The Department of War published its fifth tranche of declassified UAP files on August 7 through the PURSUE initiative — 41 files in total: 22 documents, 16 videos and 3 images, drawn from the Department of War, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of State, and, for the first time in this program, the Executive Office of the President.
After four releases we had started describing PURSUE by its arithmetic: batches shrinking, intervals stretching, content aging. Release 05 breaks that description in the places that matter. The gap between tranches stopped growing. The file count ticked up rather than down. And for the first time the archive contains the government's current investigative work — FBI agents conducting interviews in 2026, about incidents that happened in 2026 — rather than only the contents of old boxes.
The Pattern We Flagged Last Month Just Broke
After Release 04 we noted that the gaps between tranches had grown by almost exactly one week each time — 14 days, then 21, then 28 — and that the batches were getting smaller as the content got older. Release 05 arrived 28 days after Release 04, not 35. It contains one more file than Release 04, not fewer. And its center of gravity is 2021–2026, not 1947.
| Release | Date | Files | Gap | Marquee item |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | May 8 | 158 | — | The opening dump — 639 of 757 cases unresolved |
| 02 | May 22 | 64 | 14 days | Syrian "instant acceleration" + Lake Huron shootdown |
| 03 | June 12 | 72 | 21 days | Cheyenne Mountain "potato" object · six federal agents' orange orbs |
| 04 | July 10 | 40 | 28 days | Project Sign, Los Alamos 1949, Pantex 2015 — the archive goes historical |
| 05 | Aug 7 | 41 | 28 days | AC-130J gunship "cold orbs" · the FBI's own 2026 casework |
One other change is worth recording: NASA does not appear in this release at all. It had contributed to every previous tranche. In its place, a single file from the Executive Office of the President — the first time any material has come out of the White House's own files under this program.
The Gunship Tape: Six Videos, One Night, "Cold Orbs"
The centerpiece of Release 05 is a cluster of six short videos, DOW-UAP-PR117 through PR122, all captured on the same night. According to the Department of War's own description, the footage is a secondary capture — someone filming an infrared sensor display with a phone — aboard a U.S. Special Operations Forces AC-130J gunship over the Gulf of Oman on September 8, 2021, during nighttime live-fire training.
What makes this cluster different from most PURSUE video is that it does not arrive alone. An Intelligence Information Report, DOW-UAP-D101, was released alongside it. The Department's description of the video states that this report "describes the phenomena as ‘cold orbs’ approximately four feet in diameter."
That phrase is doing a lot of work. "Cold" in an infrared context means the objects registered colder than their surroundings — not the signature you would expect from a propulsion system. "Approximately four feet in diameter" is a size estimate, which means somebody attempted to range them. This is the closest PURSUE has come to publishing a characterization of an object rather than a description of a video.
It is still not analysis. The IIR is, by the Department's own definition, an unevaluated intelligence product — raw reporting that feeds later assessments, not a conclusion. And every video description in this release now carries an explicit disclaimer: readers should not interpret any part of it "as reflecting an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination regarding the described event's validity, nature, or significance."
| File | Where / when | Watch |
|---|---|---|
| PR117–PR122 (6 clips) | Gulf of Oman, Sept 8 2021 — AC-130J gunship | 117 · 118 · 119 · 120 · 121 · 122 |
| PR123–PR127 (5 clips) | Pacific Ocean, 2019 — via the Navy's UAP Task Force | 123 · 124 · 125 · 126 · 127 |
| PR134, PR142 | Middle East, 2025 | 134 · 142 |
| PR136, PR149 | Middle East, 2023 | 136 · 149 |
| FBI-UAP-PR007 | Western United States, 2026 — FBI thermal imager | Watch |
The FBI Stopped Reading Files and Started Interviewing People
Seventeen of the 41 files in this release came from the FBI — more than from any agency except the Department of War itself. That alone is new. What those files are is more significant.
They are FD-302s: the standard form an FBI agent fills out to memorialize an interview. Several of them record interviews conducted in 2026, about incidents that occurred in 2026. Two of them — D032 and D033 — document interviews with a U.S. Government Special Agent describing objects seen in the western United States, one at about 4:00 PM and one at about 9:00 PM.
The agent in D032 also filmed what they saw. That footage is FBI-UAP-PR007, shot on a hand-held thermal imager, and the FBI describes it as showing "two, slow-moving ‘black-hot’ areas of contrast."
The FBI also commissioned digital renderings to accompany several interviews — images built from witness descriptions, prepared in 2026 "as a visual aid in support of the PURSUE initiative." The most striking is tied to FBI-UAP-D024, a March 2024 interview with a former U.S. military pilot who recalled a large dark triangle while deployed as a reservist at Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002. Others depict triangles reported near Colorado Springs in 2023.
Read those renderings carefully. They are artists' interpretations produced by the FBI two decades after the events they depict, from memory-based descriptions. They are illustrations of testimony. They are not photographs, and nothing in the files presents them as evidence of anything.
