THE SOURCE
(Unchanged: DOW-UAP-PR071, a 46-second infrared video clip from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 02, published at war.gov/ufo on 22 May 2026. Its uploader-defined title is “USAF ANG F-16C (callsign [CALLSIGN]) Shoots Down UAP over Lake Huron with [Weapon System], 12 Feb 2023”. AARO assesses the footage is likely from an infrared sensor on a U.S. military platform operating in the U.S. Northern Command area in 2023, uploaded to a classified network in February 2023.)
Why this one is worth your time
This is the first briefing on PURSUE Release 02, the second tranche of declassified UAP records, and it opens with the most arresting clip in the batch. PR071 appears to show a U.S. fighter destroying an airborne object: a flash, a fragmentation, and then nothing. It is also, unusually for this series, a clip whose backstory is already public. The Lake Huron shootdown of 12 February 2023 was reported live, in detail, by national press. So this briefing does something different from most: it sets a declassified clip beside an event the public already knows, and the gap between the two is the point.
What the file says
PR071 is 46 seconds of black-and-white infrared footage. For the first ten seconds the sensor settles. At around the eleven-second mark it focuses on a single object near the centre of frame. At around the twenty-second mark the footage shows what the government’s own description calls “a radial displacement pattern that suggests a high-energy event”: the object fragments outward. The rest of the clip is aftermath. PR071 is the same kind of image as the clip PR38 in Release 01 Briefing 3, which explains how to read a military infrared feed in general: the grey thermal field, the tracking reticle, the corner brackets, the redacted telemetry. If the basics are unfamiliar, read Release 01 Briefing 3 first.
The event the file names. February 2023 produced a run of intercepts. After a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon crossed the continental United States and was shot down off South Carolina on 4 February, U.S. and Canadian forces brought down three further objects: one off the northern coast of Alaska on 10 February, one over Canada’s Yukon on 11 February, and one over Lake Huron on 12 February. The Lake Huron object was the last of the three. Press reporting at the time described it as octagonal, flying at around 20,000 feet, with what appeared to be strings or a tether hanging beneath it and no visible payload. It was engaged by an F-16 from an Air National Guard unit, on the order of the President, with an AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile, over the lake near the Canada-United States border in the early afternoon. PR071’s uploader title names that exact event; the redacted tokens, [CALLSIGN] and [Weapon System], are placeholders the government inserted over the aircraft’s call sign and the missile type, consistent with how every video in this release is handled.
The sequence on screen. The government’s published description marks three moments: the sensor focusing on a central object at around eleven seconds, a kinetic interaction at around twenty seconds, and the object fragmenting outward in that radial pattern. In plain terms, the clip shows a tracked object, then an impact, then debris. It is the first clip in either PURSUE release to show an object being destroyed rather than merely observed. A balloon, a drone and an anomalous craft would all fragment under a Sidewinder warhead, so the high-energy event in the footage is the weapon working. The footage records the intercept; it does not record what the object was.
“UAP” is the uploader’s word. Every video in Release 02 carries a title written by whoever uploaded it to a classified network, not by AARO. AARO’s role, stated in the file’s own description, is limited: it assesses where the sensor footage probably came from and when it was uploaded, and does not endorse the uploader’s title. “Shoots Down UAP over Lake Huron” reads as an official finding; it is a label a user typed. The “UAP” in it means that, at the moment of upload, the object had not been identified by that user.
The chain-of-custody caveat, new for Release 02. The 51 videos in this release, PR050 through PR099, exist as a group for a specific reason. On 6 March 2026, eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives requested access to 51 potentially UAP-related records said to be held by the Department of War and the Intelligence Community. AARO located a set of responsive materials on a classified network and these videos are the result. AARO’s own language, repeated on every one of these files, is that many of the materials “lack a substantiated chain-of-custody”, an unbroken, documented trail from the sensor that recorded a file to the archive that holds it. This briefing flags the issue early so later ones can refer back to it.
What the later record added. The Lake Huron shootdown did not end on 12 February 2023. Recovery was attempted, suspended in poor weather, and then, according to documents that became public in late 2024, partially succeeded. Debris was recovered, and follow-up reporting linked the object to a company that sells weather or monitoring equipment. The octagonal shape and trailing strings described by witnesses at the time fit a small commercial or hobbyist balloon-borne instrument package. The footage being dramatic and the object being ordinary are recorded as separate facts.
What the file does not say
What the object was. The “UAP” in the title is an uploader’s label from the moment of upload, not a current government finding, and the later public record links the Lake Huron object to commercial weather or monitoring equipment.
Anything about the object’s nature from the footage alone. The fragmentation at the twenty-second mark is the missile detonating, and a balloon, a drone or any other small object would look the same under that warhead. The clip carries a weapon working, not a craft unmasking.
A documented chain of custody. Given Release 02’s stated chain-of-custody gaps, the file does not come with a guaranteed clean provenance; in this specific case a public event corroborates its broad strokes, and that is particular to PR071 rather than to the release as a whole.
From the record
“USAF ANG F-16C (callsign [CALLSIGN]) Shoots Down UAP over Lake Huron with [Weapon System], 12 Feb 2023.” The uploader-defined title of the clip
“A radial displacement pattern that suggests a high-energy event.” The government’s description of the moment at around twenty seconds
Many of the materials “lack a substantiated chain-of-custody”. AARO’s language, repeated across the Release 02 files
Where the case connects
PR071 is the lead clip of Release 02 and the worked example for the batch’s two recurring points: that “UAP” in these titles is the uploader’s word, and that the release as a whole carries the chain-of-custody caveat. Both threads run on into the later Release 02 briefings, which refer back to this one. Release 01 Briefing 3, on the clip PR38, covers how to read a military infrared feed in general, and PR071 is the same kind of image.
The file also leaves its own threads. The redacted [CALLSIGN] and [Weapon System] tokens hide the aircraft’s call sign and the missile type; the chain of custody is not documented, only the broad-strokes match to a public event; and the debris-recovery documents that linked the object to weather or monitoring equipment became public in late 2024, after the upload. Any later tranche that unredacts the tokens or adds the recovery record lands in this series when it does.
Read it yourself
DOW-UAP-PR071 is hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 02, the full 46-second clip with the eleven-second focus, the twenty-second high-energy event, and the aftermath.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-PR071, PURSUE Release 02, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Contemporary press coverage of the 12 February 2023 Lake Huron shootdown and the February 2023 sequence of intercepts, CNN, The War Zone and others, February 2023
- Later reporting on debris recovery and the weather or monitoring equipment finding, 2024
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 3, “How to read infrared sensor footage, and the eight-pointed star”