Pentagon UFO Files, Drop #1: What's Actually in the PURSUE Releases

Since May 2026 the Department of War has been publishing United States government UFO files in batches, under a program called PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. As of the fifth release, cleared on 7 August 2026, the archive holds 375 files: documents, images, audio and video, drawn from agencies including the CIA, the FBI, NASA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the State Department, the Department of Energy and the Pentagon itself.

What is unusual is not that files are being released. It is which files. By the Department's own description these are unresolved cases — "the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena" — and the directive adds, in the same paragraph, that the Department "welcomes the application of private-sector analysis, information and expertise."

The headline cases so far: five Army service members at Fort Carson, Colorado watching something over Cheyenne Mountain in February 2022; six video files captured contemporaneously over the Gulf of Oman in 2021; a Department of Energy incident report from Pantex, Texas, where the United States assembles its nuclear weapons, which put the plant into lockdown; and a senior intelligence officer who filed a report on his own daylight sighting in late 2025. Alongside them, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office publishes the cases it did resolve, with its reasoning and its confidence levels attached.

New tranches are posted every few weeks. This entry covers the cases we judged most substantial — not all 375 files.

Ten cases out of three hundred and seventy-five

What follows is a selection. The government's own documents and footage sit alongside it.

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado — 15 February 2022. At about 9:35 in the morning, five United States Army service members stationed at Fort Carson saw an object over the mountain. One was an Army intelligence officer; the others were members of his unit.

The FBI's report on the case records what they described: a creamy, whitish object with distinct edges, opalescent, faintly translucent, with a slight shimmer, its surface made of what looked like articulating panels — fish scales, shifting in slow waves — while the object itself hung perfectly still for around two minutes. Then it was gone.

That same file offers a candidate explanation, and it is only fair to print it: that sunlight backscattering off snow-covered ground could have illuminated low cloud. It is offered at low confidence. The witnesses push back — they describe a clear "blue bird" sky with no cloud there to light. It is also worth noting that the sighting was at 9:35 a.m. in mid-February, some two and a half hours after sunrise. The case is carried as unresolved.

The Gulf of Oman — 2021. Six video files, which the Department states were "captured contemporaneously." The footage comes from an infrared sensor display aboard a US special operations gunship, filmed off the screen on a phone, and was submitted by CENTCOM. The accompanying report describes the phenomena as "cold orbs," roughly four feet across.

The Pacific Ocean, 2019. Five files, PR123 through PR127. The Department flags that this media was digitally altered before it was ever reported to AARO, and is published as received. It does not say what was changed, or by whom.

Pantex, Texas — September 2015. At around 07:10, ground surveillance radar picked up an object west of the plant, moving north at ten to fifteen miles an hour. A lieutenant and a security officer pursued it by vehicle and could not close the distance. Stopping and getting out, they heard nothing; through binoculars they could see no means of propulsion. They put it at roughly four feet tall and two feet wide at the base, tapering toward the top — the report calls it diamond-shaped. The plant went into lockdown. The recording went to Sandia, then to the FBI. Pantex is where the United States assembles and disassembles its nuclear weapons. (The report's body dates this 1 September; its cover page says 2 September.)

Late 2025 — an intelligence officer reports his own sighting. An account submitted through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence opens: "In late 2025, during early evening daylight hours, I — a senior U.S. intelligence officer — along with a colleague and two pilots…" They had left a joint operations center by helicopter to investigate loud thuds in the operating area. Four witnesses, in daylight. Released unresolved.

October 2023, the western United States. Witnesses wrote first-hand narratives directly to AARO. One of them opens, in the document's own words: "Incident 1 in October 2023, my partner and I were tasked to survey an area for individuals launching drones." They were out there looking for drones.

2026. The 7 August release includes FBI material on multiple red lights over the western United States, indexed as digital renderings. Records dated this year appearing in a declassification release is not the same thing as an open investigation, and we will not dress it up as one.

And the oldest. The earliest video we found in the library is dated 1996 — the Department says only that it was "likely captured" that year. Thirty years on, it is still carried as unresolved.

The part most coverage leaves out

The unresolved files are published by the Department of War. The resolved ones are published by AARO — the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — with its reasoning and its confidence levels attached. Both are public. The second half is worth as much as the first.

One of the most widely circulated UAP videos on the internet was shot over Aguadilla, Puerto Rico on 26 April 2013 by an infrared sensor aboard a Customs and Border Protection aircraft. It appears to show an object moving at speed, splitting in two, and entering the ocean.

Here is the reconstruction. AARO holds at high confidence that the objects showed no anomalous performance, that there were two of them traveling together rather than one splitting, and that they never entered the water. On what they actually were it goes only to moderate confidence: a pair of sky lanterns, drifting at about eight miles an hour against a recorded wind of nearly ten. A partner agency proposed mylar balloons; AARO does not concur, on the grounds that an infrared sensor is unlikely to detect reflected moonlight. It adds that the video's poor quality limits how far it can identify anything categorically.

That is what showing your working looks like. At Al Taqaddum Air Base in Iraq in October 2017, seventeen minutes of infrared from an aerostat resolved, at high confidence, to a cluster of partially and fully inflated balloons. Near Mount Etna in December 2018, an object that seemed to cross the eruption plume never went near it: AARO placed it roughly 170 kilometers — 106 miles — beyond the plume, and only about 30 kilometers from the camera. The two merely lined up in frame, and the apparent speed was motion parallax.

Which is why the word "unresolved" is worth something here.

The document everyone should read

AARO's Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume 1, runs to sixty-three pages and covers 1945 to October 2023.

Its central finding is narrower than the headlines made it. AARO found no evidence that any US government investigation, academic-sponsored research or official review panel had confirmed that any UAP sighting represented extraterrestrial technology, and no empirical evidence for claims of recovered craft being reverse-engineered. That is a statement about what investigations established. It is not the same sentence as "there is nothing out there," and it should not be quoted as though it were.

The same report documents occasions when the government misled the public about its own activities — the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel's proposed debunking program, and misidentifications left uncorrected to protect classified aircraft. It also states that it found no evidence of an Air Force policy to conceal extraterrestrial evidence.

All of that is in one document, from one office. Read it rather than the coverage of it.

The oldest version of this problem

Ezekiel 1 is not a UFO report. It tells you what it is in its opening line: "the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God." And by the end of the chapter the prophet names it himself — "this was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD."

But look at what he does in between. A man among the exiles, by a canal in Babylonia in the sixth century before Christ, reaching for words that were never going to be equal to it: "a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber…"

Then the wheels — "like unto the colour of a beryl," and "as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel."

And the detail he returns to three separate times: "when they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went." Every vehicle he had ever seen went where the animal pulling it was pointed.

He also tells you why they moved that way, which is the part usually left out: "the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels."

And he keeps his distance in the words themselves. The likeness of. The appearance of. By the close: "the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD."

We are not claiming Ezekiel saw a craft, and we think the reading that says he did is a poor one — it has to ignore the first line of the chapter and the last. Christian readers have argued for centuries about what the living creatures are and who is seated on the throne above them. Almost none of them have argued it was a machine.

What Ezekiel could not describe, he could still name. Not a phenomenon — a Person, and the glory that belongs to Him. That is the difference between his account and the files above: he knew whose sky he was looking at.

It is also why these cases can be held open without anxiety. Not because the strange is small, but because the One who holds it is not a stranger to us.

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good."

Every document and video linked here is a United States government release and is in the public domain. The unresolved archive is at war.gov/ufo; the resolved cases are at aaro.mil. We cover every drop as it lands.