SENSORS & FOOTAGE
FLIR — Forward-Looking InfraRed — a heat-sensing camera carried on aircraft. Most PURSUE military clips are FLIR footage; the 2004 Nimitz video is officially “FLIR1.”
ATFLIR — Advanced Targeting FLIR — the Raytheon targeting pod on Navy F/A-18s that recorded the Gimbal and GoFast videos.
IRST — Infrared Search and Track — a passive sensor that finds objects by their heat without emitting radar.
EO/IR — Electro-Optical / InfraRed — the combined visible-light and heat-imaging sensors on modern military platforms.
Gimbal effect — An optical artifact in which a hot object's glare appears to rotate with the camera's internal gimbal — central to the debate over the Gimbal video.
CASES & PHENOMENA
Tic Tac — The nickname for the smooth, wingless white object in the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter.
Transmedium — Describing an object that moves between air and water without apparent difficulty — a key AARO category.
Foo fighters — A World War II aircrew term for unexplained lights that paced their aircraft.
Green fireballs — A wave of unexplained luminous objects over the U.S. Southwest in the late 1940s, often near nuclear sites.
AGENCIES & PROGRAMS
AARO — All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — the Pentagon's current UAP investigation office (established 2022).
AATIP — Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — the 2007–2012 Pentagon UAP program revealed in 2017.
Project Blue Book — The U.S. Air Force's 1952–1969 UFO investigation.
PURSUE — Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — the 2026 declassification program publishing files at war.gov.
DOW — Department of War — the agency overseeing the PURSUE release.
CLASSIFICATION & TRADECRAFT
UMBRA — The NSA's codeword for its most sensitive communications intelligence; “TOP SECRET UMBRA” marks the NSA records in PURSUE. The historic COMINT codewords were UMBRA, SPOKE, and MORAY.
SCI — Sensitive Compartmented Information — intelligence requiring special access beyond Top Secret.
Redaction — The blacked-out text in declassified files. Umbra renders documents with their redactions intact.
FOIA — The Freedom of Information Act — the legal mechanism that has pried loose many UAP records.
THE NAMES FOR IT
UAP — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — the government's current term. See UAP vs. UFO.
UFO — Unidentified Flying Object — the older, pop-culture-laden term.
NHI — Non-Human Intelligence — the term used in whistleblower testimony for a claimed intelligent origin.
> Now read the files the vocabulary describes — on your iPhone.
