THE DOCUMENTS
Three sets of email correspondence from PURSUE Release 01, published by the U.S. Department of War at war.gov/ufo. DOW-UAP-D50, an exchange about an INDOPACOM area-of-responsibility report, April 2025. DOW-UAP-D51, an exchange about a March 2023 sighting in the Pacific Time Zone. DOW-UAP-D52, an exchange about a 31 October 2024 observation. All three were originally classified SECRET//NOFORN.
What this briefing is
Every briefing in this series so far has looked at a record of something seen: a mission report, a sensor clip, a sworn statement, a diplomatic cable. This briefing looks at three documents that record something else. They are internal government emails, and what they document is not a UAP. It is the work of turning a UAP report into a sentence the public is allowed to read.
These three exchanges are the seam of the whole PURSUE release. Every unclassified UAP line elsewhere in the release, the clipped “US aircraft observed one possible UAP” sentences, did not arrive in public as raw observation. Each one is the surviving residue of a clearance process. D50, D51 and D52 are three small windows onto that process, caught because the emails themselves were collected and released.
This is tier 2 material: three authentic, primary government documents. They are unusual ones, and most of this briefing is about what the paperwork of disclosure reveals.
TL;DR
The three threads show the same task at three different moments. In each, an Information Disclosure Analyst, working from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, is assembling unclassified UAP material, and has to go back to the unit that originated a report to get specific wording cleared.
D50 is an analyst asking a 12th Air Force detachment to confirm that two short “tearlines” are releasable at the unclassified level. The technician replies that he phoned the flying unit to check. The two tearlines, once cleared, are two brief sentences: a US aircraft observed a possible UAP for twelve seconds on 10 April 2025, and another for twenty-three seconds the next day. Altitude and speed are recorded as unknown.
D51 is the richest. An Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer is asked to clear the summary of an intelligence report about a March 2023 sighting, by a civilian, of a large blue triangular object near a national security facility. The officer notes that the proper declassification route “is lengthy and requires AFOSI Commander signature”, says twice that the task is “a first for me”, and approves it instead through a faster review.
D52 is the smallest and the most telling. An analyst has already had the month and day of an October 2024 sighting cleared, and writes back to ask, separately, for permission to also publish the year.
This briefing is evidence tier 2: the emails are authentic and official. The tier rates the documents. What they mostly establish is not about the sky. It is about the machinery.
What a tearline is
One term has to be clear first, because it is the hinge of all three documents.
A tearline is a portion of a classified intelligence product, written so that it can be separated from the parent document and handled at a lower classification, often unclassified. The idea is old and practical: the full report stays secret, but a short, carefully worded extract can be “torn off” and shared more widely. The tearlines in these emails are marked “1.4(a)”, a reference to Executive Order 13526, section 1.4(a), the classification category covering military operations. The parent material is classified under that category. The tearline is the piece pulled out of it for release.
This matters for reading the whole PURSUE release. The unclassified UAP descriptions that run through it are tearlines. They are not the observation. They are the part of the observation that someone decided, and then formally approved, could be made public. D50, D51 and D52 are the emails where that approving happens.
Thread one: INDOPACOM, two contacts and a phone call
D50 is brief. An Information Disclosure Analyst asks a contact at a 12th Air Force detachment to confirm two things: that two “1.4(a) tearlines” are at the unclassified level, and that the area of responsibility, INDOPACOM, can be named.
The reply is the human detail in the document. The technician writes: “I just got off the phone with the unit that flies [redacted]. They said to me that the two lines listed are on the UNCLASSIFIED level and that adding in the AOR as INDOPACOM is also at the UNCLASSIFIED level.” Clearance here is not an abstract stamp. It is one person ringing another and asking.
The two tearlines, once cleared, are these, in full:
US AIRCRAFT OBSERVED 1X POSS UAP FOR 12 SECONDS AT 2353Z, FLYING AT UNK ALTITUDE AND UNK SPEED, NO INTERFERENCE WAS NOTED.
and a near-identical line for the following day, a twenty-three-second observation. That is the entire publicly releasable content of two encounters. The objects’ altitude and speed are recorded as “UNK”, unknown. Whatever else the originating unit knew, the part that cleared the process is twelve seconds, twenty-three seconds, and no interference.
Thread two: the triangular object and a process invented on the spot
D51 is the fullest of the three, and the most revealing about how new this work was.
An Information Disclosure Analyst sends an Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer a request to clear the unclassified summary of an Intelligence Information Report, an IIR, about a March 2023 sighting. The officer’s reply is candid. The normal route, “our process for declassifying IIRs is lengthy and requires AFOSI Commander signature”, so the officer is “exploring options” and settles on processing it as a faster derivative classification review instead. Twice in the thread the officer says a version of the same thing: “this was a first for me”, “This is a first for me so I appreciate your patience.”
