THE SOURCE
DOW-UAP-PR065 and DOW-UAP-PR066, two infrared video clips from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 02, published at war.gov/ufo on 22 May 2026. Their uploader-defined titles are “USCG C-144 Tyndall UAP 2 TIC TAC IR hot 24 April 2024” and “USCG C-144 Tyndall UAP 1 TIC TAC IR hot 24 April 2024”. AARO assesses both are likely from infrared sensors on a U.S. Coast Guard platform operating in the southeastern United States in 2024, uploaded to a classified network in June 2024.
What this briefing is
One word in these two file titles does more work than everything else in them put together. “Tic Tac”. Whoever uploaded these clips to a classified network in June 2024 sat down to name two pieces of Coast Guard infrared footage and reached for the most famous noun in modern UAP history, the shape word the 2004 Nimitz case turned into something close to a brand. Twenty years on, inside the system, on a classified network, that vocabulary is still doing its work. That alone earns this pair a briefing.
The clips arrive as a pair: same aircraft type, same area, same date, 24 April 2024. That makes them a useful single briefing, and a good occasion to do two specific things. The first is to read footage from the U.S. Coast Guard, an agency that has not featured much in this series so far. The second is to deal squarely with that word, what it carries, and what it cannot carry. As always, the basics of reading an infrared feed are covered in Release 01 Briefing 3; this briefing assumes them.
TL;DR
On 24 April 2024, a U.S. Coast Guard C-144 maritime patrol aircraft, operating in the southeastern United States near Tyndall, recorded at least two short infrared clips of unidentified objects. PR065 runs 38 seconds; for most of it the sensor pans to keep an object in frame, then loses it off the side. PR066 runs 48 seconds and contains two separate moments where an object crosses the field of view; in the second, the government’s description notes the sensor pans to follow but is unable to track the object.
Both clips were uploaded to a classified network in June 2024. Both, like every video in Release 02, carry a title written by their uploader, not by AARO, and the chain-of-custody caveat set out in Release 02 Briefing 1 applies here too.
This is a pair of recent infrared clips from a credible platform, and the fact that the same patrol recorded more than one object the same day is mildly corroborative. The clips show heat-emitting objects that an operator tried, and in one case failed, to track. They do not show what the objects were, and the word “Tic Tac” in the titles is a shape label chosen by a user, not a link to the 2004 case. This briefing is labelled source tier 2: primary footage, official source, no verdict.
The platform, and what “IR hot” means
The C-144 is the Coast Guard designation for a twin-engine maritime patrol aircraft, the kind of platform that spends its working life flying long, low surveillance tracks over coastal water. It carries an electro-optical and infrared sensor turret for exactly that job. An object picked up by one of these aircraft has been picked up by equipment built to watch the sea and the air above it, operated by a trained crew. That is a credible source for sensor footage.
The titles also tell you the display mode: “IR hot”. This is the white-hot infrared mode, where heat shows bright and cold shows dark. It is the opposite of the black-hot mode in PR38, the clip examined in Release 01 Briefing 3. The point is the same in both: the camera is showing temperature, not colour, and a bright blob in white-hot mode means an object warmer than its background. It does not, by itself, say what the object is.
What the two clips show
The government’s descriptions are deliberately spare, and worth taking literally.
In PR065, for roughly the first 32 seconds the sensor pans to keep an area of contrast in its field of view. Then, at around 33 seconds, the sensor pans left and the object leaves the frame on the right. That is a clip of a tracked object and a tracking effort that ends.
PR066 is busier. At around 9 to 15 seconds an area of contrast appears from the upper right; the sensor does not pan to follow it, and it exits on the left. Then at around 33 to 48 seconds a second area of contrast crosses from lower right to lower left, and this time the sensor does pan to follow, but, in the government’s own words, is unable to track it.
That last detail is the one that will draw attention, and it deserves a careful section of its own.
