Researcher, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; UAP Science Advisory Council member
A preprint study by Jacob Haqq-Misra of Blue Marble Space and Ravi Kopparapu of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, published in August 2026, analyzed all 112 UAP videos released by the U.S. Department of War under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) since May 8, 2026. The researchers, both members of the UAP Science Advisory Council to the U.S. government, concluded that pervasive redaction of sensor data — particularly the range (distance) between observing platform and object — makes it impossible for civilian scientists to determine whether objects depicted in the footage display genuinely anomalous velocities. The study, titled "Limits on Velocity Recovery from the PURSUE Sensor Videos" and posted to the arXiv preprint server, represents one of the first systematic scientific examinations of the PURSUE release corpus. It carries significance both for the UAP transparency debate and for the methodology of UAP science more broadly: the authors argue that apparent pixel-per-frame motion in infrared targeting-pod footage is not a reliable proxy for real-world object velocity without accompanying range data, platform trajectory, and camera field-of-view specifications. The researchers explicitly declined to draw extraordinary conclusions from the footage while also declining to dismiss the objects as mundane, and called for future releases to include unredacted or separately certified range measurements.