Release report
Release 3: the Robertson Panel, the "Orbs Launching Orbs" case and the FBI and NASA files
On June 12, 2026 the U.S. Department of War published the third release (Release 3) of the PURSUE program's declassified UFO files: 72 files, made up of 53 documents, 10 images, 6 videos and 3 audio recordings.
It is a release of documents. It combines historical files (the CIA's Robertson Panel of 1953, Air Force sighting reports from 1945–1948, FBI field-office files) with recent cases: AARO's update on a 2023 event in the western United States, FBI interviews about orbs in the northeast and Colorado Springs, and eleven NASA files on what astronauts saw from Mercury to Apollo.
18 CIA files: the Robertson Panel, the U-2 and reports from abroad
CIA-UAP-002 documents the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, known as the Robertson Panel, convened by the CIA in January 1953. Its members were H. P. Robertson (chairman), Luis Alvarez, Lloyd Berkner, Samuel Goudsmit and Thornton Page, with J. Allen Hynek and Frederick Durant as associate members. They reviewed 75 case histories and films of the Tremonton, Utah and Great Falls, Montana sightings, and concluded in their report of January 17, 1953 that the phenomena posed no direct physical threat and showed no sign of hostile foreign devices. A related copy of the report sent to the Secretary of Defense is DOW-UAP-D085, in the next group. J. Dewey Fournet is also listed among the participants.
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CIA-UAP-003 is the CIA's 406-page history of the U-2 and OXCART programs. It is in the release because of its section "U-2s, UFOs, and Operation BLUE BOOK", which states that U-2 and OXCART flights accounted for more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s, and it also mentions Area 51 and Groom Lake. CIA-UAP-015 is Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 (May 1955): of 2,199 object sightings analyzed, 434 (19.7 percent) were classed as unknown. CIA-UAP-019 is a 1971 Australian review of the U.S. handling of the subject that discusses Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book and the Condon report. CIA-UAP-003 also features Richard Bissell, Kelly Johnson and President Eisenhower's decisions on the program.
The rest are shorter reports from abroad and from other agencies: a British committee and the "Yorkshire incident" in 1952 (CIA-UAP-014), a sighting near Baku on October 4, 1955 (CIA-UAP-006), Budapest in 1955–1957 (CIA-UAP-009, CIA-UAP-013, CIA-UAP-018), conversations with Soviet scientists in 1967 (CIA-UAP-010), seven sightings in Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan in 1968 (CIA-UAP-016) and an object reported over Harare International Airport on July 2, 2008 (CIA-UAP-017).
1948–1967: Army, Navy, Air Force and FBI files
DOW-UAP-D084 holds 1949 Army memoranda: an evaluation study reports some 210 incidents investigated by the Air Materiel Command since 1945, about 20 percent of them explained. DOW-UAP-D086 is a Navy memo asking stations to report "flying discs" to the nearest Air Force command. DOW-UAP-D085, with no official file number in the source data, is the Defense Department's copy of the March 1953 transmittal of the Robertson Panel report.
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DOW-UAP-D087 and DOW-UAP-D088 are the two volumes of the Air Force's "Analysis of Flying Objects in the United States", built from standard check-list forms, mostly for 1945–1948. D088 includes incident 172, the Gorman dogfight: on a night in October 1948, a pilot of the Air National Guard flying an F-51 reported chasing a light over Fargo, North Dakota, for 27 minutes. The scan of D087 is badly degraded and only fragments can be read.
Three FBI files complete the group: a January 31, 1949 letter to J. Edgar Hoover from a pastor in McMinnville, Oregon, about four beams converging in the Cascade Mountains (FBI-UAP-D011); the Newark field office file from 1952 to 1967, which opens with photographs of a saucer over Passaic, New Jersey, on July 31, 1952 (FBI-UAP-D012); and the Seattle office file "Flying Discs" from 1952 to 1960, in which an instruction of August 29, 1952 says that investigating them is the Air Force's responsibility (FBI-UAP-D013).
19 files on the 2023 western United States event, "Orbs Launching Orbs"
The core is DOW-UAP-D077, a June 5, 2026 AARO update signed by its director, Jon T. Kosloski. It concerns an incident near a sensitive national security site in which six federal law enforcement special agents, in three teams of two, reported "orbs launching other orbs" at dusk over two days in October 2023: an orange "mother orb" lasting one or two seconds that released two to four smaller red orbs, repeated several times over hours and described as silent. The agents gathered no video, photographs or technical data.
