PURSUE Release 07: A First Look at War.gov’s Seventh UFO File Drop
The Department of War published PURSUE Release 07 on October 23, 2026, the seventh batch of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files posted to War.gov/UFO.
This is a first look, not a full analysis. It is built from the releasing office’s own description and metadata for each record, not from a page-by-page read of the PDFs, so every claim below is attributed to what the descriptions say. The aim is to tell you what is in the batch and which files deserve a closer read.
We have indexed all 28 records. Every one is a PDF, and the official data file lists no video or audio rows. That makes Release 07 the first batch with no video or audio at all; each of the first six carried at least two. The package totals about 326 MB, and 11 of the 28 records are flagged as redacted.
What’s in Release 07
| Source | Records | What they cover |
|---|---|---|
| Department of War | 25 | An AARO memorandum on a 2026 triangle report, nine Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) files, fourteen Air Force reports from 1949 to 1957, and one 1954 personnel record |
| FBI | 1 | The FD-302 interview form paired with the AARO memorandum |
| Executive Office of the President | 1 | A 1963 National Aeronautics and Space Council memorandum |
| U.S. Government (interagency) | 1 | 1962-1964 correspondence on recovering space fragments |
Four threads run through it, and they do not belong together: one very recent incident, a contractor’s view of a Defense Intelligence Agency program, a stack of early Cold War field reports, and two policy papers that are not about sightings at all.
A 2026 Triangle Report From a Sensitive Site
The freshest incident in the batch is also the one with the most official attention on it. DOW-UAP-D176 is a memorandum for record documenting an AARO debrief of witnesses to a reported observation at a sensitive national security site in the western United States over two days in 2026. The metadata dates it to June.
According to the description, the memorandum records an interview with two federal special agents and folds in a corroborating account from a third official at a separate observation post. The primary event it describes: a triangular object rose vertically, held stationary, then banked and descended into a canyon, with no audible signature and no conventional propulsion features perceived. A second observation followed the next evening, and a later ground search of the accessible area found no visible debris or impact evidence.
Two things stand out. AARO says it considers the incident to warrant further investigation, because the reported shape and motion line up closely with other incidents in the western United States. The description does not say which incidents. The archive does already hold an earlier cluster from the same region and the same kind of witness, federal special agents, in the Western US event records and our analysis of them. Whether the two are connected is not something the descriptions state.
Second, the memorandum itself stops short of any conclusion about the object’s nature or origin, and it says the witnesses’ descriptive language reflects their subjective interpretation at the time. FBI-UAP-D043 is the paired FD-302, the FBI’s interview form. Its description says only that it records a 2026 interview with two federal special agents about an incident at a national security site. The releasing office pairs the two records. It does not say they are the same interview, though the descriptions fit that reading.
Nine More BAASS-Era Files
Release 06 put the AAWSAP paper trail on the record, including the Statement of Objectives, as covered in our Release 06 first look. Release 07 adds nine files from the contractor’s side. BAASS held the AAWSAP contract; these files, dated 2008 to 2010, were written by BAASS, prepared for it, or describe its fieldwork.
- The Project Management Plan (December 2008) lays out the strategy for the contract. Per the description, it argues for studying “craft” or events BAASS already believed showed novel behavior, rather than starting from the state of the art in academic or industrial research.
- Project Capella proposes a data warehouse for “unusual” aerial phenomena, and the MUFON compilation appears to hold topical papers the Mutual UFO Network prepared for BAASS under a separate supporting contract.
- Four monthly reports (March, April, June, November 2009) read like the intake side of a reporting operation. Per the descriptions, BAASS bought UAP information from MUFON, sought to become the FAA’s official reporting point for UAP, built a small field investigation team, and deployed to Brazil. The November report mentions investigations centered on a ranch in Utah and a preliminary report on a “blue orb” incident.
- The April 2010 Utah investigation report records field deployments in March and April 2010: interviews with residents, ranchers, police officers and tribal community members, handheld sensor readings, and planned biosensor experiments. Per the description, it also records reported accounts of “dog-like bipedal creatures,” orbs of light and “little people,” and says BAASS intended to try interactive methods to communicate with the presumed source. The description does not name the property.
- The November 2010 self-assessment presents BAASS’s analysis as technically rigorous. The description says it appears intended to make the case for continuing AAWSAP.
The way to read these is as a contractor’s account of itself. The releasing office’s description reads the self-assessment as advocacy for the program’s continuation. The Utah report records what people reported, and the description’s own wording is “reported” and “purported.” All nine are flagged as redacted.
Fourteen Air Force Reports From 1949 to 1957
The largest block is the oldest: fourteen reports on individual sightings, filed on the Air Force’s standard forms. Four come from Catalina Island, California, between 1949 and 1955, and each shows an official reaction rather than a mystery.
- In 1955, a bright orange object the size of a nickel at arm’s length drew the comment that it was possibly astronomical and did not warrant further investigation.
- In 1953, a round, purplish-white object moved toward Los Angeles over about ten minutes, and local astronomers suggested Jupiter.
