THE SOURCE
PURSUE Release 05 in full: 41 records, being 21 documents, 4 images and 16 videos, from the Department of War, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of State and the Executive Office of the President, published at war.gov/ufo and cleared for release on 7 August 2026. Two official bundles hold the whole tranche, 129,739,996 bytes of documents and images and 537,674,725 bytes of video. Both were downloaded and byte-verified for this series; the documents run to 335 PDF pages. This briefing takes the release itself as the record.
Why this one is worth your time
Every other briefing in this run carries a section headed “What the document does not say”. Those sections rhyme with one another, because the records do: a released file usually names other files, and most of the files it names did not arrive with it. This one collects the pattern across the whole tranche.
There is no assessment here. A record number either appears in the release or it does not; a document either encloses what it cites or it does not; a page either yields its words to a search or it does not. Everything below is one of those three, and each is checkable by anyone holding the same two bundles.
What the release contains
Release 05 is 41 records across five agencies, the first PURSUE tranche to carry an Executive Office of the President record and the first with records under a Department of State prefix. The documents bundle holds 25 files, 22 PDFs and 3 JPGs, running to 335 PDF pages; the videos bundle holds 16.
How the pages were made. Every PDF in the release was produced by Adobe Acrobat’s Paper Capture plug-in, which lays a machine-OCR text layer over a page raster. None is born-digital, so each is an image of paper with a machine’s guess at its words attached, and the quality of the guess varies page by page.
How the records pair. DOW-UAP-D101 goes with the six Gulf of Oman clips PR117 to PR122, and FBI-UAP-D032 with FBI-UAP-PR007. Each FBI interview arrives with renderings: D024 with D025, D026 with D027, D028 with D029, D030 with D031, D037 with D038 and D039, D040 with D041 and D042.
How the redactions are marked. Two practices sit in the same tranche. DOW-UAP-D101’s blackouts carry codes, 1.4(a), 1.4(c), 3.5c, (b)(6) and 130b, and its declassification instruction reads 50X1-HUM. DOW-UAP-D098 carries a stamp reading DECLASS IN FULL and has no redactions at all. Every redaction across the nine FBI FD-302s is a plain black bar.
What the release does not contain
Numbered but absent. FBI-UAP-D034, D035 and D036 are not in the release. In the pairing above, D032 and D033 stand alone just before the gap and each of the two blocks after it is one interview plus two renderings, which is consistent with a withheld interview set. That is an inference from the numbering pattern and not something the release states. Nothing says what the three records were: no index, no withdrawal sheet, no “withheld in full” placeholder, no exemption citation.
The FBI series here begins at D024. D001 to D013 were published in Release 03 and D014 in Release 04; D015 to D023 are not in Release 05.
The video numbers skip twice. Release 04 ended at DOW-UAP-PR116; Release 05 runs PR117 to PR127 unbroken, then jumps to PR134, PR136, PR142 and PR149. Nothing accounts for PR128 to PR133, PR135, PR137 to PR141 and PR143 to PR148: 18 of the 33 numbers between PR117 and PR149 are absent.
Referenced by a released record and not enclosed. DOW-UAP-D101 records that the AC-130’s digital video recorder failed and the video data became corrupted, so the primary electro-optical and infrared footage of the 8 September 2021 observations no longer exists. The six released clips are secondary phone captures of a screen, listed in the report as a PowerPoint attachment that is not itself published. The report’s source identifier and description are withheld in full and part of the grid reference is redacted.
DOW-UAP-D098’s answers are keyed to a numbered U.S. Air Force question list, enclosure 7 of one of the four references it cites; none of the four is in the file, so the answers arrive without their questions. Chart 1 does not exist in the file, the enclosure line reading “Encl: ( 1) Charts 2-13”; one plotting run is marked “Not enclosed” in the report’s own Table I; a second Montana chart called for as 7b is not present; the two films analysed are not included; and the spectrophotometric analysis the Air Force requested in February 1953 had not been done, only a preliminary plan of test being under way.
DOW-UAP-D100 cites the 30 December 1947 letter that established Project SIGN at least six times as its foundational authority; what survives is a file note saying “See Central Files for file copy of this letter”. Its paragraph 12 promises a summarising technical report, which is not in the file. The 24 September 1947 AMC letter is here and its three inclosures are not, surviving as routing paperwork only: the “Loedding Flying Disc” drawing LD-2, RAE Technical Note AERO 1703 and T-2 report F-SU-1110-ND on the Horten brothers’ flying wings. Forty-four documents loaned to AMC on 5 February 1948 under Control No. A-2641 appear as bare accession numbers, returned on 10 March. Named and not enclosed too: the “Swedish Incidents” file requested in January 1948, Collection Memorandum #7, the Air Intelligence Guide for Alleged Flying Saucer Type Aircraft and JANAP 146. AMC’s October 1948 request that the CIA disclose any evidence the objects were of domestic origin has no CIA reply in the file, and a promised second interview with Dr Irving Langmuir never appears.
DOW-UAP-D099 is an eight-page extract of Intelligence Review Number 47 of 9 January 1947, whose own contents page lists items running to printed page 64; the rest of the issue is not in the release. CIA-UAP-D022’s 1 February 1965 memorandum lists the original Navy radar film as Attachment 1, with accompanying prints, and neither is here. FBI-UAP-D033 reproduces a signed written statement referring to the agent’s “prior statement” and to an object seen “the previous night”; that prior statement is not in the release, the statement itself is not published separately as an attachment, and no imagery from either night is included.
