PURSUE Release 04: Department of War declassifies 40 more UAP files — the historical tranche

On July 10, 2026, the Department of War published the fourth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) at war.gov/UFO. Per the portal's live database, the tranche comprises 40 files — 14 documents, 3 images, 19 videos, and 4 audio files — arriving 28 days after Release 03 and bringing the cumulative public corpus to 334 files. 'The Department of War is in lockstep with President Trump to bring unprecedented transparency regarding our government's understanding of unidentified anomalous phenomena,' Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in the Department's accompanying statement.

Where Release 03 was built around the FBI's modern case files, Release 04 is the historical tranche — the deepest look yet into 1940s-60s program records. The headline items: a 1955 CIA memorandum and analysis recording what four Americans, including sitting U.S. Senator Richard Russell, watched from a train inside the Soviet Union; the verbatim transcript of a March 1949 Los Alamos conference at which Manhattan Project physicists — Edward Teller among them — argued inconclusively over months of 'green fireball' sightings; Project Sign's founding 1948 progress report alongside both drafts of the Air Force's Study No. 203; and three 1996 photographs, taken from Space Shuttle Columbia during STS-80, of an unidentified object in low-Earth orbit that the Department selected as the release's iconic image.

The release's largest single component by file count is a corpus of nineteen AARO sensor videos submitted by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Central Command, Northern Command, and the Air Force, spanning three decades from 1996 to 2025, plus two legacy captures transferred from the Navy's UAP Task Force in 2022. Three of the nineteen are paired with Range Fouler Debriefs — the Navy's standard form for an unauthorized intrusion into controlled airspace — carrying a standing Department caveat that the debrief language reflects the reporter's subjective interpretation at the time and is not itself a conclusion about what was present. Four additional audio segments, drawn from the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 crew debriefings, document astronauts and NASA flight surgeons discussing the 'light flash phenomena' later attributed to cosmic rays.

Two smaller files round out the tranche: a Department of Energy incident report republishing, with far fewer redactions, a 2015 airspace intrusion at the Pantex nuclear-weapons plant near Amarillo, Texas, first released in more heavily redacted form in May; and an FBI file pairing two unrelated pieces of correspondence — a 1967 account relayed from an eleven-year-old child and a 1974 exchange of letters — a small reminder of how much of the historical UAP record consists of ordinary citizens writing to their government.

Across four tranches in 63 days, the PURSUE program has now published 334 files spanning from the earliest Air Force studies of 1948 to AARO sensor footage from 2025 — a public corpus that, as of Release 04, reaches further into the pre-Blue-Book historical record than any of the three releases before it.