Release report
Release 1: the first release of the Pentagon UFO files, from the 1947 FBI "Flying Discs" file to Gemini 7
On May 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of War published the first release (Release 1) of the PURSUE program, the declassified UFO files at war.gov/ufo: 158 files, made up of 116 documents, 27 videos, 14 images and one audio recording. Of those, 83 carry an official DOW or NASA file code and are linked below; the other 75 (historical FBI, Army Air Forces and Air Force files, five State Department cables and a 1999 French report, among others) have no such code and are described here without individual links; in the filter chips they appear under "Historical FBI and Air Force files" and "Recent FBI files, photos and State Department cables".
The release has two halves. One is historical: files from 1945 to 1964 and later, led by the FBI "Flying Discs" case file. The other is recent: mission reports and infrared videos that U.S. military units sent to AARO between 2013 and 2026, plus NASA transcripts and photographs from the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs.
Historical files: from the 1945 "foo fighters" to Socorro, 1964
The core is the FBI Headquarters "Flying Discs" file, 62-HQ-83894, delivered in 18 parts: ten sections, seven serials and one sub-file. The official description says it covers June 1947 to July 1968, but Section 10 contains pages dated as late as 1977. Section 3 (August to early October 1947) deals largely with the Maury Island affair near Tacoma: Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman, who had sent rock samples to editor Ray Palmer, admitted the material had no connection with flying discs, and the Seattle office closed its inquiry in a report dated August 19, 1947. The same section includes material on Kenneth Arnold and ends with Bureau Bulletin 57 (October 1, 1947), under which the FBI stopped investigating discs and referred them to the Air Force.
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Section 6 (August 1950 to August 1952) opens with an FBI memo of August 23, 1950 on about 150 aerial phenomena recorded near sensitive New Mexico sites since 1948, chiefly green fireballs and discs; Dr. Lincoln LaPaz judged about half of them meteoric. Serial 438 is the FBI Albuquerque report of May 8, 1964 on the Socorro, New Mexico case of April 24, 1964: Officer Lonnie Zamora radioed about an object that "landed and has taken off", and Special Agent D. Arthur Byrnes, Jr., who went to the site, noted four rectangular indentations of about sixteen by six inches and three burned patches of grass, and described Zamora as "not given to fantasy". These FBI sections also hold letters signed by Director J. Edgar Hoover, mentions of Donald Keyhoe, NICAP, Leonard Stringfield and George Adamski, a 1952 Look article by the Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel with a photograph of the Lubbock Lights, and an informant's claim that “three men in black suits” silenced Albert Bender; the Bureau's answer, repeated in them, is that it does not investigate sightings and refers them to the Air Force.
The military files start earlier. A 17-page SHAEF file from January to March 1945 covers the "foofighters": the 415th Night Fighter Squadron reported lights that blinked, changed color and flew formation with their aircraft, and in March 1945 the Air Ministry called the matter "still something of a mystery". The Air Materiel Command file of 1947 holds the September 23, 1947 letter from Lt. Gen. Nathan F. Twining saying "the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious"; a December 30, 1947 reply orders a project code-named "SIGN". Other items include an Air Force intelligence report of October 14, 1955 relaying what Senator Richard Russell and two companions said they saw in the Trans-Caucasus, and the July 18, 1963 memorandum "Thoughts on the Space Alien Race Question" by Maxwell W. Hunter II of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, a speculative essay and not an incident report.
The release also includes the English translation of the 1999 French COMETA report (94 pages), which a handwritten note in the file calls a private rather than a government report; five State Department cables from Papua New Guinea (1985), Kazakhstan (1994, sent from the embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan), Georgia (2001), Turkmenistan (2004) and Mexico, three of which are not sighting reports; and the most recent FBI material: four files on a September 2023 sighting at a U.S. test site, a 2025 statement by a senior intelligence official, an AARO slide deck on a 2023 event in the western United States and 32 still images the FBI submitted to AARO. The COMETA report also discusses the Groom Lake base (“Area 51”) in Nevada.
