Department of War / Presidential Order 14188 / Latest tranche: September 18, 2026
The Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) published Release 01 on May 8, 2026, Release 02 on May 22, 2026, Release 03 on June 12, 2026, Release 04 on July 10, 2026, Release 05 on August 7, 2026, and Release 06 on September 18, 2026, making 450 U.S. government records public — across the FBI, AARO, USAAF, USAF, NASA, the Department of State, the CIA, ODNI, the Department of Energy, the Executive Office of the President, the broader Intelligence Community, and, for the first time, local police. We've extracted, dated, and located 2,272 discrete UAP cases from those files and assembled the complete index below.
Latest — Release 06 · September 18, 2026: the sixth tranche added 75 records, and 44 of them come from one place: the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, the Defense Intelligence Agency contract that Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies ran from Las Vegas between 2008 and 2012. The release carries the program's founding Statement of Objectives, its contract paperwork, and 37 of its reference papers on subjects from metallic glasses to warp drives and traversable wormholes, which the government itself describes as literature reviews rather than research. The tranche also publishes the Air Force's Project Blue Book file on the 1952 Tremonton film, including the pillow-balloon review and the later seabird assessment, the film itself, and the service record of the Navy photographer who shot it; Captain Edward Ruppelt's March 1952 briefing on the reorganised Air Force investigation, as audio and transcript; and the first records in the archive from local police, four Colorado officers' phone videos of a silent, multicoloured flashing light. Read the briefing →
PURSUE is the largest single declassification action in the history of U.S. UAP record-keeping. The release spans the FBI's vaulted 62-HQ-83894 file (the entire 1947 saucer wave through Project Blue Book's 1969 closure), the U.S. Army Air Forces' "Check-List - Unidentified Flying Objects" series (Box 7 of file 38_143685, covering Incidents #1 through #233), Department of War mission reports from Iraq, Syria, the Persian Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz between 2013 and 2025, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's historical record reports and aluminum/metallic specimen analyses, NASA's Apollo and Skylab crew debriefs, and Department of State diplomatic cables from Papua New Guinea, Kazakhstan, Tbilisi, Ashgabat, and Mexico City.
Every case in our index is filed against its source document, page reference, incident date, and geographic coordinates where recoverable. Case files retain links back to the original PURSUE document on aaro.mil or the relevant agency archive. Where the source records were illegible due to OCR damage, we have marked the case as such and preserved the partial text rather than reconstructing.
Most of Release 06 is paperwork from a single contract. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program was set up by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2008 to study aerospace threats as far out as 2050, and it was run by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies in Las Vegas. The tranche publishes the Statement of Objectives that defined it, the solicitation and five contract modifications, and 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents. Those papers range from ordinary engineering (lasers, ultracapacitors, fusion propulsion) to warp drives, antigravity and wormholes, and the government's own summary asks that each be read as a literature review, not as evidence that any of it works. The program's history is written up here.
The historical records are the most useful in the tranche. The Air Force's Project Blue Book file on the 1952 Tremonton film shows its assessment moving over several years: a December 1952 review with balloon specialists and General Mills found the objects closely resembled pillow balloons, and later assessments grew more confident they were seabirds catching the sun. That is a different story from the one usually told about the film. Alongside it sit the film itself, the photographer's Navy service record, and Captain Edward Ruppelt's March 1952 talk on the reorganised Air Force investigation, in which he put the unexplained share of about 800 reviewed cases at roughly 20 per cent.
At the modern end the archive takes its first records from local police: four Colorado officers' phone videos from October 2023 and January 2024, each describing a silent light flashing red, blue and green, with transcripts whose audio AARO removed for privacy. That description is also the classic account of a bright star twinkling low on the horizon, which is the first thing to rule out. The tranche closes with mission reports and infrared footage from Iraq and the Middle East, and six Indo-Pacific clips from the Yellow Sea and East China Sea.
