NASA engineer Dr Charles Buhler has detailed a frightening unidentified flying object encounter on Cocoa Beach, Florida, where a glowing sphere illuminated the shoreline before splitting into smaller objects that pursued him and his wife.
The physicist, who works as an electrostatics specialist at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, said the incident occurred in 2014 around 10pm ET about three miles off the Atlantic coast.
A military helicopter dispatched from nearby Patrick Air Force Base briefly examined the object before flying away, after which the orb moved toward the shore and broke into smaller lights.
Buhler initially thought the distant light was a boat on the water before it began pulsing with extraordinary brightness across the ocean surface. He noted that the light was far too intense to be a standard signal flare and was likely seen by numerous people in nearby oceanfront buildings and condominiums.
"Then it gets real bright... It got so bright it lit up the whole beach as far as I can see. It made shadows of us against the buildings behind us," Buhler said during an appearance on the Danny Jones Podcast on August 14.
He described the intensity of the light as resembling a major explosion, though without any smoke or debris. "It looked like a giant nuclear weapon. It wasn't a mushroom cloud with it, but it was just the brightness of it," Buhler recalled.
Military Response and Coastal Sighting
Shortly after the object began pulsing, one or two military aircraft took off from Patrick Air Force Base to inspect the phenomenon. A helicopter flew out over the Atlantic Ocean and hovered directly above the glowing sphere for several minutes.
However, the military crew abruptly departed without taking any action, leaving the bright object hovering in place over the water.
"And we were like, 'This is weird.' So the helicopter hung over for a few minutes and then just went back and the light was still there," Buhler said. He suggested the military crew quickly determined the object posed no conventional threat. "They're like, 'Okay, they know what it's not. It's not the Russians. It's not the Chinese. So, okay, it's not them. We'll be fine. Let's go back.' That's my guess. They know what it's not."
Despite taking place near a populated coastal community and a major military installation, Buhler said he searched local news reports the following day but could not find a single public mention of the event.
Buhler noted that orb sightings are a known phenomenon along Florida's Space Coast. Cape Canaveral, located just north of Cocoa Beach, is a major deepwater port and aerospace hub where similar red lights are frequently reported. "Cape Canaveral is a huge port, and there's a lot of sightings off of cruise ships of these same red what you saw, what I saw, things following the cruise ships like dolphins do," Buhler said. "People have that on video. No one knows what the heck it is. I don't think anyone knows what it is." Local tour operators even conduct regular excursions attempting to locate or summon the orbs through psychic communication.
Pursuit along the Florida Shoreline
While Buhler initially believed the glowing orb was attempting to communicate in a friendly manner, the situation turned terrifying roughly 15 minutes after the Air Force helicopter departed. The orb began moving rapidly toward the beach, closing to within one mile of the shoreline as it headed directly toward the scientist and his wife.
At a distance of approximately one-third of a mile from the beach, the object broke into five or six separate basketball-sized glowing spheres. The smaller orbs moved to the surf zone just 200 feet offshore, where the waves were breaking.
The cluster of lights began rotating in a wheel formation. "They went and rotated, these five lights, five or six lights... Went like bicycle spokes into the water, halfway out of the water, halfway into the water, and they just kept doing this," Buhler described. "It was like the freakiest, I don't know what the hell it was."
Half of the spinning objects remained visible above the ocean surface while the other half dipped beneath the water. When Buhler and his wife began sprinting down the beach in fear, the spinning cluster of lights followed them along the coast while maintaining their bicycle-spoke rotation.
Mental Directive and Ocean Disappearance
The entire encounter lasted nearly 45 minutes. As the pursuit continued, Buhler grew increasingly frightened and recalled theories about extraterrestrial life he had read about as a child.
Standing on the beach, Buhler closed his eyes and attempted to send a mental instruction to the orbs, telling them to go away.
Shortly after he projected the mental command, all of the glowing objects sank into the water and did not reappear. "It wouldn't have gone away if I didn't tell it to. I don't think it would have gone away unless I told it to. It was completely gone after that," Buhler said.
Wider Sightings and Government Position
Reports of glowing orb phenomena have appeared across the United States in official records and civilian databases. In October 2023, federal agents documented a similar encounter in which a larger mother orb released multiple smaller objects.
More recently, on April 8, 2026, a cluster of unidentified flying orbs was spotted near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, a military facility long linked to UFO reports. Three years earlier, law enforcement officers in the western United States described an orb sighting matching Buhler's description.
Thousands of orb sightings have been reported to civilian monitoring organizations, and similar incidents have been published in recently released Pentagon UFO disclosure files. However, NASA and the United States government maintain that there is no physical proof that unidentified flying objects or extraterrestrials exist.
