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Release 01 · 2026-05-08 · 158 records

The largest, most consequential tranche. Depth on DoW mission reports, first release of a formal PURSUE portal.

Release 01 opened the PURSUE portal on 2026-05-08 with 158 records. Department of War material dominated the tranche: 70 files, including a run of dated mission reports from CENTCOM theaters (Iraq, Syria) and a set of 28 short infrared and electro-optical videos. NASA contributed 12 items, primarily historical Apollo-era anomalies. A large share of the tranche (roughly half) carries no agency prefix in the war.gov filenames, meaning the originating command was not disclosed in the release metadata itself. This is the tranche the disclosure conversation is anchored to.

Agency mix
  • Unspecified74
  • DoW70
  • NASA12
  • State2
Media mix
  • pdf116
  • video28
  • image14

What mattered

  1. Gimbal, ATFLIR infrared video, 2015

    The most cited sensor-derived UAP video in the modern era, republished with the Department of War as originating command. The technical debate over gimbal-lock artifacts vs. genuine anomalous behavior is still live and is documented on the case page.

  2. GoFast, ATFLIR infrared video, 2015

    Parallax and altitude estimation dispute. Prevailing technical view: the apparent speed is a range-parallax artifact, actual object is likely a balloon or slow-drifting debris. The video's inclusion in a formal DoW release adds provenance without settling the analysis.

  3. Nimitz Tic Tac, USS Princeton radar and F-18 encounter, 2004

    Multi-sensor engagement with pilot and radar corroboration. Long the strongest publicly cited modern UAP incident. Release 01 attaches formal DoW provenance and restates the underlying observations; the raw radar tapes are still not attached.

  4. Apollo 17 lunar surface anomalies, 1972

    NASA-hosted photographic anomalies from the mission catalog. Included in PURSUE with the government's own framing. Historically interesting; evidentiary weight is low relative to modern sensor cases.

What was overhyped or already public

  1. Previously public FBI Vault material

    Portions of the tranche restated FBI files already available at vault.fbi.gov since 2011. New context around them, but not new records. Reuters and analysts noted this on day one.

  2. The bare video files without radar or sensor telemetry

    Several of the short videos went viral without their sensor context. In every case where a prevailing explanation exists (gimbal-lock, parallax, aircraft), it survives the higher-quality version. Better resolution is not new evidence.

What is still missing

  • Raw radar tapes for the Nimitz 2004 engagement.
  • Full ATFLIR sensor telemetry (range, aircraft attitude, targeting-pod state) for Gimbal and GoFast.
  • Agency prefixes on roughly half the tranche. The war.gov filenames leave the originating command undisclosed for many files.
  • Congressional or IG oversight annotations. The records ship without commentary on adjudication.

Verdict

Release 01 is the load-bearing tranche of PURSUE so far. It moved a large volume of previously scattered or previously classified material into one authoritative portal, and it attached formal DoW provenance to the cases the disclosure conversation revolves around (Nimitz, Gimbal, GoFast). It did not confirm non-human origin for any incident. Where prevailing explanations exist they continue to hold, though for a small number of cases the record remains unresolved and the missing sensor telemetry keeps them that way.