That is worth pausing on. As recently as 2023, clearing a UAP report for public release was novel enough inside the Air Force’s own investigative arm that an officer handling it had no established procedure and was improvising one. The smooth, uniform unclassified language elsewhere in the release sits on top of that.
The summary that gets cleared describes a civilian’s account: a large, blue, featureless triangular object with a solid silhouette, emitting “whitish blue” light from points along its perimeter, seen at night for about eight minutes, hovering near a national security facility and then moving in a “jerking” or “jumping” manner the reporter felt was inconsistent with jet propulsion. The report was, the document notes, obtained by personal cellular device. The reporter also said what they could not tell: not the propulsion, not whether it had a front or rear, only that they “didn’t think” it was a drone.
It is a striking description. It is also, precisely, a summary of what one civilian reported, processed into a standard intelligence format and then cleared for release. The briefing returns to that distinction below.
Thread three: permission to print the year
D52 is four sentences of substance and it is the one to remember.
An Information Disclosure Analyst writes to a 15th Air Force detachment about a 31 October 2024 observation, a possible UAP, oval or orb shaped, watched by a US aircraft for over two hours. The body of the email is a single request: “Could you please approve the use of the year this incident took place? Currently you have approved the month and the day, we request it includes the year.”
Read that again. The month and the day had been approved. The year had not. Publishing “31 October” was cleared; publishing “2024” required a separate, explicit request to the originating unit.
Nothing else in these three documents conveys the texture of the process as exactly as that one sentence. Disclosure here is not a switch that is thrown. It is granular to the level of a four-digit number, and every piece of it is someone’s decision, on the record.
What the emails show
Put together, the three threads establish something the rest of the release cannot show on its own: the shape of the work behind it.
They show that the unclassified UAP lines in PURSUE Release 01 are not a data feed. They are the output of a person-to-person clearance process, conducted by email and telephone, in which an analyst assembling the release goes back to each originating unit and asks, item by item, what may be said.
They show that the process was, at least into 2023, improvised. An experienced investigative officer treated the task as a first, and routed around the official declassification procedure because it was too slow.
They show how little tends to survive that process. Two encounters in D50 reduce to twelve seconds, twenty-three seconds, and “UNK”. The cleared residue is deliberately thin.
And they show, in D52, the granularity of the control: that the calendar year of an event is itself a thing that has to be cleared.
None of that is a criticism of the release. It is the opposite. It is evidence that the release was assembled carefully, by named roles following a real, if young, process. But it changes how the unclassified tearlines elsewhere should be read. They are not raw sightings. They are the part a clearance chain agreed to publish.
What the file says
They establish that a defined disclosure workflow exists, run from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and that it operates by clearing specific tearline wording with the units that originated each report. They establish that, as of 2023, that workflow was new enough to be improvised by the officers handling it. They establish three specific cleared observations: two brief contacts in the INDOPACOM area in April 2025, a civilian sighting of a blue triangular object near a national security facility in March 2023, and an oval or orb-shaped object watched for over two hours on 31 October 2024. And they establish, through authentic email records, the unusual degree of granularity at which release decisions are made.
What the file does not say
They do not establish what any of the observed objects were. The D50 tearlines contain no altitude, no speed and no description beyond “POSS UAP”. The D52 line is four facts long. The D51 account is the fullest, but it is a summary of a single civilian’s report, captured on a personal phone at night, and the document itself frames it throughout as what “an individual reported” and “the reporter described”. A vivid description, formatted into an intelligence report and then cleared, is still one person’s account. The clearance process does not add weight to the sighting; it only decides what of it may be printed.
They do not establish that anything was hidden improperly. The redactions and the “UNK” fields are the ordinary product of a classification process, the same point Briefing 1 made about the release as a whole.
And they do not, as primary documents, rise above tier 2. Three authentic government email threads are a strong and verifiable source about the disclosure process. They are not, and do not claim to be, evidence about the phenomenon.
What to watch
Every unclassified UAP line in this release is a tearline, with a classified parent document behind it: the twelve-second and twenty-three-second contacts and the two-hour orb of 31 October 2024 each sit on top of a fuller report that exists and was not released, and each is, under the process these emails document, wording that could one day be cleared wider. D52 records that even the year of an event was a deliberate, documented decision.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme, the publisher and the classification rule behind this briefing.
References and further reading
- Primary document: DOW-UAP-D50, email correspondence, INDOPACOM, April 2025, PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov
- Primary document: DOW-UAP-D51, email correspondence, Pacific Time Zone, March 2023, PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov
- Primary document: DOW-UAP-D52, email correspondence, October 2024, PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- Briefing 1 in this series, on PURSUE Release 01 as a whole, the redaction codes and the evidence tier system
- Executive Order 13526, on the classification of national security information, for the section 1.4(a) category and the basis of a tearline