THE SOURCE
DOW-UAP-PR036, PR040, PR041, PR045 and PR048, five infrared video clips from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 01, published at war.gov/ufo on 8 May 2026. PR036, PR040 and PR041 were submitted by U.S. Central Command (Middle East theatre, 2020). PR045 was submitted by the Department of the Air Force, with a Southern United States location. PR048 was submitted by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, 2024.
What this briefing is
This is the closing briefing for the Release 01 video set. Across the earlier briefings, twenty-two of the twenty-seven PR clips have been covered individually or in groups. These five are what remains, and together they form a small but useful roundup: an aircrew shape claim, an altered-media case, a clip with metadata that does not agree with itself, a Pacific companion to PR47, and one short additional Arabian Gulf track. The general grounding for infrared footage is in Release 01 Briefing 3.
TL;DR
PR036 is 2 minutes 17 seconds, Middle East 2020, paired with Range Fouler report D38. The accompanying report describes the object as “a solid white object making erratic movements above the water”. PR040 is 1 minute 3 seconds, Arabian Gulf 2020, and is flagged because the original reporter digitally altered the imagery by pausing the playback and adding a white line encircling an area of interest. PR041 is 1 minute 34 seconds, Arabian Gulf 2020, with no reporter description. PR045 is 58 seconds, with the title “Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2020” but the location field reading “Southern United States” and the submitting authority listed as the Department of the Air Force rather than Central Command. PR048 is 1 minute 39 seconds, Indo-Pacific Command, 2024, with the sensor tracking an area of contrast centred for the full duration.
These five are labelled source tier 2 footage that finishes the video set. Three of them carry a separately useful detail: PR036’s aircrew shape and behaviour description, PR040’s documented alteration, and PR045’s metadata mismatch. The other two clips (PR041 and PR048) are short tracks with no additional reporter context.
PR036, an aircrew shape description over the water
PR036 is the strongest analytical entry in this set, and the strength is in the paired report rather than the footage. The aircrew, writing up the encounter in Range Fouler debrief D38, described the object as “a solid white object making erratic movements above the water”. Three pieces of falsifiable detail: solid white (consistent appearance, not flickering), erratic movement (sharp course or speed changes, not smooth flight), and above the water (low altitude over the sea).
This is the same flavour of useful one-line aircrew note that the short clips in Release 01 Briefing 22 carried, and that PR034 in Release 01 Briefing 30 carried with its 90-degree turns description. None of those notes is a finding. They are the trained observer’s plain statement at the time. PR036’s description fits, in 2020 Middle East airspace, a small drone of the kind that was already routine in that theatre, including the kind that performs visible erratic manoeuvring. The “solid white” detail rules out flashing aviation lights and is consistent with reflective surfaces on a small UAS, the bright skin of a balloon, or several other ordinary candidates.
The Range Fouler form itself, with its standardised intake fields, was already the subject of Release 01 Briefing 9; PR036 is the video paired with one of those forms, and it is best read alongside that briefing.
PR040 and the small altered case
PR040 carries an explicit AARO note that the original reporter digitally altered the imagery, by pausing the playback and drawing a white line around an area of interest. This is a minor case of the same alteration-flag pattern that runs through several Release 02 clips, the Karaganda phone clip in Release 02 Briefing 10, the acceleration clip in Release 02 Briefing 12, and the shape-claim cluster in Release 02 Briefing 19.
The alteration here is mild. A pause-and-annotate is the kind of thing an operator might do to draw attention to a feature during a debrief. It is not the multi-pass speed ramping and enhancement of PR051. But it sits under the same caution: the file you are looking at is not the raw capture. Anything visible inside the annotated region of PR040, including any apparent shape or motion within the pause, has to be assessed against the fact that the imagery was processed. The underlying capture is genuine infrared footage; the processed presentation is one degree removed.
PR045, a clip whose own metadata disagrees
PR045 is the small data-hygiene case in this set, and worth a paragraph for the same reason Release 02 Briefing 15’s PR057 dual-title was: it is a documented example of internal inconsistency in PURSUE metadata.
Its title is “Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2020”. Its location field reads “Southern United States”. Its submitting authority is the Department of the Air Force, not Central Command. Three distinct fields, three different stories. The fields fit a title that is generic boilerplate left un-updated, a location (the Southern United States) that is where the encounter occurred, and an Air Force submission reflecting the chain the encounter went through. If that reading is right, PR045 is in fact a homeland clip dressed in Middle East title text.
This is not nefarious; it is just a reminder that the file’s own labels are not always self-consistent, and that a careful reader works from the metadata fields together rather than from the title alone. Where the title and the location field disagree, the location field is the more specific one.
PR041 and PR048, the routine remainder
PR041 and PR048 are routine. PR041 adds another short Arabian Gulf 2020 track with no reporter description, extending the catalogue of 2020 Middle East clips. PR048 is a short Indo-Pacific Command clip from 2024, with simple sustained tracking, and reads as a quieter companion to PR47, the three-object Pacific clip in Release 01 Briefing 24. Neither carries a distinctive analytical detail beyond the existence of the track.
What the file says
It establishes that U.S. military infrared sensors, across Central Command, the Department of the Air Force, and Indo-Pacific Command, captured five further unidentified-object encounters between 2020 and 2024, and that the U.S. government has now released all five through the official PURSUE channel. It establishes, through PR036’s paired Range Fouler report, an aircrew shape and behaviour note that fits the same useful pattern as the other paired-report descriptions in the series. It establishes one further documented case of reporter alteration in PR040, and one further case of self-inconsistent metadata in PR045. As tier 2 primary footage, the five clips finish the Release 01 video set without surprise.
What the file does not say
It does not establish what any of the objects were. None of the clips carries visible telemetry, and the descriptions, where present, are consistent with ordinary candidates such as small unmanned aircraft systems and balloons.
It does not let PR040 be analysed as a faithful recording. The alteration is mild, but it is documented and present.
It does not let PR045’s geographic context be settled without a judgement call. The location field is the more specific evidence of where the encounter happened.
And it does not rise above tier 2. The five clips fill the gap that previous briefings left, no more and no less.
What to watch
With these five, the Release 01 video set is fully read. Across twenty-seven clips the useful content recurred from the same places: the aircrew’s own words where they exist, the alteration flags where they apply, and the metadata read as a whole rather than line by line; PR036, PR040 and PR045 are one each. There is no single revelatory clip in the set.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-PR036, PR040, PR041, PR045 and PR048, PURSUE Release 01, 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
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 9, on the Range Fouler system and the form D38 belongs to; Release 01 Briefing 22, on aircrew descriptions in the short clips; Release 01 Briefing 24, on PR47 as the Indo-Pacific companion to PR48; Release 02 Briefing 10, Release 02 Briefing 12 and Release 02 Briefing 19, on altered media; Release 02 Briefing 15, on internal metadata mismatches