| Release 01 | 8 May 2026 — the big historical batch: 160+ records from DoW, State, FBI and NASA, mostly scanned files from 1944–1969 |
| Release 02 | 22 May 2026 — six documents plus a 5.6GB video bundle; small batch, several of the collection's best files |
| Release 03 | 12 June 2026 — 63 document files; centrepiece is the October 2023 Western US 'orbs launching orbs' event |
| Release 04 | 10 July 2026 — 40 items: 14 PDFs, 3 NASA shuttle images, 19 AARO videos, 4 Apollo audio recordings |
| Agencies | Department of War, CIA, FBI, DOE, Department of State, ODNI, NASA |
| Date range covered | 1944 to 2025 |
| Official source | war.gov/ufo — searchable database with free bulk downloads |
What Are the Pentagon UFO Files (PURSUE)?
The Pentagon UFO files are the declassified records published under PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. In February 2026, the White House directed the Department of War, with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to find, declassify and publish the government's unresolved UAP records. The result has been a rolling series of releases at war.gov/ufo, published every few weeks through the spring and summer of 2026.
Two things make PURSUE different from every previous US government UFO release. First, the files are unresolved cases only: records where the government says it cannot determine what was observed. Second, they come with proper archival scaffolding. Every file has a reference number (DOW-UAP-D095, CIA-UAP-D020 and so on), an originating agency, and in most cases an incident date and location. That means claims can be checked against a specific page in a specific document, which is exactly how we use them.
WatchTheStars keeps a complete local archive of all four releases, around 29GB of it, and we've been working through it steadily since May. This page is the guide to that collection: what each release contains, which documents deserve your attention, and what's honestly not worth your evening.
How Were the Pentagon UFO Files Released? The Four Batches
The Pentagon UFO files came out in four batches between 8 May and 10 July 2026, all published free at war.gov/ufo. Each batch has a distinct character, so here's what you're getting in each.
Release 1 (8 May 2026) is the historical core: over 160 records, the bulk of them scanned paper files from the 1940s and 1950s. It includes FBI "flying disc" case files running to ten sections, Air Force incident summaries covering 172 early sightings, State Department cables, and wartime intelligence files reaching back to 1944. Fair warning: most of it is photographed paper, not searchable text, so reading it means working through typewritten memos page by page, just as you would at a physical archive.
Release 2 (22 May 2026) is the opposite: just six documents, but pound for pound the strongest batch of the programme. It contains the senior intelligence officer's helicopter encounter narrative, the Sandia Base sighting log, the CIA's Sary Shagan report, the James Tuck letters and the first (heavily redacted) Pantex imagery, plus a 5.6GB bundle of videos.
Release 3 (12 June 2026) is built around one modern case: the October 2023 Western US event, in which six federal agents independently reported orange "mother orbs" releasing smaller red orbs near a sensitive site. The release contains AARO's formal case analysis, all five witness narratives, FBI digital recreations, plus a substantial historical layer: 18 CIA files including the Robertson Panel report, Gemini-era NASA crew debriefings, and FBI field office files from the 1950s.
Release 4 (10 July 2026) mixes eras deliberately. Its 14 PDFs run from Project Sign's 1948 progress report and the landmark Air Intelligence Study 203 through to Navy "range fouler" debriefs from 2019 and 2020. It adds three NASA photographs of the unidentified object seen from Space Shuttle Columbia during STS-80 in 1996, 19 AARO video clips including the oldest military UAP FLIR footage ever released, and four hours of Apollo 14 and 17 crew debriefing audio.
The Most Interesting Pentagon UFO Documents
Several hundred files in, these are the six we'd hand to a sceptical friend. Each reference number can be searched directly in the war.gov database.
ODNI-UAP-D001 — the senior intelligence officer's own account (Release 2)
A first-person narrative by a senior US intelligence officer describing a multi-hour encounter during a helicopter mission over a military test range in late 2025. Radar detected the objects first; the crew then watched an object approach within ten feet of the aircraft, split in two, and later saw "countless orange orbs" swarming against the mountains, forming a T-shape above the rotor disk and matching fighter jets' speed at altitude. It's the most vivid document in the entire collection, and the witness is about as senior as witnesses get. Our full write-up is at The 2025 Test Range Encounter.
DOW-UAP-D017 — the Sandia Base sighting log (Release 2)
A 116-page correspondence file from Sandia Base, the nuclear weapons site at Albuquerque, logging 209 sightings of green fireballs, discs and unexplained lights over America's atomic installations between 1948 and 1950. This is the raw paperwork of the green fireball era: security force reports, FBI memos, and scientists quietly worried that something kept appearing over the most sensitive sites in the country. We covered it in 209 UFO Sightings at Sandia Base.
