A federal agent filmed it himself: the first FBI-captured video in PURSUE

Every video PURSUE has published before Release 05 arrived at the FBI or the Department of War from somewhere else — a civilian's phone, a military sensor feed, an archived recording. FBI-UAP-PR007 breaks that pattern: it is thermal footage a U.S. Government Special Agent shot by hand, on an optical thermal imaging device, during a 2026 incident in the western United States. The Department describes the content as two, slow-moving black-hot areas of contrast — a term of art in thermal imaging for regions that read colder than their surroundings. The agent's own account of the incident, recorded at approximately 4:00 p.m. local time, is filed separately as FD-302 FBI-UAP-D032.

A second U.S. Government Special Agent gave a separate FD-302 account the same year, describing a 'thermally elevated aerial object' observed at approximately 9:00 p.m. local time (FBI-UAP-D033) — a different time of day and, per the release, a distinct incident from the one captured on video, though both place federal law-enforcement personnel as first-hand witnesses in the western United States within the same year.

A third strand of the cluster involves two more people present for the same night: three separate incidents inside a five-hour window, each involving multiple red lights. The first witness's FD-302 (FBI-UAP-D037) produced two independent digital renderings (D038 and D039); a second person who was present, interviewed by telephone, gave their own FD-302 (FBI-UAP-D040) and received two more renderings (D041 and D042) built from their account alone. Publishing both sets side by side lets readers compare two people's descriptions of the same night without either account being edited to match the other.

The cluster sits in the same broad geography PURSUE has already used for one of its most-cited cases: the September 2023 Western US Event, in which seven federal employees reported orbs and a 'translucent kite' at an undisclosed government test site, declassified in Releases 01 and 03. Release 05 does not state that the 2026 incidents occurred at the same site, and the Department's file for this cluster identifies the location only as 'the western United States.' What the two clusters share is a pattern: multiple federal witnesses, in the same general region, reporting anomalous aerial objects in independent incidents years apart.