James Tuck Correspondence, 1970s — Department of Energy File
Personal correspondence to and from James Tuck, a Los Alamos National Laboratory-affiliated physicist, regarding his interest in unidentified anomalous phenomena circa 1970s.
Incident Overview
In 1970s, in an undisclosed location, the Department of Energy preserved a documentary record that was declassified and published on May 22, 2026 as part of the second tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).
What the government released
Personal correspondence to and from James Tuck, a Los Alamos National Laboratory-affiliated physicist, regarding his interest in unidentified anomalous phenomena circa 1970s.
Status of the case
Records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which means the federal government has not concluded the events were anomalous, has not concluded they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Where AARO has offered a likely source for an item — an infrared sensor aboard a military aircraft, a commercial camera, or a known optical effect — that attribution is the agency’s working assessment rather than a final determination. Conventional candidates such as drones, balloons, flares, satellites, parallax and forced-perspective artifacts, and ordinary aircraft remain on the table for any unresolved case absent better data than a single sensor pass or a witness recollection.