PURSUE Release 02: Department of War declassifies 64 more UAP files

On May 22, 2026, the U.S. Department of War published the second tranche of declassified UAP records through the PURSUE (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters) portal — 14 days after the historic May 8 launch.

Release 02 contains 64 files: 51 sensor videos in the new DOW-UAP-PR050 through PR099 series, 7 previously-classified NASA crew audio files (Apollo, Skylab, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo–Soyuz), and 6 documents. The interagency effort was coordinated through the Office of the Secretary of War, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI, NASA, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

The narrative centerpiece of the release is ODNI-UAP-D001 — a first-person USPER (U.S.-person) narrative authored by a currently-serving senior officer in the U.S. Intelligence Community describing what he characterizes as 'a series of close UAP encounters lasting over an hour' from a U.S. military helicopter in late 2025. The narrative describes two oval, orange-with-white-center orbs stationary just above the rotor disk; a swarm of smaller orbs forming a triangular pattern; and a subsequent fighter scramble in which the same orbs were observed near the responding fighters. The officer concludes: 'We were virtually speechless after these observations.'

The video tranche includes the most kinematically anomalous clip yet released — DOW-UAP-PR051, the 'Syrian UAP instant acceleration' video, in which a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone achieves a weapons-quality lock on an unidentified object before the object exhibits instantaneous acceleration. It also includes the previously-unreleased Lake Huron F-16C shootdown footage from February 12, 2023, the Eglin AFB infrared clip that lawmakers visited the base in person to request, the first color (non-thermal) UAP video in the PURSUE corpus, and the first multi-USO (Unidentified Submerged Objects) encounter showing multiple spheres moving in and out of the water beside a U.S. submarine.

Historically, the most consequential release in Release 02 is a 116-page joint U.S. Air Force / Armed Forces Special Weapons Program file documenting 209 UAP reports — 'green orbs, discs, and fireballs' — near the Sandia, New Mexico nuclear-weapons custodial facility between 1948 and 1950, complete with references to recovered copper powder at some sighting sites. Combined with PURSUE Release 01's Oak Ridge nuclear-facility overflight reports from FBI 62-HQ-83894, the historical pattern of UAP activity over the most sensitive U.S. nuclear sites is now extensively on the public record.

The Department of War has publicly committed to additional rolling releases. All files in Release 02 are works of the U.S. Federal Government in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105.