Source document Department of War · 1952
This document records the Project Blue Book investigation and subsequent assessments of an incident near Tremonton, Utah, on July 2, 1952. Project Blue Book was a 1952-1969 U.S. Air Force program to investigate the nature and origin of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Source document Department of War · 1952
During its investigation of a July 1952 film of an incident reported near Tremonton, Utah, Project Blue Book examined whether the objects recorded on film might have been “pillow balloons.” Project Blue Book was a U.S. Air Force program active from 1952 to 1969 that investigated the nature and…
Source document Department of War · 1952
This document is a transcript of a March 1952 presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt outlining the U.S. Air Force’s reorganized investigation into unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Source document Department of War · 2008
This July 2008 Statement of Objectives defines AAWSAP as a contractor-supported research effort intended to assess far-term foreign aerospace threats by understanding the physics and engineering of possible breakthrough technologies out to the year 2050 rather than extrapolating from…
Source document Department of War · 2010
This DIRD examines whether a warp-propulsion concept can be grounded in known theoretical physics by linking general-relativistic warp metrics with dark energy, Casimir effects, and higher-dimensional models from string theory and brane cosmology. The paper hypothesizes that if dark energy…
Source document Local Law Enforcement · 2023
This document is a transcript of a 1-minute, 19-second video recording contained in this collection under the title LLE-UAP-PR001, captured by a law enforcement officer in Colorado in October 2023.
Release 05 widens the archive past the military and the Bureau for the first time. Two State Department cables and a file from the National Aeronautics and Space Council — an advisory body inside the Executive Office of the President — track the same story through three arms of government over six days in November 1963: a Rio de Janeiro radio broadcast claiming a large metal sphere with a body inside had fallen on Conde, in Bahia, and the Brazilian air ministry's flat denial that any such object existed. It is a useful reminder that a government paper trail records what officials were chasing, which is not the same as recording what happened.
The historical material is the strongest in the tranche. The U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center's 1953 analysis of two films shot over Montana in 1950 and Utah in 1952 concluded that it could not explain the objects as natural phenomena or recognise them as man-made, and asked for a better-funded investigation it never got. A 1947 intelligence review reconstructs the "ghost rockets" seen over Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway in 1946, when nearly a thousand reports arrived in a single month. Alongside them sits the Air Materiel Command's early assessment of flying object reports, which weighed the interplanetary explanation on paper and set it aside for want of evidence.
At the modern end, a September 2021 AC-130 gunship encounter over the Gulf of Oman arrives as six video clips and a written intelligence report — the aircrew's own recorder had failed, so the footage is a phone held up to a sensor screen. Seventeen FBI records pair agents' interview write-ups with digital renderings the Bureau commissioned from those same interviews in 2026; the drawings are the most striking images here and the least evidential, since an illustration of an account can only ever be as good as the account.
Three of this tranche's cases are written up here at length, because the documents alone do not tell you what happened: the Conde sphere, which three arms of the U.S. government chased across Brazil for twelve days before establishing that nothing had fallen; the Puerto Rico radar contact of 1964, where a pilot's estimate and a destroyer's radar disagreed by a factor of two and the CIA's first move was to rule out its own secret aircraft; and the Gulf of Oman cold orbs, the tranche's most dramatic modern encounter and the one whose evidence was destroyed by a broken video recorder before anyone could examine it.
Source document Executive Office of the President · 1963
This document is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) wire report dated November 9, 1963, tracking a local Portuguese-language radio broadcast from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, regarding an alleged crash of a “large metal sphere” containing a deceased…
Source document Department of War · 1950
This file contains a memorandum relating to the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center’s assessment of two films allegedly depicting unidentified airborne objects, captured in Montana and Utah in 1950 and 1952, respectively. The file documents the Center’s analytic process, assumptions…
Source document Department of War · 1947
This document is a U.S. Department of War General Staff intelligence review assessing incidents involving unidentified “Ghost Rockets” reported over Sweden and other Scandinavian countries beginning in May 1946. The review includes an analysis of observational reports, statements from the…
Source document Department of War · 1947
This file is a collection of U.S. Government memoranda and correspondence relating to “Project Sign,” a 1948 U.S. Air Force program to investigate reports of high-performance airborne objects. The documents characterize some of these reports as being consistent with “real” objects rather than…
Source document Department of War · 2021
This document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), the primary standardized format utilized by the Department of War, military services, and the broader Intelligence Community to disseminate unevaluated intelligence information derived from human sources (HUMINT), open sources, and field…
Source document CIA · 1965
This file contains Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) memoranda exchanged between the Assistant Director for Special Activities (AD/SA) and the Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence (AD/SI) regarding an incident allegedly involving unidentified aircraft in the vicinity of Puerto Rico.…
Release 04 is the first tranche to go back to the beginning. It carries the 1948 Project Sign progress report — the Air Force's founding UFO investigation, with its catalogue of 100 sightings from 1947 and 1948 — the Air Force's own committee review of Project Blue Book, 220 pages of Blue Book correspondence, and the transcript of a 1949 conference at Los Alamos where Manhattan Project physicists, Edward Teller among them, argued over the green fireballs and reached no consensus. At the other end of the record it adds something the archive has not had before: three Navy Range Fouler debriefs released together with the sensor videos they describe, so an operator's written account and the footage they were watching can finally be read side by side. What that pairing actually shows is the lead finding on the best evidence, and it is not the finding anybody wanted.
