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.
On the morning of September 1, 2015, two security officers at the Pantex Plant outside Amarillo, Texas, spotted something moving slowly over the facility’s perimeter and gave chase. Pantex is not a typical military base. It is the only facility in the United States where nuclear warheads are assembled, disassembled, and maintained - the single location through which virtually every warhead in the US arsenal has passed.
What the officers described, according to a newly declassified Department of Energy document, was a diamond-shaped object approximately four feet tall and two feet wide at the base, tapering thinner toward the top. It was traveling northward at 10 to 15 miles per hour. They examined it through binoculars. They could identify no propulsion system. They heard nothing at all. The facility was placed on lockdown. After a few minutes, the object continued north and disappeared off-site.
Investigators classified the encounter as “non-threatening” because the object never approached the most sensitive assets. The case was not explained.
That document is now public. Released on July 10 as part of the fourth PURSUE batch - the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, an initiative launched by the Department of War in May 2026 - the fourth tranche adds 40 files: 19 videos, 14 documents, four audio recordings, and three images drawn from the CIA, FBI, NASA, Department of Energy, and the armed services.
The most recent footage in the fourth release dates to January 1, 2025. An infrared sensor aboard a US military platform on an Indo-Pacific Command mission over the Yellow Sea captured what the government describes as “an area of contrast resembling a six-pointed star.” The object is tracked for several minutes on the recording. A second piece of footage in the same batch appears to track a separate object over the East China Sea for several minutes.
The Department of War cautions that neither description should be interpreted as an official conclusion about what the objects are. Both were classified until this week.
Pentagon officials said the July 10 release is not the last. Additional UAP records are being prepared under the administration’s transparency directive. No timeline for future releases has been given.
The oldest material in this fourth batch dates back 77 years. In the months following the first nuclear weapons tests, unexplained bright-green fireballs began appearing regularly over New Mexico - low, fast, and concentrated near the nuclear research complex at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was built.
On February 16, 1949, the US Atomic Energy Commission convened a formal conference at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory specifically to work out what the objects were. The attendees included Laboratory Director Norris Bradbury, physicist Frederick Reines (who would later receive a Nobel Prize for discovering the neutrino), and Edward Teller, the theorist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb.” Lincoln LaPaz, head of the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics and a firsthand observer of the fireballs, told the conference he had interviewed more than a hundred witnesses and could find “nowhere among meteorists” examples of conventional meteors behaving this way. The fireballs appeared “in full intensity instantly,” traveled on horizontal paths, and consistently appeared in the airspace around the country’s most sensitive nuclear sites.
The conference reached no conclusion. LaPaz privately advised the military that the objects were either classified US test devices - or Soviet surveillance equipment. Neither theory was ever confirmed.
The declassified transcript of that 1949 meeting is now part of the PURSUE public record.
The PURSUE releases now span four tranches covering incidents from the late 1940s through 2025. No single release has contained definitive confirmation of the objects’ origins - no confirmed adversary aircraft, no confirmed advanced technology program, no official explanation of any kind for the cases highlighted in each batch.
What has accumulated across the releases is a documented pattern: objects reported by trained observers near the most sensitive facilities in the US nuclear complex, across nearly eight decades, showing no acoustic signature and no identifiable propulsion, and generating no official resolution.
The Pentagon has declined to speculate on what any of the released objects might be.
AARO's annual report on unidentified phenomena, missing for months, arrived this week. Of 319 new sightings, the office resolved 114 - balloons, satellites, birds, one rocket and a single jetpack - while a shortage of sensor data left most cases open.
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.
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.