Why “unable to track” cuts both ways
When a military sensor pans after an object and cannot keep up, it is tempting to read that as the object outperforming the equipment: too fast, too erratic, too anomalous to follow. That is one possible reading. It is not the only one, and on its own the footage cannot choose.
A sensor can fail to track an object for entirely ordinary reasons. The object may be close and crossing fast, so its angular speed across the sky is high even though its actual speed is unremarkable; a nearby bird or a low drone can cross a field of view quicker than a turret slews. The operator may simply have been late or imprecise on the controls. The tracking mode may not have locked. The object may have been small or low-contrast and hard for the system to hold. None of these requires anything anomalous.
So “the sensor was unable to track it” is a genuinely ambiguous fact. It is consistent with an extraordinary object and equally consistent with an ordinary object crossing quickly at short range. The honest position is that the clip records a tracking failure and does not explain it. Reading the failure as proof of impossible performance is the same error as reading PR38’s lens flare as the shape of a craft: letting a feature of the instrument or the geometry stand in for a property of the object.
The word “Tic Tac”
Both titles contain “TIC TAC”, and that phrase is not neutral. The “Tic Tac” is the single most famous object in modern UAP history: the small, smooth, wingless white object reported by U.S. Navy aviators off the California coast in 2004. The name now functions almost as a brand.
When an uploader types “Tic Tac” into a file title, they are describing a shape, a small rounded oblong, and possibly reaching for that famous case as a comparison. They are not delivering a finding. AARO did not name these objects; it assessed only where the footage came from. Nothing in PR065 or PR066 connects them to the 2004 incident beyond a user’s choice of words. A reader should let the clips be what they are, two 2024 Coast Guard infrared clips of unidentified objects, and not let a borrowed label import twenty years of accumulated lore.
What the file says
They establish that a U.S. Coast Guard patrol aircraft, operating near Tyndall in the southeastern United States on 24 April 2024, recorded at least two short infrared clips of heat-emitting objects it could not identify, and that an operator attempted to track them. They establish that more than one object was recorded by the same patrol on the same day, which is a modest form of corroboration. They establish that the clips were uploaded to a classified network in June 2024 and have now been released through the official PURSUE channel. As recent, credible-platform sensor footage, the pair is a genuine tier 2 primary record.
What the file does not say
It does not establish what the objects were. Both clips are short, both lack visible telemetry, and both are consistent with a range of ordinary explanations, birds, drones, balloons, distant aircraft, as well as with something unusual.
It does not establish anomalous performance. The sensor’s failure to track the object in PR066 is real, but it has mundane explanations as readily as exotic ones, and the footage alone cannot tell them apart.
It does not link these objects to the 2004 Nimitz case. “Tic Tac” in the titles is an uploader’s shape word, not an AARO assessment and not a connection to that incident.
And, given the Release 02 chain-of-custody caveat from Release 02 Briefing 1, the pair does not arrive with a guaranteed clean provenance, only with AARO’s assessment of the sensor origin. Authentic Coast Guard footage of unidentified objects, recorded twice in one day, is a real and useful thing. It is still tier 2, and tier 2 is not proof.
What to watch
Everything here rests on two clips totalling 86 seconds, and the phrasing has been “at least two” because the pair is what Release 02 surfaced, not necessarily all the 24 April 2024 patrol produced; if more material exists, a future tranche is where it would appear, and more footage with the telemetry these clips lack is the one thing likely to move the pair. The clips arrive with AARO’s assessment of their sensor origin and nothing firmer, so anything that closes the Release 02 chain-of-custody gap strengthens them. The “Tic Tac” label is a lexical link, not an evidentiary one: an uploader in 2024 reached for 2004 vocabulary, and nothing ties these clips to the Nimitz beyond that word choice.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-PR065 and DOW-UAP-PR066, 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 01 Briefing 3, “How to read infrared sensor footage, and the eight-pointed star”
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 02 Briefing 1, on the Release 02 chain-of-custody caveat