PURSUE Release 06: Department of War declassifies 72 more UAP files — the AAWSAP papers, the Tremonton film, and local law enforcement's first videos

On 18 September 2026, the Department of War published the sixth 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 72 files — 56 documents, 15 videos and one audio recording — bringing the cumulative public corpus to 447 files released in 133 days. Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell's accompanying statement said the Department and its agency partners 'are actively working on the next release.' Four days earlier, on 14 September, the Department had issued a legal waiver authorising current and former service members, civilians and contractors to disclose UAP-related National Defense Information to PURSUE representatives without triggering penalties under their non-disclosure or special-access-program agreements.

The centre of gravity is the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. Forty-four of the 72 files are AAWSAP records: the July 2008 Statement of Objectives, which defined the program as a contractor-supported assessment of far-term foreign aerospace threats 'out to the year 2050' across twelve technical areas including 'spatial or temporal translation' and 'human effects'; the September 2008 solicitation and original order; five contract modifications through September 2010; and 37 of the 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents the program produced between December 2009 and January 2011 — among them the studies on warp drives, traversable wormholes, antigravity, negative-mass propulsion, invisibility cloaking, energy extraction from the quantum vacuum, and 'anomalous acute and subacute field effects on human biological tissues.' Each DIRD carries a Department summary, and the summaries are blunt: the warp-drive paper 'offers no viable engineering pathway'; the 'maverick inventor' essay 'reflects a notable methodological circularity'; the human-tissue paper 'relies heavily on case comparisons lacking physical examinations.'

The historical material centres on the Tremonton, Utah film of 2 July 1952 — Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse's 16mm Kodachrome of 12 to 14 bright objects, released as a National Archives digitization alongside the Project Blue Book case file, the 'pillow balloon' photo file compiled with General Mills, Newhouse's final Navy personnel record, and the Air Force Director of Intelligence's 'Flying Discs' file for September–December 1952. A transcript and 65-minute recording of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt's 26 March 1952 Boston presentation complete the set.

The modern material introduces a new agency category. Local Law Enforcement contributes five files: four cell-phone videos a Colorado officer submitted to AARO from October 2023 and January 2024, describing a silent object with red, blue and green flashing lights, and a transcript of the officer narrating as he filmed. U.S. Central Command contributes four Mission Reports paired for the first time with their imagery — two infrared stills and four videos from Iraq and the Middle East, 2022 and 2025, with operator descriptions ranging from 'flying sporadically… between 80 and 180 miles per hour' to 'six small spherical objects grouped together' at an estimated 480 mph. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command contributes six infrared clips from the Yellow Sea and East China Sea in 2023.