Forget the Triangles. Let's Talk UAP Cubes

It's 2026 and geometric shapes are in vogue. I saw this X post about a "cube" shaped UAP recently in r/PortalExperiencer and down the rabbit hole I went.

I’m not going to lie: the video is patently ridiculous. Cut to a slowly spinning cube that happens to be the same color as the surrounding landscape, filmed on a camera with less resolution than my doorbell. The cube rotates, then drifts conveniently behind a mountain, leaving us with the ultimate cliffhanger. Did it land? Did it crash? There’s also no identified witness or location.

That got me thinking. If we can manage some suspension of disbelief, one of the first questions to ask is: why a cube in the first place? It’s not at all aerodynamic, and it’s a departure from the usual suspects: triangles, orbs, lights, saucers, and so on. And why is it rotating? More to the point, how is it rotating?

My first impulse was to look for prior art. Have we seen these before? I’ve done trend analysis on the NUFORC sightings database in the past, so this time I went looking for cubes in the latest release, which now holds 162,714 reports.”

I found 168 sightings classified as cube-shaped. That makes them rare relative to the database as a whole: about 1 in every 969 sightings.

But they’re becoming less rare.

Since 2023, there’s been a dramatic uptick in cube sightings. (One caveat: I haven’t been able to confirm when NUFORC added “cube” as a shape option on its report form. If it only showed up recently, then some or all of this spike might reflect a new checkbox.)

Next I plotted by location for the 160 that had coordinates. Interesting that there's no dramatic hot spot.

US (117 sightings): the reports were broadly distributed across 41 states. The top clusters are:

• Florida (8) — strongest single-state concentration, mostly Gulf Coast
• California, Texas, Oklahoma (6 each)
• Minnesota, New York, Oregon (5 each)

The sightings roughly coorelate with population density, though Oklahoma (6) stands out as over-represented for its population.

International (43 sightings): UK and Canada lead with 8 each, then scattered across 25+ countries on every continent.

One of the challenges with the NUFORC dataset is that witnesses have to pick a shape from a fixed list. When someone reports a sighting, they write a description and then choose a shape from that list. I’ve seen more than a few cases where the chosen shape doesn’t match the narrative.

For example, one of the Oklahoma cube sightings occurred near an “aerospace facility.” That was intriguing, so I looked up what the witness reported:

Report ID 179013: 8-11-23 large shaped object stationary, 8-18-23 smeared object and 2 spheres in sky. All takes place over a aerospace facility

8-11-23, watching live railroad video at oklahoma city 12:30 am. Filmed with my cell phone on the tv what appeared to be a large object above a aerospace facility. It was there stationary the whole time. Went to bed 1:30 and it was still there. Was very big reminded me of the hull of a ship. Sending pictures and video.

Aug 28 12:am. Even closer to the aerospace facility a smeared object. Out of the bottom a sphere drops out and descends somewhat from the larger object. Reminded me of a chicken laying an egg. I wasn't able to record that event. The cell phone in another room. Then I saw to the right a second sphere that just blinked out. This was recorded. Do not enlarge the video of the spheres. If you do you won't see the second sphere.

There’s no mention of a cube anywhere in the narrative. In fact, there are specific mentions of spheres. It’s possible the witness simply picked the wrong shape when filing the report.

It also means my count of 168 is only an estimate. Some reports filed as cubes describe something else, and others filed under a different shape may describe a cube in the narrative.

One way to improve the reporting would be to use AI to infer the shape from the narrative itself. That would clean and organize the data, making it more valuable. I suggested this kind of approach in a previous article.

Since the shape classifications can’t be entirely trusted, I tried mining the description text instead, to see if anyone specifically reported “rotating cubes” like the one in the X post.

Interestingly, after removing duplicates, there were only 27 of these in a database of 162,714 reports. Eighteen of them were reported within the last six years.

