Release report
Release 4: Project Blue Book and the Robertson Panel, the Los Alamos green fireballs and 19 military sensor videos
On July 10, 2026 the U.S. Department of War published the fourth release (Release 4) of the PURSUE program: 40 files, including 14 PDF documents, 19 videos, 4 audio recordings and 3 images. With them the archive grows from 294 to 334 files.
The release falls into four blocks: six Air Force files on Project Sign and Project Blue Book (1948–1969), four science and intelligence documents (from the 1949 Los Alamos conference to FBI correspondence from 1974, including the 1955 CIA memoranda on Senator Richard Russell), the Pantex report and 19 military sensor videos from 1996 to 2025, and seven NASA files.
Project Sign, Blue Book and the Robertson Panel: six Air Force files (1948–1969)
The initial Project Sign report (D097), sent on April 23, 1948 by Air Materiel Command (AMC) to the Air Force director of intelligence, tabulates 100 incidents from 1947–1948, with objects described as oval, disc or saucer-shaped 31 times. Two versions of Air Intelligence Division Study No. 203 (D093 and D094) examine about 210 "flying saucer" incidents: AMC had positively identified 18 (about 9 percent), among hoaxes, unreliable witnesses and celestial bodies, balloons or cosmic-ray equipment.
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The file on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board's ad hoc committee to review Project Blue Book (1966–1967, D092; 63 of 85 pages legible). A 1965 memorandum records that 9,267 reports had been investigated by June 30, 1965, 663 of them unexplained. The committee, chaired by Brian O'Brien and including Carl Sagan among others, recommended contracting a university scientific team; the file shows the follow-up, with J. Allen Hynek and Donald Menzel as an advisory nucleus, and 1969 letters about the Condon Report. The same file records the Robertson Panel report of January 17, 1953 and the screening of the Tremonton (Utah, July 1952) and Great Falls (Montana, August 1950) films.
The 1955 correspondence (D096, 220 pages) includes a letter asking the Navy about the Tremonton film, shot on July 2, 1952 by Navy Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse, and a reply from the Office of Naval Research addressed to Donald E. Keyhoe. The block is completed by the 1954–1955 file on A. V. Roe Canada's Project Y2, called "Ladybird" by the Air Force, a circular vertical take-off aircraft whose appearance the file itself compares to popular descriptions of UFOs (D095).
From the Los Alamos green fireballs to Senator Russell on a train (1949–1974)
On February 16, 1949 Los Alamos physicists Edward Teller, Norris Bradbury and Frederic Reines met astronomer Lincoln LaPaz and security officials to discuss the "green fireballs" seen over New Mexico and West Texas (DOE-D004). LaPaz presented near-horizontal trajectories 8–10 miles high and the absence of sound and fragments; Teller made rough blackboard calculations. The group reached no conclusion; the leading hypothesis in the official description is meteors entering the atmosphere at a shallow angle and high altitude.
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Two CIA memoranda from October 1955 deal with a sighting from a train between Baku and Tiflis. The one of October 31, signed by Herbert Scoville Jr. (D020), summarizes the debriefing of four people, among them Senator Richard Russell, who saw a greenish-yellow glowing ball rising quickly; it concludes the sighting can "probably be explained as steep climbing aircraft or missiles" and that the evidence does not justify saying the Soviets had developed a radically new aircraft. The second (D021) examines an October 13, 1955 dispatch from Prague about two flying saucers which an interview with one of the observers failed to confirm in several respects.
The fourth document (D014) gathers two pieces of correspondence from the FBI Chicago office: a 1967 call from an 11-year-old who heard a noise and saw a flash of light, and a 1974 exchange of letters with Larry Bryant about an alleged April 8, 1954 sighting of an occupied UFO.
Pantex and 19 military sensor videos (1996–2025)
The Pantex report (D005) describes an unidentified object over the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, a nuclear weapons facility. Ground surveillance radar detected it west of the facilities moving north at about 10–15 mph; protective force personnel followed it for several miles, heard no sound, could identify no propulsion and described a "diamond" shape about 4 feet tall. The radar video was sent to Sandia National Laboratories and the report says the object never appeared threatening. Pages 5 and 6 had been released on May 22, 2026 in a more redacted form (DOE-UAP-D001).
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The 19 videos are infrared or electro-optical sensor clips from U.S. military platforms (one aboard a civilian aircraft), from 8 seconds to 5 minutes long. Six come from Indo-Pacific Command (Yellow Sea, East China Sea and South China Sea, 2023–2025), seven from Northern Command (2016 and 2020), two from Central Command (Middle East, 2023), one from the Air Force, one from the Navy and two that the Navy UAP Task Force transferred to AARO in 2022, from 2015 and 1996 (PR109 and PR113). Three videos are paired with a Navy "Range Fouler Debrief" form: PR106 with D089, PR112 with D090 and PR116 with D091. In PR115, AARO's comment explains that when a tracked source has a temperature similar to its surroundings it can blend into the background or flicker because of auto-gain filters.
Apollo 14 and 17 debriefings and three STS-80 images
The four audio files are the two parts of the Apollo 14 crew debriefing (Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell, D026 and D027) and the two of the Apollo 17 medical debriefing (D028 and D029), at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. What the official descriptions highlight is the "light flash phenomena", a well-documented biological effect in which high-energy cosmic rays pass through the eye and strike the retina. On Apollo 17, a one-hour blindfolded session produced no flashes, and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt says that when dark-adapted the flashes occurred almost continuously.
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The three images (D030, D031 and D032) were taken between November 19 and December 7, 1996 by astronauts aboard Space Shuttle Columbia during STS-80: they show an unidentified object in low-Earth orbit that, per the official description, appears to rotate about its major axis, consistent with a free-floating object.
How to read this release: the videos are titled "Unresolved UAP Report". AARO not having resolved them does not mean it confirms anything extraordinary, and the official descriptions warn that all descriptive language reflects the reporter's subjective interpretation. The historical documents are analysis and correspondence of their time, not current conclusions. There are inconsistencies in the official data: D093 and D094 carry different dates (December 1948 and April 1949 in the record) but describe the same Study No. 203, and in D005 the cover letter places the incident on September 2, 2015 and the report on September 1. Several long files have blank or redacted pages (for example, 179 of 220 pages legible in D096). The summaries on this site are AI-generated from the documents and reviewed under the policy on the methodology page.
