The Pentagon's fifth PURSUE release, posted August 7, adds 41 files from the widest set of agencies yet - and a new kind of evidence: FBI witness forms, including federal agents describing objects they could not identify over the western U.S. this year.
Somewhere over a mountain range in the western United States earlier this year, a federal agent trained a thermal camera on two slow-moving patches of “black-hot” contrast - shapes that read as colder than the sky behind them, drifting with no obvious engine. Then the agent did something telling. According to Newsweek’s read of the file, they deliberately filmed a Black Hawk helicopter in the same shot, so that whoever reviewed the footage later would have a yardstick for the object’s size.
That account is one of the newest items in the Pentagon’s fifth release of declassified UFO records, posted on August 7, 2026. According to CBS News, the batch runs to 41 files drawn from the widest mix of agencies so far - the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and the Executive Office of the President - with documents dating from 1950 to this year. What sets this drop apart is not a single spectacular video. It is a new kind of paperwork.
Most of the earlier PURSUE releases leaned on military sensor footage. This one introduces FBI FD-302 forms - the Bureau’s standardized record of a witness interview, the same document type agents fill out after questioning anyone in a federal investigation. CBS News reports the release includes eight of these forms, several paired with agency artist renderings of what the witness described.
PURSUE stands for the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, the rolling disclosure process President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to begin earlier in 2026. The first batch went live on May 8; more followed on May 22, June 12, and July 10, the last of which centered on a silent object over a Texas nuclear-weapons plant. The August 7 files, a Pentagon spokesman said, will be followed by more “on a rolling basis.”
The FD-302s matter because they change what is on the table. A grainy infrared clip invites arguments about lens artifacts and distant aircraft. A signed interview record from a named federal agent, describing what they saw in their own words, is a different class of document - and several of them, Newsweek reports, describe sightings from 2026, not the archival cases that filled earlier releases.
The western U.S. accounts are unusually specific. Newsweek reports that one witness logged three separate sightings inside a single five-hour window: dash-shaped red lights near the terrain, an object that appeared to hover roughly 500 feet above their vehicle, and a glow that descended into a dry wash. Another account describes red lights over a mountain line that began drifting east, followed about 15 minutes later by six to ten more lights that appeared overhead, moved in sync, and traveled off to the east-southeast before one dropped sharply away.
The thermal case is the one with the Black Hawk in frame. The agent watched two slow “black-hot” anomalies for several minutes before they faded. Filming a helicopter alongside them was a small, deliberate act of documentation - an attempt to leave a measurable record rather than a story. “Black-hot” simply refers to a thermal camera setting in which cooler objects appear dark against a warmer background, the same infrared imaging that produces most military UAP video.
The release is not all recent or domestic. CBS News notes it also includes six videos from an AC-130J gunship over the Gulf of Oman in 2021, which recorded roughly 25 “cold orbs,” and an FBI form describing a 500-foot triangular shape seen near Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002. But the presence of 2026 sightings, by government personnel, on American soil, is what makes this batch feel less like a history project.
None of this is the government saying it has found aliens. Every one of these cases carries the same label: unresolved. That is a specific term of art. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, uses it for reports it has neither explained away nor confirmed as anything unusual. As AARO has said in its recent reporting, described by DefenseScoop, a persistent “lack of timely and actionable sensor data” continues to constrain its ability to close cases, and the office maintains it has found no verifiable evidence that any UAP involves extraterrestrial technology.
That is the honest tension in this release. The FD-302s add credibility of a human kind - trained federal agents, on the record - while the thermal clips add exactly the kind of ambiguous sensor data AARO says it struggles to resolve. Neither, on its own, closes a case.
Why it matters is less about proof than about process. For the first time, the public can read the government’s own witnesses describe recent, unexplained sightings in the same standardized forms used for any federal investigation - and watch how an agent tried, in the moment, to make the record measurable. Whether that record ever resolves the objects is a separate question, and one the Pentagon has not answered.
It is the only maritime case in the Pentagon's newest UAP report, which logged 319 sightings in a year and could resolve only about a third. AARO says the Virginia encounter is still unexplained.
The Pentagon's fourth PURSUE release dropped July 10 - 40 newly declassified files including a lockdown at America's nuclear warhead factory, a star-shaped object tracked over the Yellow Sea, and a 1949 meeting of atomic scientists stumped by mystery lights.
Rep. Eric Burlison arranged White House-level access to classified UAP material, toured a key naval test facility, and says the intelligence officials who briefed him cannot identify the glowing, plasma-like objects he consistently sees on restricted footage.