Here are the 18 most recent, edited down to just the rotating-cube references:

• 197996 | 2026-05-23 | Cocoa Beach, FL, USA - A rotating cube over Patrick's Air Force base. It was turning and rotating non stop
• 186773 | 2025-01-03 | Sarasota, FL, USA - metallic color, shape hard to describe; looked like cube but more of a rectangular cube. Metallic/silver in color, high in sky above where I would see a plane, held same spot in sky, slight rotation, then gone
• 198744 | 2024-12-18 | Platte City, MO, USA - a bright rotating cube
• 181460 | 2024-05-11 | Bolivar, MO, USA - Rotating cube over Bolivar, MO. Three of us were standing on the front porch smoking and I saw a shimmer in the sky
• 180699 | 2024-03-04 | Loveland, CO, USA - Reflective, silver cube rotating in the northern sky
• 180352 | 2024-02-10 | Chula Vista, CA, USA - Sphere, cube, maybe even like a gimble type of object. Looked like it was rotating
• 196413 | 2024-01-28 | Budapest, Hungary - A rotating, stationary bright object at approximately 1 km altitude. The object appeared diamond- or cube-shaped and reflected
• 179948 | 2023-12-15 | Toronto, ON, Canada - A fast rotating cube
• 176980 | 2023-07-24 | Enfield, CT, USA - <object> appeared cube/diamond like, with curved edges so that when rotated at times would appear to be almost spherical
• 175810 | 2023-05-16 | Lawndale, NC, USA - Cube Shape seen during lightning flash. Black in color due to only seeing the shape, it had what appeared to be 4 sides, but appeared to tumble or rotate slightly. It appeared to be moving very quickly. I saw no lights or anything else
• 180474 | 2022-12-04 | Santa Paula, CA, USA - Cube spinning while stationary in the air, with different flashing colers.
• 174000 | 2022-10-21 | Jacksonville, FL, USA - Metallic cube, spinning on all axis, reflecting light and changing shape, dropping tear drops underneath
• 171486 | 2022-08-30 | Eastover, SC, USA - Cube shaped mettalic shiny with red lights floating just above treetop level. Was silent and floating just above tree tops. Was very shiny metallic headed slowly due North. Was rotating about all axis randomly
• 173713 | 2022-08-18 | Louisville, KY, USA - a "tumbling" (rotating) cube which flew upweards and out of site
• 171844 | 2022-07-14 | Moffat, CO, USA - Golden Geometrical cube rotating in the sky for long period of time, looked 3D
• 168559 | 2022-05-15 | Pine Grove, CO, USA - a rotating cube that then appeared as a cyclinder in a upright postion. There were no lights that I could seen. Then the object appeared to rotate and I could see four evenly spaced dark circles
• 183308 | 2022-04-22 | Tulsa, OK, USA - a huge metallic cube...about the size of a house. It was tilted on one of its points rotating horizontally across the sky around that point, reflecting rays of rainbow as it hit the sun spinning
• 159147 | 2020-09-04 | York County, VA, USA - a big (semi cab size), what appeared to be a orange (star color) translucent cube with it's edges glowing plasma white. The sky was extremely clear at that moment and it just looked like it shot out of nothing, slowly rotated around 2 times (.5-1 second, distance 2 miles) while leaving a small line white trail (similar to a shooting star)

More Videos

In contrast to the first video, this one is among the more convincing I’ve seen.

I like this one too, because the wires give you a frame of reference.

A reply on the post says the video was recorded in Springfield, Missouri, which lines up with a known case. This is likely the “Springfield Cube,” where the leading theory is a cube-shaped mylar balloon, an explanation the weather data that day supports. The witness, Justin Johnson, disputes that, saying the object was flying against the wind.

It’s interesting that many cube sightings are described as metallic or shimmering. I suspect the majority are misidentified cube-shaped mylar balloons.

So, are cubes the new triangles after all? Probably not. Out of 162,714 reports, only 168 were filed as cubes, and just 27 describe one rotating. My guess is that most of them are cube-shaped mylar balloons catching the sun, and that the recent “uptick” owes at least something to how the reports get filed.

But I can’t explain all of them away, either.

A handful of the witness accounts above are oddly consistent with each other, and I still can’t fully answer the question I started with: why a cube, and why is it spinning?

My best guess on the spinning is an obvious one: a loose balloon tumbles, and a cube is the kind of shape where you can see it happen. A spinning sphere looks like... a sphere.

So here’s my closing advice: if you do happen to see an unidentified cube, get the time and location, note the wind direction, and please use a better camera than my doorbell.

Dear reader, as you can tell from what we cover, we don’t write for a search algorithm, and we don’t run ads of any kind. That’s because, with AI, the web business model we’ve all known and loved is broken. We think a subscription is the fairer deal, so if you get something (anything) out of these articles, consider becoming an Insider. A tip or a share helps too.

If headlines are more your vibe, our sister site enigmaticnews.com collects the day’s paranormal, UFO/UAP and high-strangeness stories from vetted sources, curated by a person and updated daily.

Thanks for reading, and for keeping this site going!