Summary:
On 18 September 2026 the United States Department of War posted the sixth tranche of declassified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena records under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. The tranche comprises 71 files — 55 documents, 15 videos and one audio recording — and is available at war.gov/UFO. Sixty-seven of the files originate with the Department; the remaining four are videos supplied by Colorado local law enforcement.
The historical records date from 1952. They centre on a colour motion-picture film taken by a Navy photographer near Tremonton, Utah, and the Air Force investigation that followed it. Also included are an audio briefing by the officer then directing that investigation, in which he told an audience that about 20% of the cases then on file were good reports from reliable people, and a correspondence file weighing whether to recover an object reported to have entered the sea off Okinawa in 1950.
The modern records are military sensor tracks and phone footage from a Colorado officer. They include infrared and electro-optical video of single and clustered spherical objects recorded over the Middle East, infrared tracks over the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, and mobile-phone clips of silent red, blue and green lights. Most of these cases carry no official analytical resolution.
The largest single body of material is a 2008 Defense Intelligence Agency study contract with Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. The papers produced under it are not accounts of UAP encounters but commissioned reviews of speculative aerospace science — surveys of concepts such as wormholes, warp drive, antigravity and invisibility cloaking, assembled to gauge where future breakthroughs might lie.
Detailed Report
1. Release Overview and Program Context
The Department of War published the sixth PURSUE tranche on 18 September 2026 through the official portal at war.gov/UFO. The material was released under the presidential order of February 2026 directing the government to locate and disclose its records on unidentified anomalous phenomena.
The tranche spans more than seven decades, from a 1950 sea-entry report documented in 1952 to infrared sensor footage recorded in 2025.
Prior coverage of the programme:
· Release 01 — 8 May 2026: Declassified UFO Files Now Public: First Drop Under PURSUE
· Release 02 — 22 May 2026: PURSUE Release 02: 72 New Declassified UAP Files Revealed
· Release 03 — 12 June 2026: Third Tranche of Declassified UAP Records Released by U.S. Department of War
· Release 04 — 10 July 2026: U.S. Department of War Releases New UAP Documents
· Release 05 — 7 August 2026: PURSUE Release 05: 41 Declassified UAP Files Unsealed
2. Historical Files, 1952: Film, Investigation and a Lost Object
The historical portion of the tranche comprises four related records: the Tremonton colour film, the Project Blue Book investigation that examined it, an audio briefing delivered by the officer then directing the Air Force investigation, and an Air Force correspondence file concerning a reported sea entry off Okinawa.
The film was taken by Navy Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse, an aerial photographer with more than 1,000 hours of camera experience. He recorded it at 11:10 on 2 July 1952, approximately seven miles north of Tremonton, Utah, capturing a group of bright objects as they moved in a westerly direction.
The copy posted to the portal is a digitised 16-millimetre print held by the National Archives, running slightly over one minute. It contains no horizon, aircraft or terrain to establish scale, and shows only a cluster of bright points moving and drifting against a clear sky. No feature on the print resolves into a wing, fuselage or bird.
Newhouse addressed the limits of his own footage in an 11 August 1952 letter to Hill Air Force Base. He described “a group of about ten or twelve objects — that bore no relation to anything I had seen before — milling about in a rough formation and proceeding in a westerly direction,” and stated that “there was no reference point in the sky and it was impossible for me to make any estimate of speed, size, altitude or distance.”
Project Blue Book, the Air Force programme that investigated unidentified flying objects from 1952 to 1969, regarded Newhouse as a reliable witness. Early assessments considered birds, balloons and a mirage. In an evaluation dated 1 June 1956, Colonel John G. Eriksen recorded that identifiable seagulls appeared in some frames and that a subsequent blind review had characterised the bright points as “bird reflections in the strong sunlight.” Eriksen concluded that “the unanimity of opinion present in all evaluations made in this case leaves little reasonable doubt that the UFOs in the Newhouse film were indeed seagulls.”
The audio recording in this tranche is a briefing delivered by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt in Boston on 26 March 1952, while he was directing the Air Force investigation that became Project Blue Book. “Going back, we have approximately 800 cases now on record,” he said. “About 20% are very good reports offered by very reliable people and are just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn.”
He noted that these reports originated with military aircrews, commercial pilots and other qualified observers, and that some clustered near Los Alamos, Albuquerque and Oak Ridge. He added that radar had at times indicated airspeeds between 1,000 and 3,500 miles per hour, none of which had been confirmed, and that the Air Force had reached no settled conclusion as to the nature or origin of the phenomena.
The fourth record is a 253-page Air Force flying-disc correspondence file covering September to December 1952. Within it, Technical Sergeant Emery Guzi reported that an unidentified flying object had entered the sea off Okinawa in November 1950, and he provided a marked map and a sketch.
Air Force officers subsequently disagreed over the location, variously identifying the village of Ginama, a shallow lagoon at Oku, and the deep water off Hedo-saki. On Guzi's sketch the object would have entered at a depth of approximately 10 fathoms — about 60 feet — and any search would have required diving across roughly half a square mile. On 2 October 1952 Colonel William A. Adams assessed a recovery effort as impractical and directed that the papers be retained in the event Blue Book later chose to pursue it. The file records no dive and no recovery.
3. Modern Encounters: Middle East, China Seas, Colorado
The modern records in this tranche are military sensor tracks supplied by United States Central Command, additional infrared footage from the China seas, and phone video from a Colorado officer.
The earliest are two clips recorded in May 2022 over the Middle East during Operation Inherent Resolve. Each shows objects tracked against the background as the sensor alternated between infrared and daylight modes. The crews assessed the objects at speeds between 80 and 180 miles per hour and at roughly one to two metres in size, with altitude undetermined and the reporting aircraft at 20,000 feet. The reports state that the objects did not interfere with the mission.