These six are chosen for what they are, not for how well-evidenced they are — the two are different questions, and the Project Sign report is the most important document in the tranche while scoring near the bottom of our Alien Proof Index. Both readings are on each card.
Source document Department of War · 1948
This file contains an initial report from the Air Materiel Command regarding Project Sign. Project Sign was a 1948-1949 U.S. Air Force program to investigate the nature and origin of unidentified flying objects (UFO).
Source document Department of Energy · 1949
This document is a transcript of a 1949 conference held at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now Los Alamos National Laboratory), Los Alamos, New Mexico. Attendees included several eminent scientists and physicists, many of whom had contributed to the development of the first nuclear weapons…
Source document Department of War · 1967
This file documents the 1966-1967 deliberations and recommendations of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Scientific Advisory Board’s Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book was a 1952-1969 USAF program to investigate the nature and origin of unidentified flying objects (UFO).
Source document NASA · 1996
During STS-80, between November 19 and December 7, 1996, astronauts aboard Space Shuttle Columbia captured a series of three images of an unidentified object in low-Earth orbit. In the second photograph, the object is visible near the center of the frame, to the right of the limb of the Earth.
Source document Department of War · 2020
The United States Northern Command submitted a report of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) consisting of 11 seconds of video footage from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2020. An accompanying Range Fouler Debrief,…
NASA · 1971
This file contains segment 1 of 2 of the Apollo 14 post-mission crew debriefing at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center), Houston, Texas. In the recording, crew members and debriefers discuss the “light flash phenomena,” a then novel, now well-documented biological effect where…
Release 03 is the most FBI- and CIA-heavy tranche yet. Its centerpiece is a two-day October 2023 event at a sensitive Western US site — five sworn witness narratives, an AARO case-analysis update, a site map, and a dozen digital reconstructions. Alongside it: the Bureau's multi-document Colorado Springs 2022 file with an Intelligence Community analysis, an ongoing Northeastern orb series with reports into 2026, eighteen CIA historical files reaching back to the Robertson Panel, and the NASA Gemini-program debriefings.
Western United States
This memorandum summarizes the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s (AARO) ongoing analysis of a reported incident near a sensitive national security site in the western United States involving unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) over a period of two days in 2023. As of June 2026, the case…
Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S.
This document contains analysis by an All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Intelligence Community (IC) partner to account for a 2022 incident involving an airborne object near Colorado Springs, Colorado. U.S. military service members reported the incident to AARO in 2023.
Washington, D.C., USA
The CIA's 1953 Scientific Advisory Panel — the Robertson Panel — concluded flying saucers were no physical threat but recommended an official program to 'debunk' them and reduce public interest, and the surveillance of civilian UFO groups. Its full report is in the June 2026 PURSUE release.
Byurakan, Armenia, USSR
A CIA intelligence report, declassified in the June 2026 PURSUE release, captured a speculative paper by Nikolai Kardashev and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov on charged masses 'bouncing' through collapse into a different region of spacetime — filed by the agency among its UAP records.
Northeastern United States
In October 2024, at approximately 1851 local time in the northeastern United States, an eyewitness observed a light source below the horizon, hovering above a pond at an estimated distance of 2,700 feet. The luminous object resembled a “plasma-like sphere” intermittently changing shape and…
Undisclosed location
This file contains an Evaluation Study of the Phenomenon (Flying Saucers) prepared at the request of the Plans & Operations Divisions of the General Staff, U.S. Army (P&O, GSUSA) to determine if the origin could be traced to natural phenomena or the activities of a foreign power.
