THE SOURCE
DOW-UAP-PR068, PR070 and PR073, three 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 begin with intelligence report numbers and place them near Eglin Air Force Base, near Columbus, Ohio, and in the U.S. Northern Command area. AARO assesses all three as likely from infrared sensors on U.S. military platforms.
What this briefing is
Most of the video footage in the PURSUE releases comes from overseas, the Central Command theatre above all. These three clips are different in one specific way that makes them worth a briefing together: they are over the United States itself. Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, the airspace near Columbus, Ohio, and the Northern Command area, which is the command responsible for the defence of North American airspace.
This briefing reads the domestic set, and uses it to introduce a second thread visible in all three titles: each begins with an “IIR” number, the trail of an intelligence report. The general grounding for reading infrared footage is in Release 01 Briefing 3.
TL;DR
PR068 is a 63-second clip, assessed to Northern Command airspace in 2023, titled by its uploader as footage from a fifth-generation aircraft on 20 January 2023; its description has a sensor tracking an area of contrast, and a second area of contrast appearing late in the clip. PR070 is a 30-second clip near Eglin Air Force Base, dated by the uploader to 13 February 2023; the sensor pans and cycles contrast modes until the object loses distinctiveness against the background. PR073 is an 88-second clip near Columbus, Ohio, dated to 2022; the sensor tracks an object, and at one point the object appears to rotate.
All three titles open with an intelligence report number, the format “IIR 1 NNN SNNNN 23”. IIR means intelligence information report, the raw-reporting document type examined in Release 02 Briefing 4. These clips travelled into the intelligence system as attachments to such reports.
This is a tier 2 set, labelled at that level by the source, and its interest is geographic: it is sensor footage of unidentified objects over American soil and American bases, not a distant theatre. Clip for clip, it has the same range as the overseas footage: short, no telemetry, no identification, and one apparent “rotation” that the government itself attributes to viewing geometry rather than the object.
Why “over the homeland” is the notable part
For most of the modern UAP story the dramatic footage has been foreign: the Middle East, the Navy’s ocean ranges. Footage placed over the continental United States, and specifically near a major Air Force base and over a Midwestern city, lands differently. It moves the question from “what are aircrew seeing on deployment” to “what is being recorded in the airspace the United States defends as home”.
Northern Command, which PR068 is assessed to, is precisely the command tasked with North American air defence. An unidentified object tracked in that airspace is, by definition, an object inside the area the United States watches most closely. That is the genuine significance of this set, and it is a fair thing for a reader to find striking.
It is worth one calibration, though. Early 2023, the window two of these clips fall in, was a period of unusually intense attention to American airspace, around the Chinese surveillance balloon and the intercepts that followed, including the Lake Huron shootdown in Release 02 Briefing 1. When attention to the sky spikes, reporting of things in the sky spikes with it. That does not explain the objects away. It is a reminder, as the Sandia briefing put it, that concentrated observers produce concentrated reports, and that the timing of a cluster is partly a fact about the observers.
What an “IIR” in the title means
Each of the three titles starts with a string like “IIR 1 655 S0301 23”. As Release 02 Briefing 4 set out with the CIA file, an IIR is an intelligence information report: raw reporting, information collected and circulated for analysts to weigh, explicitly not a finished evaluation.
So these clips did not arrive as standalone curiosities. They were logged into the intelligence system as the visual material behind intelligence reports, each with its own report number. That tells you the encounters were taken seriously enough to be written up and routed through intelligence channels. It does not tell you the reports reached any anomalous conclusion. An IIR number on a clip means the encounter was documented and circulated. It is a marker of process, not of verdict.
The “rotation” in PR073
PR073, the Columbus, Ohio clip, contains the one moment in this set that a viewer might over-read, and the government’s own description defuses it.
At around the thirty-eight to forty-one second mark, the area of contrast appears to rotate. AARO’s description attributes this directly to “the orientation of the sensor relative to the area of contrast”. In plain terms: the apparent rotation is a product of the viewing angle changing between the sensor and the object, not the object spinning on its own axis.
This belongs to a pattern this series keeps meeting. The eight-pointed star in Release 01 Briefing 3 was the camera’s optics, not the object’s shape. The sudden inversion in Release 01 Briefing 7’s contrast-mode footage was the display being toggled, not the object changing. PR073’s rotation is the same kind of thing: an artefact of the instrument and the geometry, which an untrained eye attributes to the object. The discipline is always to ask whether a striking on-screen behaviour belongs to the object or to the way it is being viewed.
What the file says
They establish that U.S. military infrared sensors captured and tracked unidentified objects in American airspace, near Eglin Air Force Base, near Columbus, Ohio, and in the Northern Command area, across 2022 and 2023. They establish that each encounter was documented through the intelligence system, carrying its own intelligence report number. They establish that PR068 recorded more than one object in a single short clip. As primary sensor footage of unidentified objects over the homeland itself, released through the official PURSUE channel, the set is a genuine tier 2 record and a geographically significant one.
What the file does not say
It does not establish what the objects were. All three clips are short, none carries visible telemetry, and all are consistent with the very heavy ordinary traffic of American airspace: aircraft, drones, balloons and more.
It does not establish anomalous behaviour. The apparent rotation in PR073 is attributed by AARO to viewing geometry, not to the object, and nothing else in the descriptions points beyond ordinary tracked contacts.
It does not establish that the intelligence reports behind these clips reached any unusual finding. An IIR number marks that an encounter was documented and circulated, not that it was resolved as anomalous.
And it does not, given the Release 02 chain-of-custody caveat from Release 02 Briefing 1, arrive with a guaranteed clean provenance, only with AARO’s assessment of the sensor origin. The set is a real, and genuinely notable, tier 2 holding: unidentified objects over American soil, documented and now public, and still unexplained rather than extraordinary.
What to watch
The IIR numbers are the live thread: each clip entered the system as the visual material behind an intelligence report, so written reporting on each encounter exists somewhere, with a report number now in public view, and whether later tranches surface those reports is the concrete thing to watch. The geography keeps its weight: unidentified objects tracked in the airspace the United States defends as home, by the command that defends it, are now on the public record.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- DOW-UAP-PR068, PR070 and PR073, 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 4, on intelligence information reports, and Release 02 Briefing 1, on the chain-of-custody caveat