PURSUE Release 02 went up on war.gov on May 22, 2026, and added 64 records to the government's declassified UAP collection. The breakdown is lopsided: 51 of the 64 files are military sensor videos, seven are NASA mission audio excerpts, and six are documents. The full UFO Papers archive holds 84 videos across all three releases, so this single batch supplied more than half of the footage in the entire collection.
That makes Release 02 the video drop. Release 01 opened the collection with 158 files on May 8. Release 03 followed with 72 on June 12 and swung back toward paperwork. Release 02, the smallest batch of the three, carries most of the archive's modern military footage plus a small stack of Mercury and Apollo era audio. This post walks the batch one media type at a time. The archive documents what the government filmed, recorded, and wrote down. Nothing here claims what the objects were beyond what the records state.
The Breakdown
Sixty-four records: 51 videos, seven audio files, six PDFs. By agency, the Department of War accounts for 52, NASA for seven, the Department of Energy for three, and the CIA and ODNI for one each. The Department of War column is 51 videos plus a single document. The NASA column is entirely audio. Exactly one record in the release dates to the 1940s, the Sandia Base file covered below. The rest of the dated material runs from 1961 through 2025.
The 51 Videos
Every clip in the batch carries the same provenance note. On March 6, 2026, eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives requested access to 51 potentially UAP-related records allegedly held by the Department of War and the Intelligence Community. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) identified responsive material on a classified network and notes that many of the files lack a substantiated chain of custody. The 51 clips, filed as UFOP-144 through UFOP-194, all reproduce that note.
AARO assesses 48 of the 51 as likely derived from infrared sensors aboard U.S. military platforms. Where the assessments include a date, the footage runs from 2018 to 2024; 20 clips land in 2020 alone, and seven carry no date at all. The derived region tags put 32 of the 51 in CENTCOM/Middle East. On shape, 37 sit at Unclassified, ten carry the Sphere tag, two are Tic-Tac, one Cylinder, one Luminous. Both of the archive's Tic-Tac entries are clips from this batch.
A few individual clips give the flavor of the set:
- UFOP-144, uploader-titled "4 UAP Formation Iran 26 Aug 2022 over water [CALLSIGN]," runs 20 seconds. AARO's shot log records four areas of contrast crossing the frame in the first four seconds and a fifth entering from the top left corner a second later.
- UFOP-148, "Spherical UAP Erratic movement," runs almost four minutes and is assessed to come from the European Command area in August 2022. The record states the media "was digitally altered prior to its upload to a classified network, and is presented as received," and that the alterations "significantly influence the area of contrast's apparent performance characteristics." The erratic movement in the title, per the government's own description, owes at least something to editing.
- UFOP-152 shows an area of contrast over the Yellow Sea in January 2023 and carries an AARO comment noting it duplicates another record, DOW-UAP-PR57a, because two uploaders titled the same underlying material differently on the classified network.
Every shot log in the set closes with the same disclaimer: the description is "provided for informational purposes only" and should be read as reflecting no analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination about the event's validity, nature, or significance. AARO describes areas of contrast and sensor pans. It offers no identification of anything in the frames. The whole set is indexed under Pentagon and military UAP videos.
The Seven NASA Audio Clips
Seven of the archive's 11 audio files arrived in this batch, all NASA mission recordings from 1961 to 1972, indexed with the rest of the space material under NASA and Apollo UAP files. Five come from Project Mercury: Mercury-Redstone 4 in July 1961, Mercury-Atlas 7 in May 1962, Mercury-Atlas 8 in October 1962, and two excerpts from Mercury-Atlas 9 in May 1963. Two come from Apollo: a 1969 Apollo 12 medical debriefing and an Apollo 17 excerpt from December 7, 1972.
The Mercury-Atlas 9 excerpt filed as NASA-UAP-D010 catches pilot L. Gordon Cooper Jr., approximately an hour and 41 minutes into the final Mercury flight, noting that he sees "John's fireflies," John Glenn's term from Mercury-Atlas 6. NASA later attributed the fireflies to frozen condensation separating from the spacecraft body and reflecting sunlight. In the Apollo 12 debriefing, NASA-UAP-D008, Conrad, Gordon, and Bean describe light flashes or "streaks of lights" in the dark as they tried to sleep; NASA determined those were internal to the astronauts' vision rather than external light sources. The quietest entry is NASA-UAP-D014, in which the Mercury-Redstone 4 recovery team discusses a dye pack in the water that did not activate.
