The fourth tranche of the Trump administration's PURSUE program: 40 files — 14 documents, 3 images, 19 videos, 4 audio files — bringing the public corpus to 334 files. Where Release 03 was the FBI's tranche, Release 04 is the historical one: a 1955 CIA debrief of four observers (one a sitting U.S. Senator) watching an object over the Soviet Union, the 1949 Los Alamos conference on 'green fireballs' attended by Manhattan Project physicists, Project Sign's founding 1948 progress report, and three NASA photographs of an unidentified object shot from Space Shuttle Columbia in 1996. Nineteen AARO sensor videos and four Apollo-era 'light flash' audio segments round out the release.
On September 1, 2015, an unidentified object intruded the restricted airspace above the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas — the facility where the United States assembles and disassembles its nuclear weapons. Ground-surveillance-radar imagery and an incident report were first released, heavily redacted, as part of PURSUE Release 02 in May 2026. PURSUE Release 04 republishes the same file, DOE-UAP-D005, with far fewer redactions.
Three photographs taken from Space Shuttle Columbia during the STS-80 mission (November 19 – December 7, 1996) show an unidentified object in low-Earth orbit near the Earth's limb. Across the sequence the object appears to rotate or tumble, then continues along a trajectory that carries it against the face of the Earth. The Department's release includes no NASA disposition for the object, unlike two earlier Shuttle-era anomalies — STS-48 (1991) and STS-75 (1996) — already on the public record.
PURSUE Release 04 publishes four audio segments — two from the Apollo 14 post-mission crew debriefing (February 18, 1971) and two from the Apollo 17 crew medical debriefing (December 21, 1972) — in which astronauts and their debriefers discuss the 'light flash phenomena': brief flashes of light some Apollo crews reported seeing with their eyes closed in flight. The phenomenon was unexplained at the time; it is now understood as high-energy cosmic rays passing through the retina or optic nerve. PURSUE Release 02 previously published the related November 1969 Apollo 12 medical debrief on the same subject.
In October 1955, four Americans travelling by train through the Soviet Union — among them U.S. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, then chairman-in-waiting of the Senate Armed Services Committee — watched a luminescent, greenish-yellow object climb and pass above their train between Baku and Tiflis, now Tbilisi. PURSUE Release 04 declassifies the CIA's debriefing memo and its companion analysis, which concluded the sighting could 'probably be explained as steep climbing aircraft or missiles.' The analysis also weighs the 1953 Robertson Panel's findings and Project 'Y,' the real U.S.-Canadian program then trying to build a saucer-shaped aircraft.
PURSUE Release 04 publishes the verbatim transcript of a March 22, 1949 conference at Los Alamos, called after months of unexplained 'green fireball' sightings over the laboratory that built the first atomic bombs. Manhattan Project physicists — Edward Teller among them — argued over explanations ranging from shallow-angle meteors to an 'electron phenomenon'; meteoriticist Lincoln LaPaz told the room nothing like it had ever been seen in a meteorite fall. The conference adjourned without a consensus.
PURSUE Release 04 publishes six U.S. Air Force files tracing the government's institutional handling of UFO reports from 1948 to 1967. The centerpiece is Project Sign's first progress report on 100 sightings from 1947-48, alongside both surviving drafts of Air Intelligence Division Study No. 203. Rounding out the file: records of the Avro 'Project Y2' saucer-shaped-aircraft assessments, 1955 correspondence relating to Project Blue Book, and the 1966-67 Scientific Advisory Board review that led directly to the Condon Committee and, eventually, Blue Book's closure.