PURSUE TRANCHE 5

THE FIFTH 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, Release 04 on July 10, and Release 05 on August 7, the second straight tranche to land exactly four weeks after the one before it. As before, the tranche is additive: nothing from the earlier releases is removed, and each file carries its own agency, date, and location metadata rather than a single blanket assessment.

A NEW AGENCY: THE WHITE HOUSE'S SPACE COUNCIL

Release 05 introduces a contributor no earlier tranche has carried: the Executive Office of the President, via a single file from the records of the National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC), a cabinet-level body that coordinated U.S. space policy from 1958 to 1973. The document is a CIA wire report on a Portuguese-language radio broadcast out of Rio de Janeiro, describing an alleged crash of a "large metal sphere" with a deceased occupant near Conde, Bahia, Brazil. Handwritten annotations dated November 13, 1963 show a NASC official asking the State Department to have the U.S. Embassy verify the report locally.

What follows is a genuine paper trail across three agencies in eleven days. The Embassy in Rio cabled back on November 14 that the story matched a weather-balloon report already on file, with nothing found to have crashed. A second cable from the American Consulate in Salvador, Bahia, the city nearest the alleged site, followed on November 20: the scientific attaché found no contemporary local reporting to support the claim, cited contradictory follow-up coverage, and passed along the Brazilian Ministry of Aeronautics' flat denial that any "strange object" had come down. Read start to finish, the three documents are the government checking a viral rumor against the facts on the ground and closing it out, the kind of routine, unglamorous verification work that makes up most of the declassified record.

THE PUERTO RICO INTERCEPT

The CIA's two files reach back further, to a November 19, 1964 incident near Puerto Rico, in the middle of the Cold War's most sensitive reconnaissance programs. A Navy aviator described a "delta-shaped" object he visually estimated at Mach 3; a radar aboard the destroyer USS Gyatt tracked a contact at roughly 3,800 knots, about 4,373 mph, over 21 minutes, corroborated by a second pilot flying an F-8 Crusader. Briefing material was prepared for Walter Elder, executive assistant to CIA Director John McCone. The CIA's own analysts weighed and ruled out a domestic explanation, the classified YF-12A OXCART program, before floating foreign reconnaissance of the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Range as the more likely account. It is a rare PURSUE file with hard radar numbers on both sides of the ledger: a human estimate and an independent instrument track.

FIFTEEN CLIPS, THREE INCIDENTS

Sixteen of the 41 files are video, nearly all of it Department of War "Unresolved UAP Report" clips grouped into three incidents: six clips from a 2021 Gulf of Oman sighting reported by U.S. Central Command from an AC-130J gunship's infrared sensor (an accompanying intelligence report describes "cold orbs" roughly four feet across), five clips from a 2019 Pacific Ocean sighting transferred to AARO by the Navy's UAP Task Force, and four more from Middle East incidents in 2023 and 2025. As with every PURSUE video, each carries AARO's standard, deliberately flat second-by-second description of what the sensor shows, an area of contrast, its position in frame, with no judgment about origin attached.

OLD CASES AND NEW ONES

The tranche's documents span nearly eighty years. On the old end, a 1947 War Department General Staff review of Scandinavia's "Ghost Rocket" sightings concludes most reports were misidentified, but flags a residue of "real incidents" it attributes to Soviet tests of captured German V-1 technology, and notes Sweden's own public explanation shifted to a vaguer "celestial origin" to avoid a diplomatic incident. A 1953 Naval Photographic Interpretation Center memo assesses two films of objects filmed over Montana and Utah in 1950 and 1952, finding characteristics the analysts judged inconsistent with natural phenomena or known aircraft of the day, and recommending further funded study that, as far as the record shows, never happened.

On the new end, the FBI contributes a cluster of 2026 interviews and renderings from the western United States, "Multiple Red Lights," "Slow-moving Objects," a "Thermally Elevated Aerial Object," first-hand accounts collected this year, not decades-old case files. A separate FBI thread documents a January 2026 interview with a former Department of War employee describing an October 2023 sighting in Colorado Springs, paired with a digital rendering of a dark, translucent triangle.

READING RELEASE 05 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, video, and images. 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 05 is in the app alongside 01 through 04, with each file's source assessment intact.