Most PURSUE files are old, closed, or both. The two at the top of this release are neither. In 2026, two Federal Special Agents at a sensitive national security site in the western United States answered a colleague's call-out of a 'thermally elevated aerial object,' ran to the western side of their observation post, and saw what their co-signed statement calls 'a substantial, nonreflective, dark black triangular object most resembling a delta wing drone' — nine to fifteen feet across, hotter than ambient on a handheld thermal device, 'a completely consistent thermal signature across the entire airframe and no visible exhaust gases.' It climbed over a ridge, turned to horizontal flight 'at a very significant velocity,' and dropped out of sight about 1.5 miles away. Neither agent heard anything. The FBI recorded the interview on an FD-302 (FBI-UAP-D043) and had nine forensic sketches drawn from it.
AARO's memorandum for record (DOW-UAP-D176) adds a corroborating account from a third official at a separate post, a second sighting the following evening, and a ground search that 'found no visible debris or evidence of an impact in the accessible survey area.' Then it says something the Department rarely says on this portal: AARO 'considers this incident to warrant further investigation due to the close alignment of the phenomena's reported morphological features and kinematic profiles with those of other reported incidents in the western United States region.' Release 05 carried federal agents' 2026 accounts from the same region; read that cluster here. Neither release says the incidents share a site.
The second thread picks up where Release 06 left off. That release published AAWSAP's studies; this one publishes its contractor. Nine records from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies show where the effort actually went: buying the Mutual UFO Network's case data (and later proposing to cut its stipend), bidding to become 'the Federal Aviation Administration's official reporting point' for UAP, a 'blue orb' report, a deployment to Brazil, and a 2010 self-assessment the Department reads as written 'to reinforce the case for the organization's continued relevance and for the continuation of AAWSAP.' The most striking is the April 2010 report from a Utah ranch: interviews with residents, police and tribal community members, handheld sensors, planned plant-based biosensors, accounts of 'dog-like bipedal creatures' and 'little people' — and a stated intent to 'attempt communication with the presumed source of reported anomalous activity.'
The rest is mostly the early Cold War: a B-52 gunnery-scope return over Saudi Arabia in 1957, a light on the Soviet side of the Bering Strait, a Swedish airline crew's 'shining metal' sphere, a red light in the Berlin air corridor that Soviet authorities 'could not account for,' four reports over Catalina Island, the personnel record of the Air Force intelligence chief in office when Project SIGN began, and a 1962-1964 Executive Branch file on recovering fallen space hardware — publicly through NASA, privately for 'technical analysis.' Several of the old reports carry their own explanation (a balloon, Jupiter, storks). They are published because the Department still classes them as unresolved.
