THE SOURCE
Eleven short infrared and full-motion-video clips from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 01, published at war.gov/ufo on 8 May 2026: DOW-UAP-PR019, PR021, PR022, PR023, PR031, PR032, PR033, PR037, PR039, PR043 and PR046. Each runs between five and fourteen seconds. Each was submitted to AARO by U.S. Central Command, paired with a mission report from the DOW-UAP-D series.
What this briefing is
PURSUE Release 01 contains twenty-seven video clips. Most are long enough to anchor their own briefing, and several already have, PR38 in Release 01 Briefing 3, PR28 in Release 01 Briefing 5. Eleven of them are not. They run between five and fourteen seconds each, and a briefing on a five-second clip is a briefing on almost nothing.
So this briefing reads the short clips as a group. Done that way, they stop being thin and start being instructive, because each one carries a single quietly important detail in the mission report it was filed with: the aircrew’s own first description of what they thought the object was. The general grounding for reading infrared footage is in Release 01 Briefing 3.
TL;DR
The eleven clips share a shape. All eleven were submitted by U.S. Central Command. All eleven come from infrared or full-motion-video sensors on U.S. military platforms in the Middle East theatre between 2022 and 2025, with PR043 (Africa, 2025) and PR046 (INDOPACOM, 2024) the two exceptions to the regional pattern. Each one is paired with a written mission report from the D-series of PDFs, and each of those mission reports contains a one-line aircrew description that the clip itself does not give you.
That paired language is the part worth reading. The aircrew’s description for PR019 was “possible missile”. For PR021, “probable SU-27/35”, a Russian fighter type. For PR022, “moving from north to south”. For PR023, “flying west to east”. For others, similarly terse heading or contact notes, sometimes naming a candidate platform, sometimes simply describing the trajectory.
These are brief sensor captures of objects U.S. aircrew could not confirm from the footage, recording a specific candidate identification for several of them and filing them up the chain. “Unresolved” in this set frequently means the clip was too short for an analyst to confirm the aircrew’s own first guess. This briefing is labelled source tier 2.
The aircrew word the press skipped
The Release 01 coverage focused on the long clips, the ones with visible behaviour. The short ones got skipped, and a small but real signal was skipped with them.
When a U.S. military aircrew encounters an unidentified object, they note it in the mission report with whatever first-pass identification their training and instruments suggest. For PR019, the D10 mission report calls the object a “possible missile”. For PR021, the D14 report calls it a “probable SU-27/35”, naming a specific Russian fighter model. For the Syria October 2024 trio (PR031, PR032, PR033, all paired with D32), the report’s language is descriptive: object characteristics and motion, no exotic claim. For PR022 and PR023, the report contents itself with a direction of travel.
These first-pass calls are not findings. They are the aircrew’s professional best guess in the moment, recorded for later analysis. A “possible missile” is, exactly, possibly a missile. A “probable SU-27/35” is, exactly, probably a fighter type the United States routinely tracks in the Middle East. They could be wrong; analysts later may revise or reject them. But they are the part of the file that records what the people on the platform thought they were looking at, before anyone in public called it a UAP.
Reading the short clips with those notes in hand reframes the set. These are not eleven mystery objects. They are eleven brief encounters in which something was visible long enough to be logged but not long enough to be confirmed, with aircrew who, in several cases, named a conventional candidate.
Why the clip is short, and what “unresolved” then means
The other useful thing the short clips do as a group is reveal something about the bar for the “unresolved” label.
When a contact crosses an aircraft’s sensor for five or ten seconds, the sensor’s analytical content is small. There is no time to fix size, speed, distance, or behaviour over a long run; there is rarely telemetry visible enough to recover the numbers; there is no chance for the operator to cycle modes and watch how the object behaves under different views. The clip records that a contact was there, and almost nothing else.
Under those conditions, even a conventional object can come out the other end as “unresolved”. A fighter at the edge of range, a missile at the wrong angle, a drone briefly crossing the field, can all leave too little sensor record to confirm what they were. The “unresolved” tag in this set is what happens when a candidate identification exists but the footage cannot meet the bar to confirm it. As Release 01 Briefing 3 put it, unresolved means “not yet identified”; in the short clips, it often means “the clip itself never had enough in it to identify”.
What the file says
They establish that across multiple years and a single theatre, U.S. military sensors briefly recorded objects that aircrew could not, on the footage alone, confirm. They establish that the encounters were filed up the proper chain, paired with structured mission reports, and submitted to AARO. They establish, through those paired mission reports, that the aircrew themselves often named a candidate identification, sometimes specific (a Russian fighter type, a possible missile), sometimes a bare trajectory note. As a group, the eleven clips are a tier 2 record of routine brief encounters that the system logged honestly.
What the file does not say
It does not establish that the objects were anomalous. Several were called a missile or a fighter type by the aircrew at the time; the “unresolved” tag reflects the footage’s limits, not a finding of strangeness.
It does not establish anything about the individual objects that the clip alone can confirm. Five to fourteen seconds of infrared, without telemetry, will not yield identification.
It does not, as a group, support reading the short-clip set as “eleven extraordinary cases”. The pattern these clips show, taken with their paired reports, is much closer to a normal operational reality: in a busy theatre, brief unidentified contacts happen, get logged, and most likely resolve into ordinary objects once full data exists, which the released clip is not.
What to watch
The D-series pairing is where the aircrew’s first word lives: possible missile, probable SU-27/35, a bare heading. Whether any later document confirms or rejects those first-pass calls is the open question; a five-second clip will not answer it on its own, and the paired mission report is where any answer would sit.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-PR019, PR021, PR022, PR023, PR031, PR032, PR033, PR037, PR039, PR043 and PR046, 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 3, on how to read infrared sensor footage; Release 01 Briefing 7, on reading a single CENTCOM mission report; Release 01 Briefing 20, on reading a batch of them