Further infrared tracks recorded in 2023 cover the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. They show a bright mark moving over the water. Those tracks do not give a speed.
The Middle East footage resumes in 2025 with two of the tranche's more detailed clips. On 29 October a sensor tracked a single bright object for four minutes and 58 seconds; the crew described it as resembling “a white round orbit” and moving “as fast as 500” miles per hour. A second 2025 clip, roughly one minute long, records a short line of bright points that the crew identified as six small spherical objects, noting that they “seemed agile” while travelling at 480 miles per hour.
The final records are four mobile-phone clips filmed by a Colorado law-enforcement officer in October 2023 — the first local-law-enforcement footage posted to the portal. The officer described the lights as silent and as flashing red, blue and green, stating in the accompanying transcript, “I am watching another orb that is flying approximately 300 feet up off the ground.” Consumer mobile-phone cameras autofocus and process imagery automatically, which can distort the apparent shape and motion of a distant light source.
4. The Defense Intelligence Agency's Speculative Science Files
The largest body of material in the tranche derives from a 2008 Defense Intelligence Agency study effort conducted under contract by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies. The tasking directed the contractor to survey potential foreign aerospace advances projected through 2050, including developments in lift, propulsion, power, materials and what the statement of objectives termed spatial and temporal translation — movement not achieved through conventional aerodynamic flight.
The documents produced under the contract are Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, a series of commissioned literature reviews prepared for analysts. They are not flight-test reports and do not assert that the technologies surveyed are achievable. Thirty-seven are included in this tranche, most of which had previously been released under the Freedom of Information Act. The most significant are grouped below.
Spacetime, gravity and exotic propulsion
· Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy (April 2010) reviews the concept of a hypothetical tunnel connecting two distant points without traversing the intervening space, and notes that general relativity does not indicate how such a structure could be constructed.
· Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions (April 2010) examines propulsion achieved by contracting space ahead of a craft and expanding it behind, and concludes that the required energy remains unattainable.
· Antigravity for Aerospace Applications (March 2010) assesses schemes to cancel or shield the Earth's gravitational pull, evaluated against the physics established as of 2010.
· Negative-Mass Propulsion (January 2011) considers propulsion using matter that would respond to gravity in reverse, and states that the existence of such matter has not been demonstrated.
· Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum Spacetime Metric Engineering (March 2010) asks whether the fabric of spacetime itself could be shaped to drive a craft without a conventional engine, and finds the energy required far beyond what existed in 2010.
· The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research (March 2010) tracks experimental claims that spinning superconducting discs produced a gravity-like effect, noting that the expected signals were minuscule, the results were not cleanly reproduced, and the underlying theory remained disputed.
Quantum-scale concepts
· Concepts for Extracting Energy from the Quantum Vacuum (April 2010) reviews proposals to draw usable power from empty space treated as an active field rather than as nothing, and finds the schemes undeveloped and unconfirmed.
· The Space Communication Implications of Quantum Entanglement and Nonlocality (March 2010) examines whether the link between entangled particles could carry a controllable message across space, and concludes that standard quantum rules do not permit a usable communication system built that way.
· Quantum Computing and Utilizing Organic Molecules in Automation Technology (December 2010) surveys early quantum computers and the use of organic molecules as switching elements in automated systems, as those fields stood in 2010.
· Quantum Tomography of Negative-Energy States in the Vacuum (January 2011) addresses how the negative-energy states invoked by wormhole and warp-drive concepts might be measured, without producing them.
Nuclear, fusion and high-energy propulsion
· Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion (March 2010) reviews a fusion method that confines its fuel with electric fields rather than magnets, assessing its use as a neutron source and as a possible compact engine.
· Advanced Nuclear Propulsion for Manned Deep Space Missions (March 2010) surveys reactor- and nuclear-pulse concepts for driving a crewed ship far beyond Earth orbit in place of chemical rockets, as they stood in 2010.
· Positron Aerospace Propulsion (March 2010) treats the energy released when positrons annihilate ordinary matter as a possible fuel, and identifies the production and storage of positrons as the principal obstacle.
· Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion I and II (November 2010) examine fusion reactions designed to minimise neutron emission as a theoretical basis for deep-space propulsion.
Directed energy and photonics
· Pulsed High-Power Microwave Source Technology (January 2010) surveys short, high-intensity microwave emissions for weapon and sensor applications.
· State of the Art and Evolution of High-Energy Lasers (March 2010) provides an assessment of the high-energy laser field as of 2010.
· Laser Lightcraft Nanosatellites (November 2010) examines lofting small kilogram-scale spacecraft using ground-based or onboard laser beams in place of carried fuel.
The remaining reference documents cover advanced materials and a range of other subjects. The materials papers address biomaterials, metallic spintronics, metamaterials for aerospace applications, and invisibility cloaking. Others examine high-frequency gravitational-wave communications, the tracking of vehicles at hypersonic velocities, a statistical treatment of the Drake equation, and the cognitive limits on operating multiple unmanned spacecraft simultaneously.
Conclusion
The sixth PURSUE tranche places the Tremonton film, the Project Blue Book assessment, Ruppelt's account of the Air Force's unresolved caseload and the Okinawa correspondence file into the public domain. It posts them alongside the recent Central Command and law-enforcement sensor records and the 2008 Defense Intelligence Agency study contract and its commissioned reviews. The material spans more than seven decades.
The tranche does not establish the identity of the objects in the Tremonton film or the modern sensor tracks. Nor does it assert that any concept examined in the Defense Intelligence Reference Documents has been realised. Processing of additional records for subsequent releases continues.