The nuclear-weapons plant intrusion, released again — this time with the redactions lifted

The Pantex Plant, on the plains outside Amarillo, Texas, is the U.S. Department of Energy's final-assembly site: the facility where American nuclear warheads are assembled, disassembled, maintained, and life-extended. It is, in plain terms, one of the most closely guarded pieces of ground in the country. On September 1, 2015, an unidentified object entered the restricted airspace above it.

DOE-UAP-D005, the incident report PURSUE Release 04 publishes, pairs a written account of the intrusion with ground-surveillance-radar imagery of the object — the kind of sensor corroboration that distinguishes a documented airspace incursion from an uncorroborated visual report. The Department's file does not offer an identification; it presents the report and the radar imagery as recorded at the time.

This is the file's second appearance in the PURSUE record. Pages 5 and 6 of the same incident were first released on May 22, 2026, as DOE-UAP-D001 in PURSUE Release 02, in a substantially more redacted form. Release 04 republishes the fuller version, with far fewer lines withheld, under the new designation DOE-UAP-D005.

The Department has not explained why the redaction changed between May and July, and the file itself does not say. What it adds to the public record is the imagery the May release withheld — and one more entry in a pattern this archive has tracked across multiple PURSUE tranches: unidentified aerial activity, repeatedly and specifically, over the handful of sites that store, build, or guard the U.S. nuclear arsenal.