Withheld inside the pages that are here. Every FD-302 has its file number, field office and interview location redacted, and in FBI-UAP-D024 and D028 the location is withheld down to “United States”. D030’s page 3 is entirely redacted, seven black bars and no readable text; D028’s page 3 is almost entirely redacted, two black bars and nothing else; D026 ends inside a redaction, mid-sentence, the last readable words being the beginning of the witness’s wife’s account; D037 carries two substantial fully blacked paragraphs on page 3 plus a further block at its foot. Inspected at 300 dpi there is no (b)(6), no (b)(7)(C), no exemption legend, no FOIA processing stamp and no withdrawal sheet anywhere in the release.
Second witnesses not separately interviewed. Four FBI interviews record another person present who is not on the record: the second pilot who saw the Bagram triangle in FBI-UAP-D024; the witness’s wife in D026, who saw the object and gave a detail through her husband; the driver and front-seat passenger in D028, where neighbourhood witnesses are also raised with no statement recorded; and in D030 both a co-worker beside the witness and the witness’s wife, who heard the distorted phone call. FBI-UAP-D037 and D040 are the exception: the two men in the same vehicle were each interviewed and both records released.
On the page and not in the text. FBI-UAP-D040’s page 2 has no text layer, so roughly half that witness account is absent from any text extraction of the released file. Five pages of DOW-UAP-D100 yield no text, 4, 62, 132, 210 and 240; the last two carry substantive content, page 240 being the first page of the December 1947 “Analysis of ‘Flying Disc’ Reports” with its title and summary. In the same file the Twining letter’s key sentence survives on the page image and is destroyed in the text layer, so a search of the released text for “Twining”, “visionary” or “fictitious” returns nothing. In CIA-UAP-D022 the 11 February 1965 memorandum, which carries the analytic conclusion, has unusable OCR; in CIA-UAP-D023 the name Walter N. Elder truncates at “MR. WALT”; in DOW-UAP-D099 the masthead, issue number and date did not survive OCR. Nine of the twenty-two PDFs contain pages with no usable text layer.
Names on the outside that are not on the inside. The word “unresolved” in DOW-UAP-D101’s release title appears nowhere in the document. The Department of War’s own PDF metadata for DOW-UAP-D100 spells “Materiel” as “Material”, and the release title calls a 245-page HQ USAF correspondence file an Air Materiel Command report. DOS-UAP-D002’s subject line dates its own case to November 8, 1964 while every other date element in the file is 1963; the error is in the original document. EOP-UAP-D001 carries no Executive Office of the President or National Aeronautics and Space Council identification on its face, the attribution coming from the filename and PDF metadata. The digital renderings released with the FBI interviews carry no caption, credit, date or attribution, and nothing states who produced them or whether any witness reviewed them.
From the record
Video Recorder (DVR) inexplicably failed and the video data became
DOW-UAP-D101, on the loss of the primary AC-130 recording; the sentence continues: corrupted
5. Reference (d) requests spectrophotometric analysis of the Utah
DOW-UAP-D098, opening the paragraph on the test the Air Force asked for in February 1953, which the report records as not yet carried out
a. The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.
DOW-UAP-D100, the first numbered conclusion of the 23 September 1947 Twining letter, read from the page image; the release’s own text layer renders this line as unusable OCR, so no keyword search of the file reaches it
2. Navy has provided, at our request, pertinent traffic
CIA-UAP-D022, the memorandum of 1 February 1965, listing the film and the prints that are not in the release
on this subject, as well as original radar film, Attachment 1,
with accompanying prints of same.
The object appeared approximately two ridge lines farther west than the
FBI-UAP-D033, from the signed written statement reproduced in the file, whose own referenced prior statement is not in the release
Where the case connects
Each gap belongs to one of the other twelve briefings in this run. Release 05 Briefing 1 has the lost AC-130 recording and the withheld source table; Release 05 Briefing 2 the five Pacific clips, which arrive with no paper at all; Release 05 Briefing 3 the CENTCOM clips carrying the eighteen absent PR numbers; Release 05 Briefing 4 the 1953 film analysis and its missing question list; Release 05 Briefing 5 the Air Materiel Command file and its unenclosed references; Release 05 Briefing 6 the rest of Intelligence Review Number 47; Release 05 Briefing 7 the Navy radar film and the two CIA pages that will not yield text; Release 05 Briefing 8 the 1964 subject line and the transcript sheet with no letterhead; Release 05 Briefing 9 the blacked page 3s and the two interviews that reduce to “United States”; Release 05 Briefing 10 the file that ends inside a redaction; Release 05 Briefing 11 the prior statement and the object seen the previous night; Release 05 Briefing 12 the page with no text layer, and the one case here where both witnesses were interviewed.
Release 04 Briefing 7 sits directly against this one. It covered DOE-UAP-D001 and DOE-UAP-D005, the one case in the collection so far in which the same pages were released twice in two states of redaction, so that the two could be read against each other. Nothing in Release 05 is presented that way.
PURSUE publishes on a rolling basis and Release 05 is the fifth tranche. Anything later released against these gaps lands in this series when it does.
Read it yourself
Both bundles are linked from the Release 05 tab at war.gov/ufo, the documents and images in one and the videos in the other. Everything above is checked by listing the record identifiers and looking for the numbers that are not there, then reading each document’s own reference, enclosure and attachment lines against the file list. For the nine PDFs with incomplete text layers, work from the page images.
Read the files. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and the publisher behind this briefing.
References and further reading
- PURSUE Release 05 documents bundle, 21 documents and 4 images, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- PURSUE Release 05 videos bundle, 16 videos, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Official release statement for PURSUE Release 05, U.S. Department of War, war.gov
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), 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 05 Briefing 5, on the Air Materiel Command file and the documents it names
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 05 Briefing 12, on the FBI red-lights pair and the page with no text layer
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 04 Briefing 7, on the one case where the same pages were released twice in two states of redaction