Range Fouler Debrief, Atlantic Ocean, 2020 — Department of War File
This document is a Range Fouler Debrief, a standardized reporting form the U.S. Navy uses to record the circumstances surrounding an unauthorized intrusion into controlled airspace during active military operations or training. These reports contain a narrative description of the observer’s…
Incident Overview
In 2020, in the Atlantic Ocean, the Department of War preserved a documentary record that was declassified and published on July 10, 2026 as part of the fourth tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).
What the government released
This document is a Range Fouler Debrief, a standardized reporting form the U.S. Navy uses to record the circumstances surrounding an unauthorized intrusion into controlled airspace during active military operations or training. These reports contain a narrative description of the observer’s experiences. This report accompanies the video titled “DOW-UAP-PR116.”
A U.S. military operator reported observing an object, describing the phenomenon as “darker, maroonish color, approximately 12-15 feet in height.” The report describes the phenomenon “travel[ing] with the wind” and noted that it did not “maneuver or change direction.” It also describes the phenomenon as appearing as a “large, somewhat deformed balloon.”
All descriptive and estimative language contained in this report reflects the reporter’s subjective interpretation at the time of the event. Such characterizations should not be interpreted as a conclusive indication of the presence or absence of any intrinsic object features or performance characteristics.
Related records
The Navy debrief above is the written half of a pair: the Department of War released it alongside the sensor footage in Unresolved UAP Report, Atlantic Ocean, so the operator’s account and the video of what they were looking at can be read against each other. That pairing is unusual in this archive, and it is the closest the release comes to letting a witness statement be checked against an instrument.
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.