The Department of War published its seventh PURSUE tranche on Friday, October 23, 2026, five weeks after the September 18 release. It is the smallest of the seven tranches, 28 documents, and the first with no video at all. The running corpus now stands at 478 released records across seven tranches, and every one is indexed in the full PURSUE archive.
Most of the release finishes a story the last one started. Nine of the 28 files are reports that Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, the Las Vegas contractor, wrote for the Defense Intelligence Agency under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. Release 06 published the contract; Release 07 publishes the work product.
What Bigelow told the Pentagon it was doing
The earliest of the nine is a December 2008 project management plan. The contract asked Bigelow to work through twelve technical areas, and the plan says it would do that through a handful of projects, among them physics research, cooperation with government-held information, academic outreach, a database, oral-history interviews, and a review of material described as excluded from Project Blue Book. It also states a strategy that explains much of what follows. The most productive approach, it argues, was to study “craft” or events the company already believed showed novel behaviour, rather than to survey the state of the art in universities and industry.
The monthly reports for March, April, June and November 2009 show that strategy turning into administration. They cover staffing and security clearances, the technical papers that became the reference documents released in September, and a database of reports. The March report records that Bigelow bought UFO case data from the Mutual UFO Network and was trying to become the Federal Aviation Administration’s official reporting point for unexplained aerial sightings. A separate November 2008 compilation holds papers that the network wrote for the contractor, and a December 2008 data warehouse proposal called Project Capella sets out how the company meant to catalogue what it collected.
The November 2010 self-assessment is the most revealing of the set, because of when it was written. The government’s own summary says it appears intended to make the case for keeping the program alive. It describes the company’s people, software and field sensors, and offers engineering models of reported incidents as proof of competence. Read beside the funding language in the September contract modifications, it shows a contractor selling the work to a customer that was losing interest.
The Utah ranch
The release also contains a contractor’s account of field work at a ranch in Utah, a property better known from UFO lore than from official records. The April 2010 Utah ranch investigation report never names the property in the government’s summary, and the manifest lists the contractor’s home city rather than the site. It describes two months of field work. Bigelow staff interviewed residents, law enforcement officers, ranchers, business owners and members of nearby tribal communities, took readings with handheld sensors, planned experiments that used plants as biological sensors, and sought photographic, acoustic and chemical evidence. The accounts it records include “dog-like bipedal creatures,” orbs of light, “little people” and “prehistoric-looking” birds. The report also says the team meant to use “interactive methods” to try to communicate with whatever was behind the activity. The Skinwalker Ranch story is better known than it is documented, and a contemporaneous record of how the work was run is rare. The government’s summary does not name the property, so the link to that story is ours, drawn from the program’s history.
One passage in the June 2009 report, about a planned underground vault, drew wide press attention, and we cover what it does and does not say.
It is a contractor’s report, not a government finding. The release carries no endorsement of anything in it, and the accounts it relays are second-hand.
A triangle from June 2026
The one modern encounter in the tranche is from this year. An AARO memorandum for record documents a debrief of two federal special agents, with a third official’s account added, about two days of sightings at a sensitive national security site in the western United States in June 2026. The agents described a matte black, flat triangle that rose vertically, hovered for about twenty seconds, then banked and dropped into a canyon, at about 8:23 pm in late dusk. A search on the ground afterwards found no debris. AARO says the case warrants further investigation because the object’s shape and movement match other reports from the same region. A matching FBI FD-302 records an interview with two agents about the same incident.
The two files are a pair, but the government’s summaries do not say whether they record the same interview or separate ones. Either way they are one set of witnesses, not two independent ones. The witnesses used binoculars and a handheld thermal monocular, but the released text has no recording or radar record, and the witnesses watched at dusk from one to three miles away, where size and distance are hard to judge.
Fourteen older sightings
The remaining files reach back to the Air Force’s first decade. A cluster from Catalina Island, California runs from a 1949 letter to Kenneth Arnold through reports in 1952, 1953 and 1955. Others come from Saudi Arabia, Guam, Canada, Germany, Morocco, Alaska, Sweden and Indiana. A 1953 report from Morocco is a good example of how these files read when the question is settled: the radar unit’s own electronics staff judged that anomalous propagation, ship radar jamming or flocks of geese or storks was the most likely explanation. The Sassari, Italy report of 1952 records an interview with a professor who described a glowing sphere, and shows an attaché passing a newspaper account up the chain more than a year later.
Two files belong to the archive’s longer-running thread on how the government handled the subject. The service record of Colonel Howard M. McCoy is 298 pages on the officer who ran Air Materiel Command intelligence when Project Sign and Project Grudge began. A pair of papers on recovering space debris that lands abroad, from 1962 to 1964, shows agencies arguing over who would handle foreign satellite fragments and how to describe the effort to the public. They are about spacecraft, not saucers, and they are in the release because they show the government planned for the discovery of unexplained hardware.
One more detail is worth recording. The document numbers in this tranche jump from D164 to D166 and from D171 to D173. D165 and D172 appear nowhere in the manifest. The release does not explain the gaps, and nothing here suggests what the missing documents might be.