DOW-UAP-D077 to D083 — the 'orbs launching orbs' case file (Release 3)
Seven documents covering the October 2023 Western US event: AARO's case analysis signed by its director, plus five independent witness narratives from federal law-enforcement agents. AARO attributes roughly 60% of the observations to military infrared countermeasure flares, and openly states the remaining 40% — including a red orb that hovered above a ridgeline for several hours and objects that mimicked ground vehicles — has no radar or flight-data correlate. A government analysis that shows its working and admits what it can't explain is rare, and this is the best example in the collection. Full page: The Western U.S. Event (2023).
CIA-UAP-D020 and D021 — the Senator Russell memos (Release 4)
In October 1955, Senator Richard Russell — chairman of the Armed Services Committee — watched a luminous disc rise vertically near Baku while travelling through Soviet Azerbaijan by train. The CIA debriefed him, stamped the file Top Secret, and sat on it for seventy years. The companion analysis paper is nearly as interesting: its assessment leans on the fact that the US and Canada were building a disc-shaped aircraft of their own at the time, the Avro Project Y. Our page: The Senator Russell Sighting (1955).
DOW-UAP-D095 — the Newfoundland KC-97 file (Release 4)
A 57-page folder containing the July 1955 radar-visual incident over Newfoundland, in which an Air Force committee concluded it was "unable to explain the simultaneous ground radar returns and aircrew visual sightings" and recommended fighter scrambles "without delay" for future cases. The same folder holds the Scientific Advisory Board's review of the real Avro flying disc programme, with a covering letter signed by Jimmy Doolittle. Full page: The Newfoundland KC-97 Incident.
DOW-UAP-D093 and D094 — Air Intelligence Study 203 (Release 4)
The Air Force's 1948–49 "Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the United States", 101 pages across draft and final versions. Its famous line is that "some object has been seen"; its working hypothesis was Soviet technology, illustrated with sighting maps and comparisons to flying-wing aircraft. As a window into what military intelligence actually concluded at the very start of the UFO era, nothing else in the release comes close. It pairs naturally with DOW-UAP-D097, Project Sign's first progress report from the same period.
"The committee was unable to explain the simultaneous ground radar returns and aircrew visual sightings."
— USAF Directorate of Intelligence memorandum, 11 July 1955 (DOW-UAP-D095)What's Dull in the Pentagon UFO Files? An Honest Assessment
Most of the collection is boring, and saying so matters, because the boring parts are what make the interesting parts credible. Release 1 is largely administrative: routing slips, duplicate incident summaries, letters from the public, and State Department cables that mention flying discs only in passing. DOW-UAP-D096 in Release 4 is 220 pages of 1950s correspondence about Project Blue Book, valuable for atmosphere and the occasional quotable letter, but nobody needs to read all of it.
A few practical warnings from our own reading. Much of Release 1 is image-only scans, so text search won't work on it. Redactions are heavy in places, especially in the Pantex material, where the descriptive text under the radar images is blacked out entirely. And some Release 3 illustrations, including the "notional map" of the Western US event, are AI-generated by the government's own tools and explicitly not to scale — useful for orientation, but they are illustrations, not evidence. Finally, most of the videos are short, grainy infrared clips; AARO's own captions explain several apparent anomalies as sensor artefacts, and they're usually right.
Our PURSUE Coverage: Every Deep-Dive and Article So Far
Everything below is built directly from files in this collection, with document references throughout.
Case pages: The 2025 Test Range Encounter · The Western U.S. Event (2023) · The Pantex Plant Incident (2015) · The Senator Russell Sighting (1955) · The Newfoundland KC-97 Incident (1955) · The STS-80 Incident (1996) · The Green Fireball Incidents (1948–1950) · The Cheyenne Mountain Incident (2022) · The Northeastern Orb Cluster (2021–2026) · UAP & Nuclear Weapons · Apollo 17 UAP Encounter
Articles: The first release: what's actually in it · The second batch · The third release · The fourth release · What the declassified videos actually show · The federal agents' orb reports · The Sandia Base sighting log · The James Tuck letters · The CIA's Sary Shagan report · What the files mean for the UK
For the wider archive project — the UK MOD files, Brazil's Varginha and Operação Prato records, and the NSA UMBRA files — start at the UAP Document Archive hub.
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The strongest files in these releases all come down to trained observers describing exactly what they saw. A decent pair of binoculars is how you do the same: turn a strange light into an aircraft, a satellite, a planet, or something genuinely worth reporting.
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What's Next for the PURSUE Files?
The Department of War has said releases will continue "every few weeks" as more records clear declassification review, and there's plenty still unmined in what's already out: the Release 4 video set, the Gemini debriefings, and most of Release 1's scanned archive. Our weekly document series works through the queue one file at a time, and this page will be updated as new releases land. If there's a specific document you want us to read next, the fastest route is our about page.