PURSUE TRANCHE 4

THE FOURTH 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, Release 03 on June 12, and Release 04 on July 10. Sean Parnell, Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs, said the Department was publishing "the fourth release of declassified and historical" UAP files under PURSUE, and that further files would follow on a rolling basis. As before, the tranche is additive — nothing from the earlier releases is removed.

THE OLDEST FILES YET

Release 04 reaches further back than any tranche so far. It includes records from Project Sign and Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force's first two official UFO investigation programs, begun in 1948 and 1952; a set of 1955 CIA sighting analyses; and material from a 1949 Los Alamos conference on aerial phenomena, held at the laboratory that had built the atomic bomb four years earlier. These are early-Cold-War working papers — the government trying to make sense of its own reports in real time — not conclusions about origin. Read alongside the 1953 Robertson Panel report from Release 03, they fill in the paper trail of official skepticism that shaped how the United States handled UFO reports for decades.

THE NUCLEAR THREAD

A recurring feature of the PURSUE record is UAP activity reported near nuclear facilities, and Release 04 adds a modern instance: a 2015 incident report from the Pantex Plant, the Department of Energy's primary nuclear-weapons assembly and disassembly site near Amarillo, Texas. Its inclusion is why the Department of Energy appears as a contributing agency for the first time. The file documents what was observed and reported at a sensitive site; it does not assign a cause. It sits within the longer pattern of nuclear-adjacent sightings that runs through the declassified record.

NASA, THE FBI, AND A MODERN DEBRIEF

The tranche also carries NASA imagery from STS-80, the 1996 Space Shuttle Columbia mission — long a talking point in UFO circles for orbital footage of drifting points of light, which NASA and analysts have generally attributed to debris and ice particles near the orbiter. FBI correspondence appears again, continuing the Bureau's presence across every release. The most contemporary item is a 2019 "Range Fouler" debrief — the military's term for an unauthorized object intruding on a training range — in which an aviator with 28 years of Air Force and Navy service describes an object over the eastern United States as unlike anything he had seen in his career. As with all PURSUE material, it is a first-person account on the record, not an official determination of what the object was.

THE VIDEOS

Nineteen of the 40 files are videos — the largest video share of any tranche to date — including newly declassified Department of War cockpit and sensor clips alongside the historical NASA footage. They carry the same neutral framing as earlier PURSUE video: descriptions of what a sensor or witness captured, with any All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) assessment attached rather than a verdict on origin. Four short audio files and three images round out the release.

READING RELEASE 04 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 04 is in the app alongside 01, 02, and 03, with each file's source assessment intact.