THE SOURCE
DOW-UAP-PR052, PR053, PR054, PR056, PR074, PR076 and PR098, seven infrared video clips from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 02, published at war.gov/ufo on 22 May 2026. Six are assessed by AARO to U.S. military sensors in the Central Command area; PR054 to the European Command area. PR052, PR053, PR054 and PR056 carry AARO’s notice that the media was digitally altered before upload.
What this briefing is
This is the closing briefing on the Release 02 video set, and it does one specific job. It picks out the clips whose uploader titles make confident statements about shape or formation, “Spherical UAP”, “Cigar Shaped or Fast Spherical UAP”, “Spherical UAP Erratic movement”, “Spherical UAP pulsing over water”, “UAP USO Formation”, “UFOs in formation over Persian Gulf?”, and reads them as a group. The grouping is not arbitrary: it surfaces a pattern that runs across the release and that no single-clip briefing reveals on its own. The general grounding for infrared footage is in Release 01 Briefing 3.
TL;DR
There are seven clips in this group. Five sit in the Central Command area and were uploaded across 2020 to 2024; PR054 sits in the European Command area, 2022; PR098, in the Persian Gulf, runs almost eighteen minutes, by far the longest. The shape labels in the titles span the whole vocabulary that UAP discussion tends to reach for: spherical, cigar, erratic, pulsing, formation, single objects and groups.
One detail unifies the group and is worth saying plainly: four of the seven, PR052, PR053, PR054 and PR056, carry AARO’s explicit statement that the media was digitally altered before it was uploaded to a classified network. That is a much higher altered rate than the Release 02 average, where only six of the fifty-one videos are flagged this way. Read together, the most confident shape claims in the uploader titles cluster, disproportionately, with the clips whose footage the government itself says has been worked over.
This set is a sub-collection of the release, and it carries a warning. Shape language in a clip title is one of the things to weight least and look hardest at the alteration flag for. This briefing is labelled source tier 2 for the underlying captures; the processed versions, as Release 02 Briefing 10 and Release 02 Briefing 12 set out, sit lower.
The pattern in plain numbers
PURSUE Release 02 contains 51 videos. Of those, AARO marks six as digitally altered prior to upload: PR051, PR052, PR053, PR054, PR056 and PR072. That is roughly twelve per cent of the video set. PR051 is the “instant acceleration” clip examined in Release 02 Briefing 12. PR072 is the Karaganda phone clip examined in Release 02 Briefing 10. The remaining four, PR052, PR053, PR054 and PR056, all sit in this briefing’s shape-claim group.
That is the pattern. Across the whole release, roughly one in eight videos has the alteration flag. Across the shape-claim group, four of seven do. The most assertive labels and the most-processed clips are not the same set, but they overlap to a degree that is unlikely to be a coincidence.
One explanation for the overlap involves no concealment. An uploader who wanted to draw attention to “spherical UAP” or “cigar shaped UAP” may be the same uploader inclined to enhance, slow, or annotate the clip so the shape comes through more strongly, making the alteration part of the same act as the confident title. The consequence is the same as for any altered media: a clip that has been worked over in undocumented ways cannot be analysed as a faithful recording, and a shape that survives only on enhanced playback is not one the original sensor reliably captured.
What an infrared “shape” actually is
The category problem is worth saying directly. A targeting-pod infrared image of a distant heat-emitting object is, in nearly every case, a few-pixel “area of contrast” against the sky. There is essentially no shape in it. The eye’s instinct to assign a shape, spherical, cigar, triangular, is doing most of the work, and the camera’s optical artefacts, as Release 01 Briefing 3 set out with the eight-pointed star, do much of the rest.
So an uploader title that names a shape is, almost by definition, an interpretation laid over imagery that does not really support it. The interpretation may be right. It is just not the thing the clip shows. The clip shows a warm spot in a thermal frame. A reader who treats “spherical” or “cigar” as a finding from the footage has crossed a gap the footage does not bridge.
The clip whose own title hedges
One title in the group does what all the others should and does not get enough credit for. PR098’s uploader title is “UFOs in formation over Persian Gulf?”, with a question mark. The uploader themselves is not certain. The interior of the clip backs up that humility: at low magnification AARO’s description has a single area of contrast, and at higher magnification, between roughly 22 seconds and 1:59, the area “appears as multiple distinct” points or shapes. Same magnification effect Release 02 Briefing 18 read in PR097: one object at low zoom, several at high.
An uploader who marks their own framing as a question rather than a statement, paired with an AARO description that names the ambiguity directly in what the sensor shows, makes PR098 the one clip in this group whose title and footage are aligned on their uncertainty.
What the file says
They establish that U.S. military infrared sensors captured and tracked unidentified objects across a range of dates and theatres, primarily Central Command, and once European Command, that the encounters were logged with confident shape vocabulary by their uploaders, and that the footage was released through the official PURSUE channel. They establish, as a group, the overlap between assertive shape claims and AARO’s alteration flag, an overlap that holds across most of this set. And they establish, in PR098 specifically, that some uploaders did mark their own uncertainty in the title, which is worth noticing.
What the file does not say
It does not establish that the objects were any specific shape. Infrared blobs do not carry reliable shape information; titles that name a shape are interpretation, not measurement.
It does not establish anomalous behaviour from terms like “erratic” or “pulsing”. Those are descriptive impressions in the uploader’s words; nothing in the AARO descriptions of these clips uses them as findings.
It does not let the altered clips, PR052, PR053, PR054 and PR056, function as faithful records. As Release 02 Briefing 10 set out for PR072 and Release 02 Briefing 12 for PR051, processed versions cannot be analysed as if untouched.
And it does not, given the Release 02 chain-of-custody caveat from Release 02 Briefing 1, arrive with a guaranteed clean provenance. The seven clips together complete the Release 02 video set’s coverage and leave its shape-claim language exactly where it should be: in the titles, and not in the analysis.
What to watch
This closes the Release 02 video set. Lined up against the alteration flags, the confident shape titles ran four of seven here, a baseline for the next batch. PR098 carries a question mark in its title. The shape vocabulary itself, spheres, cigars, formations, is older than these titles and bigger than this release; the Nine Classes topic traces where it comes from.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-PR052, PR053, PR054, PR056, PR074, PR076 and PR098, 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
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 02 Briefing 10, on the Karaganda altered clip; Release 02 Briefing 12, on the acceleration claim; Release 02 Briefing 1, on the chain-of-custody caveat and uploader-defined titles; Release 01 Briefing 3, on infrared shape and the eight-pointed star