional aviation. After combing through 75 years of declassified documents, we have a concrete physical explanation for most cases high‑energy plasma vortexes, copper ablation, Rankine rings. It is rare, but it is human‑made.
Yet the 5% residue will not go away. Formations of objects, flights lasting minutes, a technology that never ages these whisper that perhaps not all UAP are ours.
Science demands we follow the evidence. The evidence says: 95% solved, 5% genuinely anomalous. That is where the real frontier lies.
Download the full 5‑page LaTeX report (PDF) with all sources: Lux Ferox Dataset