36 mission reports and range fouler forms
Most of these are Mission Reports (MISREP), the standardized form U.S. military units use to report UAP to AARO, from missions between 2016 and 2025 over the Arabian Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Greece, the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf of Aden, among others; six more are Range Fouler debrief or reporting forms (D038, D042, D044, D056, D057 and D058). Several were declassified by Maj. Gen. Richard A. Harrison, USCENTCOM Chief of Staff, between October 2025 and March 2026. Many are heavily redacted: in D004 the first four pages contain almost no unredacted text.
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What can be read is brief. D007 says the object "looks like a balloon, similar to previously reported UAP from 48FW". D025 describes a round diamond-shaped object seen on a SWIR camera over Greece on January 25, 2024 for about two minutes. D055 is a one-page summary dated November 18, 2016 in which a U.S. Navy P-8A observed a possible missile of unknown origin 55 NM northwest of Latakia, Syria.
28 Unresolved UAP Reports: infrared videos and one still image
This block holds 27 videos recorded by infrared sensors aboard U.S. military platforms, plus one still image (PR020). The file titles are "Unresolved UAP Report"; 21 were submitted by U.S. Central Command and the rest by Indo-Pacific Command (3), Northern Command, Africa Command, the Air Force and the Army (one each), with years from 2013 to 2026. Several carry no description at all: the official text of PR038, PR046 and PR049 says the reporter gave no oral or written account.
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Where there is an accompanying mission report, the official description quotes it. For PR019, five seconds of video from 2022, the mission report (D010) described a "possible missile" and four other objects, not shown in the video, as "possible birds". The still image PR020 was digitally altered by the reporter, who added a red line encircling an area of interest before sending it, and its mission report (D012) says the operator could not positively identify the UAP. In PR045 AARO notes that the apparent growth of the area of contrast is likely at least partly due to the U.S. platform closing the distance.
14 NASA files: Gemini 7, Apollo 11, 12 and 17, and Skylab
One of the files is Gemini 7. In the transcript (D003) and its audio excerpt (D003A), 4 hours 24 minutes into the flight in December 1965, Command Pilot Frank Borman reports "a bogey at ten o'clock high"; Houston asks whether it is the booster, and Borman answers "we have debris up here, this is an actual sighting" while saying the booster is also in sight. Handwritten notes in the file are headed "UFO SIGHTING BY BORMAN".
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In the Apollo 12 transcript (D001) Alan Bean describes particles and flashes of light "sailing off in space", and five annotated photographs (VM001 to VM005) highlight faint marks in the lunar sky. The Apollo 17 transcript (D002) records bright fragments drifting past the spacecraft, which the crew guessed were ice or paint from the S-IVB stage, and flashing objects reported by Eugene Cernan. The accompanying photograph (VM006) shows three dots in a triangular formation; the official text says there is no consensus on their nature, that DOW has opened a case and obtained the original film, and that results will be released when the analysis is complete.
The debriefings add D004, in which Buzz Aldrin describes an object seen a day out from the Moon that the crew thought might be the S-IVB, although the ground said that stage was 6,000 miles away, and D006 (Apollo 17), in which Harrison Schmitt reports light flashes, and D007 (Skylab), with light flashes reported by the first crew and a bright reddish object seen by the Skylab 3 crew. D005 is not about UAP: it covers an ultraviolet experiment on Apollo 17.
Context documents: emails and launch records
How to read this release: the military videos are titled "Unresolved UAP Report", which only means AARO has not resolved them. AARO notes that all descriptive and estimative language in these reports reflects the reporter's subjective interpretation at the time of the event and should not be read as a conclusive indication of any object's features or performance. Neither the Pentagon nor NASA confirms anything extraordinary here. Some official labels disagree with the documents: D027 is labeled October 2023 but its own timestamps read June 2024; D042 is labeled 2023 but the form is dated August 31, 2020; and the State Department cable listed as Mexico 2003 is dated September 16, 2023. Several files are not sightings: D048, D049, D005 and State Department cables 003 to 005.
