PURSUE Release 05: Department of War declassifies 41 more UAP files — the triangle release

On 7 August 2026, the Department of War published the fifth 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 41 files — 22 documents, 16 videos, and 3 images — published 28 days after Release 04 and bringing the cumulative public corpus to 375 files. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said of the release that 'these files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it's time the American people see it for themselves.' Per the Department's standing policy for the portal, the materials cover only unresolved cases: incidents the government has been unable to definitively explain.

The organizing idea of Release 05 is a shape: the triangle. Four FD-302 interview records — the FBI's standard form for documenting an interview — each come paired with a digital rendering the Bureau commissioned in 2026 from the witness's own description, a practice PURSUE Release 03 first showed with the Western US Event and that here becomes the spine of an entire tranche. A former U.S. military pilot, interviewed in March 2024, described an enormous dark triangle passing overhead and blotting out the stars while he was deployed as a reservist at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan, in June 2002; the same interview also covers incidents he reported in 2023 and 2024. Two more witnesses — a former Department of War employee and a separate U.S. Person — independently reported triangular objects with red lights near Colorado Springs, Colorado in October 2023, interviewed months apart and rendered separately. A fourth, older FD-302 (FBI-UAP-D028, not covered on its own page here) documents two former service members describing a 'Dark Triangle with Lights' in June or July 2011.

Release 05 also contains the first video the FBI has ever captured itself for PURSUE, rather than received from a witness. FBI-UAP-PR007 is hand-held thermal footage a U.S. Government Special Agent shot during a 2026 incident in the western United States — two, slow-moving black-hot areas of contrast, per the Department's description — filed alongside his own FD-302 and a second agent's interview describing a separate evening sighting the same year. Two more witnesses to a third sequence — three incidents inside a five-hour window — were interviewed separately and each had two digital renderings prepared from their account, letting readers compare two independent descriptions of the same night.

Two agencies appear in PURSUE for the first time, via the same story. In November 1963, a Rio de Janeiro radio broadcast claimed a 'large metal sphere' carrying a deceased occupant had come down near Conde, Bahia, Brazil. A CIA wire report tracking the broadcast survived in the files of Edward C. Welsh, executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council — a body inside the Executive Office of the President — making it the first EOP file PURSUE has released. Two State Department cables follow the claim to its end: the U.S. consulate confirming, a day later, that Washington and Rio were discussing the same news item, and a second cable from the consulate's scientific attaché, six days after that, reporting the story a fabrication that originated in Rio with no contemporaneous local reporting to support it. Eleven days, start to finish — one of the clearest documented examples in the PURSUE corpus of the government's debunking process actually working, in close to real time.

The rest of the release fills out both ends of the historical record. Six Gulf of Oman videos from September 8, 2021 — every one a cell-phone recording of the infrared display aboard a Special Operations AC-130J gunship, a limitation the Department states plainly — arrive with the Intelligence Information Report that first logged the sighting. Five hand-held Pacific Ocean clips from 2019 and four native CENTCOM sensor videos from the Middle East (2023 and 2025) round out the modern sensor record. On the historical side, a Department of War General Staff intelligence review dated January 9, 1947 assesses the Scandinavian 'ghost rocket' wave as inconclusive; an Air Materiel Command file from the Project Sign era (1947-1948) describes some reports as consistent with real objects whose performance exceeded any known U.S. aircraft; and the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center's 1953 film analysis lays out, without resolving, its method and conclusions on the long-argued Montana (1950) and Utah (1952) UFO footage. A separate CIA exchange between the Assistant Directors for Special Activities and for Scientific Intelligence, plus a briefing prepared for the Director's executive assistant, covers a November 1964 sighting near Puerto Rico.