PURSUE · Release 06

The sixth PURSUE release published two 2025 mission reports in which Central Command MQ-9 crews reported unidentified phenomena. On 29 July at 20:22 Z, a crew from the 65th Special Operations Squadron described 'six small spherical objects grouped together', with an estimated altitude of 22,000 feet, an estimated speed of 480 miles per hour and the note that they were 'able to change directions quickly and simultaneously'. On 29 October, another crew tracked for nine minutes something its operator described as 'a white round orbit' at up to 500 miles per hour. What both share, and it is the file's finding, is the paper: three years after the 2022 Iraqi report, which filed an equivalent observation in a generic box, the Air Force form now carries a whole UAP module, with fields for propulsion, intelligent control, advanced capabilities, effects on persons and recovered material. They are partly filled, and all the kinematics are marked 'estimated': the reporting infrastructure grew, the sensor that should feed it did not.

On 5 May 2022, two MQ-9 crews from different squadrons observed on the same day, over the same area of Iraq, objects one to two metres across moving erratically at between 80 and 180 miles per hour. The first tracked them for an hour and forty minutes and kept finding them again each time it returned the sensor to its points of interest, with a dust storm degrading collection; the second saw them that same evening at 4.98 nautical miles, flying at flight level 200. PURSUE published both reports on 18 September 2026 (DOW-UAP-D109 and D106), and they are among the most granular in the archive: time to the second, grid, own-ship state and the sensor identified. They also contain an internal contradiction that explains half the collection: the narrative calls the objects 'UAPs', while the second report's structured field 'observed activity description' reads 'UAS' — unmanned aircraft system. Both crews closed the matter with the same sentence: 'the UAPs did not hinder the mission.'

In October 2023 a local law-enforcement officer in Colorado filmed four clips of a light on the rear camera of his phone, describing it as silent and showing red, blue and green flashing lights, and escalated the report to AARO. PURSUE published it on 18 September 2026 under a new series — LLE, for local law enforcement — the programme's first whose origin is neither a combatant command nor a federal agency but a patrol officer. The release includes a transcript of the officer narrating live: he says he is watching 'another orb' some 300 feet up, that he checked radar and found no aircraft in the area, and that it had been stationary for about fifteen minutes. AARO itself warns that a phone's autofocus distorts the apparent morphology and kinematics of a distant subject at high magnification — precisely the mechanism that would explain a fixed, silent light of shifting colours.

In 2023, Indo-Pacific Command reported to AARO an unidentified anomalous phenomenon over the Yellow Sea, recorded by an infrared sensor aboard a military platform. PURSUE published it on 18 September 2026 in three clips totalling three minutes and twenty-four seconds. The official records describe no object: they speak of an 'area of contrast' the sensor tracks, and one of them contains a sentence whose negation appears to have dropped out, inverting its sense.

In March 1952, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt — director of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson AFB — gave a 'flying saucer' lecture to scientists at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (a FFRDC founded in 1951 at Hanscom AFB, Massachusetts). The talk was captured on reel-to-reel tape and catalogued as 'AF-ATIC-FILM, 03/52.' The recording remained in MIT Lincoln Lab's possession for 74 years. On June 24, 2026, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) confirmed that MIT Lincoln Lab acknowledged the file's existence and agreed to hand it over to Congress. It is the first known recording of an official USAF briefing on UAP/flying saucers to civilian defense contractors, made four months before the 'Invasion of Washington' of July 1952. On 18 September 2026 the sixth PURSUE release published the audio of a March 1952 Ruppelt presentation together with its full transcript; the month, the speaker, the subject and the medium all match, but no document in the release names the laboratory, so identification with the reel being demanded remains unestablished.

On July 2, 1952, U.S. Navy Chief Photographer's Mate Delbert C. Newhouse filmed in 16mm near Tremonton, Utah a group of ~12 bright objects moving in formation. The Navy photographic labs (Anacostia) analyzed the film and concluded they were not aircraft, balloons or birds; the 1953 Robertson Panel reviewed it and attributed it to birds.

U.S. DoD federal program (~USD 22M, 2008–2010), requested by Senator Harry Reid, contracted to the DIA and executed by Robert Bigelow's BAASS from the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. It produced 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) on exotic physics and biological effects. The first formally documented U.S. federal program after Project Blue Book — with contracts, paid receipts and testimony under declaration — and the direct precursor to AATIP (Elizondo) and the disclosure wave that culminates in AARO and the 2023–2025 congressional hearings. The case also folds in the three instrumented-measurement campaigns at the property —NIDS (1996–2004), BAASS and Brandon Fugal's televised team— and their results, of far lower evidential quality than the program's paperwork.