A First From Inside the Executive Office of the President
Three files in this release orbit a single 1963 story out of Bahia, Brazil, and together they are the most institutionally interesting thing in the batch — not because of what they claim, but because of who kept them.
A Portuguese-language radio broadcast out of Rio de Janeiro reported the crash of a "large metal sphere" containing a dead occupant. The CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service picked it up. The clipping ended up in the files of Edward C. Welsh, Executive Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council — a cabinet-level body inside the Executive Office of the President — with handwritten annotations dated November 13, 1963. That file, EOP-UAP-D001, is the first PURSUE record to come from the Executive Office of the President.
Here is the part that matters, and that a breathless read of this release will skip: the two accompanying State Department cables exist because the U.S. Embassy in Rio was working to confirm that Washington had assessed the newspaper account as inauthentic. The paper trail is not a record of a recovered craft. It is a record of the U.S. government checking a sensational press story and concluding it did not hold up — and then filing it at the highest levels anyway.
The Historical Layer
The older material in Release 05 is thinner than Release 04's but includes one genuinely significant document.
| File | Year | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| DOW-UAP-D098 | 1953 | Naval Photographic Interpretation Center analysis of two films shot in Montana (1950) and Utah (1952). The Center assessed the objects as inconsistent with natural phenomena or known aerospace technology — and asked for a better-funded investigation it never got. |
| DOW-UAP-D099 | 1947 | Intelligence review of the Scandinavian "ghost rockets." Notes that the Swedish Defense Staff privately attributed them to Soviet V-1 tests from Peenemünde while saying otherwise in public. |
| DOW-UAP-D100 | 1947–48 | Project Sign correspondence. Characterizes some reports as consistent with "real" objects rather than fabrications or perceptual error, and frames the performance envelope as a potential national security problem. |
| CIA-UAP-D022 | 1965 | CIA memoranda on an object near Puerto Rico, exchanged between the offices running U-2 and A-12 OXCART reconnaissance and foreign-technology analysis. |
Four Reasons to Hold This Release Loosely
1. The videos are copies of copies. The gunship footage and the Pacific clips are phone recordings of a screen. The Department says so plainly: they are "not native primary sensor data," and filming a display introduces blur, flicker and artifacts that can look like structure.
2. "Cold orbs" is a description, not a finding. It comes from an Intelligence Information Report, which the Department itself defines as unevaluated raw reporting that exists to feed later assessment. No later assessment has been published.
3. The renderings are artwork. Every FBI image in this batch was drawn in 2026 from a witness's recollection — in one case of an event 24 years earlier. They illustrate what someone remembers, and memory of a night sky is famously poor at scale, distance and shape.
4. The Brazil file is a debunk in the archive's clothing. The most sensational-sounding item in this release — a metal sphere with a dead occupant — survives here only because U.S. officials were confirming to each other that the story was not authentic.
The Scorecard: Still Zero
After Release 02 we listed the questions PURSUE would have to answer to be a disclosure program rather than a document dump. Five releases and 375 files later, the count that matters has not moved: the government has published no technical analysis of any file it has released. No photogrammetry, no radar correlation, no sensor-fusion assessment, no resolution of a single unresolved case.
The irony is sitting in the archive itself. The one document in this release that does contain real analytic work — the 1953 Naval Photographic Interpretation Center study of the Montana and Utah films, with its luminosity comparisons and photogrammetry — is 73 years old, and it ends by asking for resources to do the job properly. That request is still outstanding.
The Honest Conclusion
Release 05 is the most operationally current tranche PURSUE has produced. A special operations aircrew's tape arrives with an intelligence report attached. The FBI is interviewing witnesses about things that happened this year and filming them itself. A file has come out of the Executive Office of the President for the first time. On the question of whether this program is still moving, the answer this month is yes.
On the question of whether it is explaining anything, the answer is unchanged. The Pentagon has finally put a number on one of these things — four feet across, and colder than the sky around it — and attached a formal note that you should not read that as a finding. The files are getting closer to the present. The conclusions are still nowhere.
Sources: Department of War / war.gov/UFO (primary — all 41 files and the release database) · DoW press release, Aug 7 2026 · DVIDS (official video records) · CBS News · KKTV (Colorado Springs)
Related Briefings
- Breaking: 40 Files, Five Agencies, 77 Years — Inside the Pentagon's Fourth UAP Release (July 18, 2026)
- Breaking: Freed to Talk, Not Free to Publish — Inside Trump's UAP NDA Waiver (August 1, 2026)
- Breaking: Pentagon Drops 64 More UAP Files — the Syrian "Instant Acceleration" Footage (May 22, 2026)
- Breaking: Pentagon Releases 400 UFO Incident Files (May 8, 2026)
- Edition 018: Trump Administration Launches PURSUE Platform