PURSUE TRANCHE 3

THE THIRD RELEASE

PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — publishes the government's UAP holdings in numbered tranches at war.gov. Release 01 went public on May 8, 2026, Release 02 on May 22, and Release 03 on June 12. Department spokesperson Sean Parnell said the Department of War was "publishing the third release of declassified UAP files as part of PURSUE" and would "release additional files on a rolling basis." By the third drop, war.gov reported it had taken more than 1.7 billion hits since launching in May — a measure of public appetite, not of what the files prove.

THE FBI LEADS THE TRANCHE

The Bureau is the largest single contributor to Release 03, reported at 29 files. Two modern case clusters anchor its share. The first is a multi-year series of "orb" sightings in the northeastern United States — notable because, according to the records, FBI agents witnessed some of the events first-hand rather than merely logging third-party reports. The second is the first-person record of the so-called October 2023 "Western US Event," an account from a federal law-enforcement agent describing sightings near a sensitive national-security site over two days. As with all PURSUE material, the files document what was observed and reported; they do not assert what the objects were.

OLDER FILES, LESS REDACTED

Release 03 also reaches back into the Cold War record. It includes the CIA's 1953 Robertson Panel report — the early scientific review that shaped U.S. government skepticism toward UFO reports — in a less-redacted form than was previously public. NASA material appears too: crew debriefings from the Apollo and Gemini era, including more than two hours of 1972 audio from the Apollo 16 mission that contains an off-hand crew reference to an "alien starbase," and a 1962 audio excerpt of the Cronkite–Cooper interview in which astronaut Gordon Cooper discusses unexplained sightings by "exceptionally well-qualified people." These are historical recordings and remarks, not official conclusions — context that matters when an off-hand line gets quoted out of it.

THE VIDEOS

Six new videos accompany the documents. Among them is footage tied to a husband-and-wife sighting showing what the file describes as a "brilliant red sphere" followed by an identical orb. The clips carry the same neutral framing as earlier PURSUE footage — descriptions of what a sensor or witness captured, with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) assessments attached rather than verdicts on origin.

READING RELEASE 03 IN UMBRA

War.gov hosts the raw files but does not organize them for reading — a tranche arrives as a wall of cryptically named PDFs, audio, and clips. Umbra indexes every release by agency, type, date, and location, makes the whole archive searchable, and pushes a notification the moment a new tranche goes public. Release 03 is in the app alongside 01 and 02, with each file's source assessment intact.