- In 1952, three Boy Scouts at a summer camp reported silver “flying saucers” that climbed and then apparently disintegrated. The preparing officer noted no attempt to establish reliability and called the observers’ experience “probably meager at best.”
- In 1949, a letter to Kenneth Arnold, whose 1947 sighting helped launch the flying saucer era, relayed that two people saw six objects. A handwritten note records an Air Force conclusion of insufficient data.
The rest of the block spreads from Saudi Arabia to Alaska. A B-52 crew over Saudi Arabia reported an unidentified return on a gunnery scope for five to seven minutes. A radar return in Morocco changed shape between “V,” “W” and “M,” and Air Force electronics personnel judged anomalous propagation, ship jamming, or birds the most likely explanation. A 1953 report from Germany draws on Tempelhof Airport air traffic logs, where a British European Airways pilot reported red “rockets” fired about a mile ahead of the aircraft.
This block is better read as a record of how the Air Force collected than as a list of unsolved cases. The descriptions repeat a disclaimer that the reporters’ characterizations are subjective and are not conclusive about the objects. They also show how mixed the material was: translated newspaper clippings relayed by an air attaché, a pilot’s report with a weather-balloon caveat, a radar return with an explanation attached.
One small hygiene note: the metadata is not always consistent. D164 is listed with a December 1, 1953 incident date, while its own description says the report gives no exact date and covers a December 8 to 15 weather window. A couple of file names carry a different year than their titles. Read dates in this batch with that in mind.
One more historical record is not a sighting report. D180 is the final personnel record of Colonel Howard M. McCoy, a senior intelligence officer at Air Materiel Command in the years the Air Force started Project Sign and Project Grudge, and one of the officers involved in running them. It is the second personnel record in two releases, after the Navy photographer’s file in Release 06, and it pairs naturally with the Project Sign progress report from Release 04.
Two Policy Papers That Are Not About Sightings
The two smallest files are the ones most likely to be misread. EOP-UAP-D002 is a May 1963 memorandum inside the National Aeronautics and Space Council about a meeting with NASA on coordinating policy for recovering reentering U.S. and Soviet space debris and satellite fragments that might land on foreign soil. USG-UAP-D002 is the wider interagency correspondence from October 1962 to May 1964 on how to receive, analyze and divide such material between the Defense Department, NASA, State and the Atomic Energy Commission.
“Recovery of Foreign Materiel” will draw searches for retrieval stories. Nothing in either description supports that reading: both are about space debris policy. What the descriptions do document is a gap between public and private handling. Draft public statements would have named NASA as the holding authority for foreign material, while private correspondence described a parallel plan to exploit it for technical analysis. Those negotiations never produced a settled policy, and the memo records NASA’s Arnold Frutkin as reacting to the proposed arrangement as “very negative.”
That is a documented fact about space debris in the early 1960s, and nothing more. The same council appears in Release 05’s inquiry into the 1963 Bahia, Brazil incident, which makes these a useful companion set.
Explore This Release
The full set is browsable in the Document Database. The PDFs link directly to the official copies on war.gov; we have not mirrored the roughly 326 MB package.
- The Release Comparator shows how this batch differs from the six before it.
- Archive Statistics has the running count, now 351 records across seven releases.
- The Sighting Map plots the locatable records, from Catalina Island to Sweden.
- The Evidence Explorer explains the source-status label on each record.
Common Questions About PURSUE Release 07
How many files are in PURSUE Release 07?
Our index counts 28 records, all PDFs, totaling about 326 MB. The official data file behind the War.gov page lists the same 28, all of them PDFs.
Which agencies are in Release 07?
The Department of War supplies 25 of the 28 records. The rest come from the FBI, the Executive Office of the President, and a file the release tags as interagency U.S. Government material.
What is the most significant file in Release 07?
Two candidates, of different kinds. The AARO memorandum on the 2026 triangle report is the most recent and most actively open case, with the FBI form beside it. The BAASS group is the most useful for understanding how AAWSAP actually operated, because it is the contractor describing itself.
Is Release 07 the last PURSUE batch?
No. The Department of War says materials will continue to post on a rolling basis, with tranches every few weeks. We have not seen a date announced for an eighth batch.
What to Watch Next
The deeper reads worth doing, in order: whether the FBI form and the AARO memorandum describe the same interview, and which “other incidents in the western United States” AARO has in mind; the Utah investigation report set beside the November 2009 monthly report that first mentions the ranch; and the two space-debris papers, which settle how much of the “foreign materiel” language was about hardware.
The summary is plain. Release 07 is small, has no video, and mostly adds context rather than overturning anything: the BAASS files show a contractor building a UAP reporting operation and, by the releasing office’s reading, arguing for its own continuation, and the early Air Force reports pair each sighting with a suggested explanation or an admission of too little data. What is new is the June 2026 memorandum, a case AARO itself says warrants further investigation.
Flynn Lin is the founder and editor of UFO Declassified. You can reach him at contact@ufo-declassified.com for corrections, tips, or questions about any record on this site. Read more about the PURSUE archive, the Release 06 first look, or browse the Release 07 document set.