Most of the 64 records in Release 02 are short sensor-video clips from U.S. Department of War operations across CENTCOM, the Gulf, and the Pacific. A handful of records, though, are historically substantive — a nuclear-facility case from 1948, a CIA report on Soviet missile work that names an unidentified aerial phenomenon, an ODNI narrative from a senior intelligence official, NASA mission audio with 17 corroborating witnesses, a redacted Pantex incident report, and a Los Alamos physicist quietly invited to talk UFOs.
New Mexico
This file contains 116 pages of documentation from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program (AFSWP) – the direct, post-World War II successor to the Manhattan Project – and from the U.S. Air Force – relating to a series of sightings and investigations in Sandia, New Mexico, from 1948-1950. This…
USSR
This document is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intelligence information report (IIR) that describes human intelligence gathering activities in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This report characterizes its content as informational, not as finally evaluated intelligence.
Western United States
This document is a first-hand account written by a currently serving (May 2026) senior U.S. intelligence official. The official was part of a team investigating reports of unusual noises and sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena in and near a sensitive U.S. military facility in late 2025.
Cislunar Space · 17 witnesses
During the eleventh and final crewed mission in the Apollo program, Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, and Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans report seeing small lights outside the Apollo spacecraft during transit to the moon. The crew describe bright…
Pantex Plant, Texas
A Pantex Unidentified Object Incident Report that includes an enhanced image from ground surveillance radar tower.
New Mexico
A letter to the members of the Pajarito Astronomers club regarding an upcoming meeting featuring a presentation from a Los Alamos National Laboratory-affiliated physicist, Dr. John Warren, titled “Why Should a Scientist be Concerned about UFOs?” The referenced event was not officially hosted by…
Release 02 also contributed a string of NASA crew-audio excerpts — the Mercury-Redstone 4, Mercury-Atlas 7, Mercury-Atlas 8, and two Mercury-Atlas 9 recordings, plus an Apollo 12 medical debrief — and a 1970s correspondence with Los Alamos physicist James Tuck.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
Between 1947 and 1951, FBI agents, Air Force radar operators, AEC patrolmen, and Atomic Energy Commission scientists at Oak Ridge documented dozens of unidentified objects over America's most secret nuclear weapons facility. The case files were sealed for nearly eighty years.
Roswell
A first saucer wave case from Roswell. An interviewee mentioned the possibility that the US government has been concealing off-world technology since 1947, referencing the Roswell events.
Bakersfield, California
A first saucer wave case from Bakersfield, California. Experienced pilot Dick Rankin reported observing a formation of ten flying discs over Bakersfield, California.
off Florida’s east coast
A post-cold war case from off Florida’s east coast. In January 2015, Navy aircraft recorded an object traveling at high speeds near the ocean surface.
Idaho · 200 witnesses
A first saucer wave case from Idaho. On Independence Day, approximately 260 people in Idaho reported seeing the flying objects.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA · 50 witnesses
Between 1947 and 1951, FBI agents, Air Force radar operators, AEC patrolmen, and Atomic Energy Commission scientists at Oak Ridge documented dozens of unidentified objects over America's most secret nuclear weapons facility. The case files were sealed for nearly eighty years.
Multiple, redacted · 32 witnesses
Between 2024 and 2025, the Federal Bureau of Investigation submitted thirty-two still images of unidentified anomalous phenomena to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Each was derived from a U.S. government sensor system, redacted before submission, and accompanied by a brief AARO-issued narrative description. The dates and locations of the underlying events have not been disclosed.
Western United States · 7 witnesses
Seven federal law enforcement agents independently reported orbs, a translucent kite-like shape, and a glowing orb one witness compared to the 'Eye of Sauron' — a case AARO calls among the most compelling in its holdings.
Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. It is the framework established under Presidential Order 14188 for the systematic declassification of U.S. government records relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
May 8 is the anniversary of the 1948 release of the Project Sign "Estimate of the Situation," the first formal U.S. military UAP assessment. The Department of War selected the date to mark the historical continuity from Sign through Grudge, Blue Book, AATIP, the UAP Task Force, and AARO.