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AARO cross-checked the reports against flight logs, radar and ADS-B data. It judges that about 60 percent of the activity is plausibly attributable to U.S. military aircraft dispensing infrared countermeasure flares, while the remaining 40 percent has no known aircraft correlated with it, including a red orb that stayed in place for several hours. Its preliminary hypothesis, based solely on testimony and elimination of other explanations and unsubstantiated by technical data, is that "unrecognized technology" may account for up to 40 percent. The case remains unresolved. The group includes a notional map (DOW-UAP-D078), five written narratives by witnesses 1 to 5 (DOW-UAP-D079 to DOW-UAP-D083), ten digital renderings and two digital recreations that the FBI prepared in 2026 at the Department of War's request (FBI-UAP-D014, FBI-UAP-PR005).
15 files: Colorado Springs 2022 and orbs in the northeastern United States
FBI-UAP-D001 is an FD-302 interview from March 2025 with a service member who describes an object seen in February 2022 with four other soldiers near Fort Carson, Colorado: "bean shaped", matte white, motionless and silent above a saddle of Cheyenne Mountain for three to five minutes. The FBI also made a forensic sketch interview and a digital rendering (FBI-UAP-D002, FBI-UAP-D003). An analysis by an Intelligence Community partner (ICA-UAP-D001) assesses with low confidence that it may have been backscattering of sunlight and states that no anomalous data was recorded and that the event did not represent an unknown adversarial capability.
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The other group is a series of reports from the northeastern United States between 2021 and 2026: FD-1057 records from October to December 2024 about a person who reported "plasma orbs" near the home and about FBI agents' visits to the site (FBI-UAP-D004 to FBI-UAP-D008), two FD-302 interviews from 2026 (FBI-UAP-D009, FBI-UAP-D010) and four phone videos: "Triangle Orbs" (November 2021), "Red Orb Rotation" (March 2022), "Orbs Over the Pond" (October 2024) and "Northeastern Orb Sighting" (July 2025) (FBI-UAP-PR001 to FBI-UAP-PR004). The FBI assesses the individual who reported the events in the first three videos (FBI-UAP-PR001 to FBI-UAP-PR003) as highly credible, and those who reported the fourth as credible.
12 files: NASA, the astronauts and a 1998 correspondence file
NASA-UAP-D015 compiles 1962–1963 debriefings and technical analyses of the luminous particles reported by Mercury astronauts John Glenn (his "fireflies") and Scott Carpenter ("snowflakes"), among others. The Gemini debriefings follow: Gemini 4 in June 1965, in which Ed White recounts seeing "sparkles" (NASA-UAP-D016 to NASA-UAP-D018); Gemini 5 (NASA-UAP-D019, NASA-UAP-D020); Gemini 7 (NASA-UAP-D021); and Gemini 9 (NASA-UAP-D022).
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The three audio files are a November 1962 interview in which Walter Cronkite asks Gordon Cooper about UFOs (NASA-UAP-D023) and two scientific debriefings after Apollo 16 (an April 1972 mission) (NASA-UAP-D024, NASA-UAP-D025). In D025 a scientist says at 32:41, in the middle of a discussion of magnetic anomalies on the far side of the Moon, "Could be an alien starbase or something, I don't know"; the official description calls it an off-handed comment. USG-UAP-D001 is a 1998 NASA file of congressional and White House correspondence; NASA's reply to Senator Grassley says it has no program investigating UFOs, and it encloses James Oberg's 1976 article explaining the best-known astronaut sightings, among them McDivitt's 1965 Gemini 4 sighting, which the article identifies as the spacecraft's own spent booster. USG-UAP-D001 also mentions the Air Force's Roswell Report and the claims of APRO research director James Harder about an Apollo 12 UFO.
How to read this release: the Pentagon publishing a file does not mean it confirms anything extraordinary. AARO calls the 2023 western United States case unresolved but notes that it rests on testimony without technical data. The FBI documents record what witnesses said, and the Intelligence Community analysis of the Colorado Springs case points to a possible optical effect. The records are not fully consistent: the FBI interview places the Colorado Springs sighting in early February 2022 around 1:00–2:00 PM, while the analysis gives February 15, 2022 at 0935; the title of FBI-UAP-D022 says 2026 while its description and the rest of the series say October 2023. Some scans, such as D087, are badly degraded. This site's summaries are AI-generated from the documents and reviewed under the policy on the methodology page.
