On August 7, 2026, the Department of War published its fifth tranche of declassified UAP records under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, known as PURSUE. The release adds 41 new files to the public archive, including 16 video recordings and 25 documents and images drawn from the Department of War, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, and the Executive Office of the President. It brings the total PURSUE archive to 375 records.
PURSUE is the government's rolling public release program for unresolved UAP records, launched May 8 under an executive order signed by President Trump. The Department of War publishes new tranches every few weeks as materials are discovered and declassified. Release 05 arrived 28 days after Release 04 on July 10. The new files are publicly available at WAR.GOV/UFO under the Release 05 tab.
State Department and White House Records Enter the Archive
Release 05 marks two institutional firsts for the PURSUE program. The Department of State contributed its first records to the archive, and the Executive Office of the President joined through a file held by the National Aeronautics and Space Council, or NASC, the cabinet-level advisory body that coordinated American space policy from 1958 to 1973.
Together, the new records trace the government's handling of reports in November 1963 that a craft had crashed near Conde, Bahia, Brazil, with a deceased occupant aboard. EOP-UAP-D001 is an FBIS wire report dated November 9, 1963, tracking a Portuguese-language radio broadcast that described a large metal sphere and a dead crewman wearing a uniform or spacesuit with strange markings. Handwritten annotations dated November 13 record a NASC request that the State Department query the embassy in Rio for verification.
DOS-UAP-D001, a cable of November 14, relayed the embassy's understanding that a weather balloon had been reported in the area but that no object had been found crashed. A follow-up cable, DOS-UAP-D002, of November 20, relayed the scientific attaché's finding that the reports were a fabrication originating in Rio de Janeiro, citing a lack of contemporary local reporting and a denial by the Brazilian Ministry of Aeronautics that any strange object had appeared in Conde.
A Cold War Encounter Near Puerto Rico
Two CIA documents describe an incident that analysts could not easily explain. CIA-UAP-D022 is a set of memoranda exchanged between the CIA's Assistant Director for Special Activities and Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence concerning a November 19, 1964, sighting near Puerto Rico. A U.S. Naval aviator described the object as delta-shaped and about the size of a jet fighter, and visually estimated its speed at Mach 3, roughly 2,200 miles per hour. Radar aboard the guided missile destroyer USS Gyatt measured the contact at 3,800 knots, about 4,373 miles per hour. The memoranda noted that the object might have been tied to foreign intelligence gathering, given missile testing within the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Range. Both offices ruled out domestic experimental aircraft, including the YF-12A OXCART.
CIA-UAP-D023, briefing notes prepared for Walter N. Elder, Executive Assistant to the Director of the CIA, adds that the radar contact held for 21 minutes and includes visual estimates from the pilot of an F-8 Crusader who was present during the incident.
New Military Sensor Videos
Video again forms a large part of Release 05, with 16 recordings of unresolved UAP reports. The most detailed set is DOW-UAP-PR117 through DOW-UAP-PR122, six clips tied to a September 8, 2021, encounter by the aircrew of a U.S. Special Operations Forces AC-130J Gunship during a nighttime live-fire exercise over the Gulf of Oman. According to the accompanying Intelligence Information Report, DOW-UAP-D101, the aircrew observed roughly 25 instances of similar phenomena, which they described as cold orbs about four feet in diameter hovering near the water's surface. Their speed estimates ranged from 250 to 1,300 miles per hour, and they characterized the objects as maneuvering aggressively, flying in various formations, and appearing to react to the deployment of the aircraft's weapons systems. Because the aircraft's digital video recorder was not functioning, the footage was captured secondarily with a cellular device aimed at the infrared display.
Five clips, DOW-UAP-PR123 through DOW-UAP-PR127, date to 2019 and were transferred to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, by the Navy's Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force in 2022. The recordings were made with hand-held devices aimed at infrared displays aboard a U.S. military platform, and the files note that the media was digitally altered before being reported to AARO and is presented as it was received.
Four shorter clips, DOW-UAP-PR134, PR136, PR142, and PR149, cover infrared and electro-optical contacts over the Middle East from 2023 and 2025. AARO assessed all of the video cases as unresolved.
The FBI contributed one video, FBI-UAP-PR007, ten seconds long, showing two slow-moving black-hot areas of contrast captured with a hand-held thermal imaging device by a U.S. Government Special Agent during a 2026 incident in the western United States, as recorded in the accompanying FD-302, FBI-UAP-D032.
FBI Witness Interviews and Digital Renderings
Alongside the video, the FBI contributed a series of FD-302 interview forms paired with digital renderings prepared in 2026 for the PURSUE initiative. The renderings illustrate triangle reports, including an incident above Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan, in June 2002, described by a former military reservist; a dark translucent triangle near Colorado Springs, Colorado, in October 2023, described by a former Department of War employee; a dark triangle with lights seen in June or July 2011 by two former service members; and a large triangle with red lights also reported near Colorado Springs in 2023.
More recent files describe a 2026 series in the western United States in which two witnesses reported multiple red lights across three incidents within a five-hour period, documented in FBI-UAP-D037 and FBI-UAP-D040, with four digital renderings. A separate FD-302, FBI-UAP-D033, records a Special Agent's account of a thermally elevated aerial object observed at about 9 PM in 2026.
Historical Documents
Three Department of War records reach back to the early years of the UFO question. DOW-UAP-D099 is a General Staff intelligence review of the ghost rocket incidents reported over Sweden and other Scandinavian countries beginning in May 1946. The review notes that the Swedish Defense Staff privately attributed the objects to Soviet V-1 missile tests launched from Peenemünde, yet publicly described a celestial origin, a shift that the review suggests was intended to avoid diplomatic conflict with the Soviet Union. Its final assessment held that most reports were likely misidentified natural phenomena, but that the best evidence supported a small number of real incidents involving low-flying V-1 type missiles.
DOW-UAP-D100 is a collection of memoranda and correspondence concerning Project Sign, the 1948 Air Force investigation into reports of high-performance airborne objects. The Air Materiel Command concluded that observers generally were not mistaken about seeing something, though many objects were likely weather or scientific balloons and some were celestial phenomena such as Venus. It found no physical evidence for the unexplained sightings and no evidence supporting the idea of vehicles from another planet, and it recommended that the Department of War avoid public comment on flying discs.
DOW-UAP-D098 is a 1953 memorandum from the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center assessing two films of alleged unidentified objects captured in Montana in 1950 and Utah in 1952. The Center judged that the objects displayed characteristics inconsistent with natural phenomena or commonly known aerospace technologies, and it recommended a better resourced investigation, citing a lack of funding and personnel.
What Release 05 Means for the PURSUE Program
Release 05 keeps the program on a cadence of roughly every two to four weeks, arriving 28 days after Release 04. The archive now holds 375 records across five tranches, and participation has widened with each batch. The Department of State and the Executive Office of the President join the Department of War, the FBI, the CIA, NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence among the agencies that have contributed records.
As with every prior tranche, the released cases remain unresolved. AARO's determination, repeated across the video files, is that the available evidence is insufficient to identify the phenomena or to rule out conventional explanations. The Department of War has confirmed that additional releases are forthcoming, and the materials continue to be posted at WAR.GOV/UFO.