The second tranche added 64 records: 51 sensor videos and 7 mission-audio excerpts curated by AARO in response to a March 6, 2026 request from eight U.S. House members for potentially UAP-related material (AARO notes many of these lack a substantiated chain of custody), plus 6 PDFs — the 116-page Sandia Base 1948–50 general correspondence, a CIA 1973 Intelligence Information Report on Soviet systems referencing an unidentified aerial phenomenon, NASA Mercury and Apollo crew audio, two Department of Energy letters (James Tuck's 1970 correspondence and the 1986 Pajarito Astronomers invitation), and the redacted Pantex Plant Unidentified Object Incident Report.
The sixth tranche added 75 records. Forty-four of them are from the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), the Defense Intelligence Agency contract run by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies from 2008: its Statement of Objectives, solicitation and five contract modifications, and 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents on topics from metamaterials and high-energy lasers to warp drives and negative-mass propulsion, which the government describes as literature reviews rather than original research. The historical material is the Air Force's Project Blue Book file on the 1952 Tremonton film, including a December 1952 pillow-balloon review and the later assessment that the objects were probably seabirds, the digitised film itself, the photographer Delbert Newhouse's Navy service record, a Director of Intelligence flying-discs file from late 1952, and Captain Edward Ruppelt's March 1952 presentation on the reorganised Air Force investigation as audio and transcript. At the modern end it adds the archive's first local-law-enforcement records (four Colorado officers' phone videos and their transcripts, 2023–2024), four mission reports with infrared stills and video from Iraq and the Middle East, and six Indo-Pacific sensor clips from 2023.
The fifth tranche added 41 records and widened the archive past the Pentagon for the first time, adding Department of State and Executive Office of the President files. Its centrepiece is the reported fall of a large metal sphere at Conde, in Bahia, Brazil, in November 1963: a Rio de Janeiro radio broadcast picked up by the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a National Aeronautics and Space Council file, and two U.S. Embassy cables that ended with the scientific attaché in Salvador calling the story a fabrication and Brazil's Ministry of Aeronautics denying it outright. The historical material also includes the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center's 1953 analysis of the Montana (1950) and Utah (1952) films, a January 1947 Department of War review of the Scandinavian "ghost rockets", Air Materiel Command correspondence on Project Sign, and two CIA files on a November 1964 radar contact near Puerto Rico. At the modern end it adds a September 2021 AC-130 gunship encounter over the Gulf of Oman — six clips and a written intelligence report, recorded on a phone because the aircraft's own video recorder had failed — nine further sensor videos, and seventeen FBI records pairing agents' interview write-ups with digital renderings the Bureau drew from those interviews in 2026.
The fourth tranche added 40 records, and it is the most historical of the four. The centrepiece is the founding-era paperwork: the 1948 Project Sign progress report with its catalogue of 100 sightings, two Air Materiel Command analyses of flying object incidents from 1948 and 1949, the Department of the Air Force committee convened in 1966–67 to review Project Blue Book, 220 pages of Blue Book correspondence, and a 1949 conference at Los Alamos where Manhattan Project physicists — Edward Teller and the meteor specialist Lincoln LaPaz among them — debated the green fireballs without agreeing on a cause. It also adds nineteen unresolved sensor videos from CENTCOM, INDOPACOM and NORTHCOM, three Navy Range Fouler debriefs published alongside the videos they describe, three STS-80 shuttle photographs from 1996, the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 crew debriefing tapes, a 2015 Pantex Plant incident report, and CIA and FBI correspondence.
No — some of the documents (notably the FBI 62-HQ-83894 sections) had been partially released through earlier FOIA productions over the decades. PURSUE is the first time the complete file series has been released together with internal cross-references intact, alongside previously withheld AARO and Department of War material.
Every case file on Spooky Valley links to the source document at aaro.mil or the relevant agency archive. Case pages cite the document number and page reference (e.g., D196/P40) so you can locate the original record.
The PURSUE release covers documents the agencies have determined no longer require classification. Material relating to active intelligence sources, ongoing operations, and certain Special Access Programs remains withheld. AARO continues to receive new reports under the standing UAP reporting framework.
The full searchable archive lets you filter by year, decade, country, city, agency, case type, and era. Every case page links back to its source document.