One catalog oddity: the archive's derived tags list 12 Sphere records, and 11 of them arrived in Release 02, ten videos plus one of the Mercury-Atlas 9 audio excerpts.
The Six Documents
The paperwork is where the release covers the most ground in the fewest files, 1948 to 2025 in six PDFs.
DOW-UAP-D017 is the one mid-century item in the batch and its largest single document: 116 pages from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program, the direct post-World War II successor to the Manhattan Project, and from the U.S. Air Force, covering a series of sightings and investigations at Sandia, New Mexico, from 1948 to 1950. The file contains 209 sightings of "green orbs," "discs," and "fireballs" reported near the military base. Witnesses reported the objects maneuvering, flying out of sight, disappearing, or exploding. The documents include contemporary investigations into residual copper powder found in some areas where sightings were reported, and a few of those investigations became the basis for Project Grudge, whose reports from other military installations are collected in the same file. It reads well next to DOW-UAP-D084, the 1949 evaluation study of the flying-saucer phenomenon prepared at the request of the Plans and Operations Divisions of the U.S. Army General Staff, which arrived in Release 03. Both carry the Disc/Disk tag, the most common derived shape in the archive at 27 records, indexed under disc and flying-saucer sightings.
The other five:
- CIA-UAP-D001 is a December 1973 CIA intelligence information report on human intelligence collection in the USSR, which the report itself characterizes as informational rather than finally evaluated intelligence. Section 14 records a source describing a luminous, bright green object seen in the summer of 1973, concentric circles forming around it over several minutes before it dissipated, no sound. The source offered no opinion on what it was.
- DOE-UAP-D002 is 1970s personal correspondence to and from James Tuck, a Los Alamos National Laboratory-affiliated physicist, regarding his interest in UAP.
- DOE-UAP-D003 is a 1986 letter inviting the Pajarito Astronomers club to a presentation by Dr. John Warren, another Los Alamos-affiliated physicist, titled "Why Should a Scientist be Concerned about UFOs?" The laboratory notes the event was not officially hosted by Los Alamos and that it has no record of what was discussed there.
- DOE-UAP-D001 is a Pantex unidentified object incident report that includes an enhanced image from a ground surveillance radar tower.
- ODNI-UAP-D001 is the newest thing in the release: a first-hand account written by a currently serving senior U.S. intelligence official who was part of a team investigating unusual noises and UAP sightings in and near a sensitive U.S. military facility in late 2025. From a helicopter, the official recounts glowing orbs at close range and at a distance, and an apparent high-speed object moving low to the ground that appeared to split in two and accelerate away in two different directions. The account accompanies infrared imagery taken from the ground during the same exercise, released on war.gov on May 8, 2026.
Where Release 02 Sits in the Archive
The collection currently holds 294 records: 158 from Release 01, 64 from Release 02, 72 from Release 03. By media type it runs 175 PDFs, 84 videos, 24 images, and 11 audio files. Release 02 supplied 51 of the videos and seven of the audio files while adding six documents and no images. The Department of War total sits at 143 records archive-wide, and 52 of those, nearly all of them the video set, came in this batch.
The batch also moves the derived statistics. CENTCOM/Middle East holds 69 records archive-wide, and 32 of them are Release 02 clips. The usual caveat applies: shape and region tags are heuristic index labels applied to make the collection searchable, and the authoritative content is always the underlying record.
Release 03 pulled the collection back toward documents three weeks later, 53 PDFs out of its 72 records. That batch brought the FBI narrative files, including FBI-UAP-D002, an FD-1057 containing a first-hand description of UAP reported near Colorado Springs in 2022, and ICA-UAP-D001, an analysis of a 2022 Colorado Springs incident produced by an AARO Intelligence Community partner. It also brought CIA-UAP-017, a July 2008 report on a UFO sighting at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe; per the record, individuals debated whether the sighting was an advanced reconnaissance device of a foreign government or of extraterrestrial origins. The most recent paperwork in the archive, FBI-UAP-D009, is an FD-302 recording a February 2026 interview about incidents in the northeastern United States; the sighting itself is dated only 2026. The newest batch has its own index at latest PURSUE release.
One archival footnote to close on. The ODNI narrative went up on May 22 describing a helicopter flight profile as "map-of-the-earth." On May 26 the collection posted a correction: the military aviation term is "nap-of-the-earth," and the document was updated. Sixty-four records, more than half the archive's footage, and a posted correction that turned on a single letter.