The Pentagon's Sixth UAP Records Tranche

Briefing

On the eighteenth of September 2026 the U.S. Department of War published the sixth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), hosted at WAR.GOV/UFO [1]. Reporting on the tranche describes 71 files — 55 PDFs, 15 videos and one audio file, dated between 1952 and 2025, most of them redacted — dominated by documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) [5]. The Department states that it and partner agencies are already working on the next release, which will be issued on a rolling basis [1].

What the Department itself documents and what the press reports are not the same thing, and this file keeps the two apart throughout.

Sequence of events

The second of September 2026

• DefenseScoop reported that the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office was pursuing a sole-source subscription contract for pre-1990 historical UAP records held by the National UFO Historic Records Center, a New Mexico nonprofit led by the UAP historian David Marler, to support a congressionally mandated review of federal UAP involvement back to 1945 [9].

The fourteenth of September 2026

• The Department of War issued a legal waiver permitting current and former service members, civilian personnel and contractors with access to UAP-related National Defense Information to disclose it to official PURSUE representatives [7].
• The waiver supersedes civil and administrative enforcement provisions in existing non-disclosure agreements and Special Access Program Indoctrination Agreements, and does not cover communications outside the PURSUE channel [7].
• DefenseScoop reported that the waiver explicitly authorises covered disclosures without triggering breach-of-agreement penalties, and noted that the published text addresses civil and administrative enforcement without specifying criminal prosecution [8].
• Jordan Flowers, executive director of the Disclosure Foundation, described the waiver as “a meaningful step toward establishing the facts and toward the transparency and accountability the American public has been asking for” [8].

The eighteenth of September 2026

• The Department issued a statement attributable to Sean Parnell, Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs and Chief Pentagon Spokesman, announcing “the sixth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) files as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE)” [1].
• The same statement says the collection “continues to be housed on WAR.GOV/UFO,” that the Department “will release additional files on a rolling basis,” and that “The Department of War and our agency partners are actively working on the next release of UAP files” [1][2].
• CBS News reported the release comprises 71 files — 67 from the Defense Department and four from local law enforcement in Colorado — with 64 of the 71 containing redactions [5].

Documentary record

The portal’s own download paths record the preceding tranches as dated the twenty-second of May 2026 (release 02), the twelfth of June 2026 (release 03), the tenth of July 2026 (release 04) and the seventh of August 2026 (release 05), with the sixth bundle published under sept-18/release-06 as a single ZIP archive [3].

The archived release-06 page names nine items directly: DOW-UAP-D102, a Project Blue Book file on the Tremonton film, Utah, 1952; DOW-UAP-D110, the AAWSAP Statement of Objectives, July 2008; DOW-UAP-D111, the AAWSAP Solicitation and Original Order, September 2008; DOW-UAP-D117 and DOW-UAP-D129, AAWSAP Defense Intelligence Reference Documents on metallic glasses for aerospace applications (December 2009) and metallic spintronics (March 2010); DOW-UAP-D154, a transcript of a 1952 presentation by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book; DOW-UAP-PR159, historical film of reported UFOs, Utah, 1952; and LLE-UAP-PR001 and LLE-UAP-PR002, unresolved UAP reports from Colorado, 2023 [3].

CBS News reported that the tranche includes 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents produced for AAWSAP — a DIA programme it describes as established in 2008 and concluded in 2012 — covering theoretical topics including warp drives, wormholes, antigravity and invisibility cloaking [5]. Among them, CBS described a 38-page 2010 study examining “evidence of unintended injury to human observers by anomalous advanced aerospace systems,” which documented three antenna engineers with unexplained medical symptoms likened to radiation illness [5]. CBS also reported that the four Colorado law-enforcement files are cellphone videos from October 2023 showing objects with “red, blue, and green flashing lights” [5], and quoted the Ruppelt transcript: “about 20% are very good reports offered by very reliable people and…just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn” [5].

The material is mirrored outside government: John Greenewald Jr. operates The Black Vault, which reproduces the PURSUE releases as a searchable archive with OCR text, transcripts and subtitles [10].

What the videos can and cannot show

A preprint by Jacob Haqq-Misra (Blue Marble Space) and Ravi Kopparapu (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), both of the UAP Science Advisory Council — arXiv 2608.12445, submitted on the twelfth of August 2026, revised on the twenty-eighth of August 2026, not peer-reviewed — analysed the 112 PURSUE sensor videos released before this tranche [6][4]. It concludes that “No PURSUE video provides this set of information” — range, observer velocity, aspect angle and camera field angle — and that the videos “in their present form cannot fully resolve unidentified cases or conclusively indicate anomalous velocities” [6]. For DOW-UAP-PR113 the authors state the available data cannot distinguish “a bird flying at close range” from “a large craft traveling at Mach 5 a kilometer away”; for DOW-UAP-PR149, a vessel of known size in frame yields an upper bound of Mach 0.4 [6]. Kopparapu has put the point plainly: “Something can look extremely anomalous when we are seeing only a small part of the information needed to understand it” [4]. Writing for The Debrief on the fourth tranche, Micah Hanks assessed that several objects in those videos likely represent balloons or sensor artefacts [12]. This is the same measurement problem that governs every sensor-derived case in the archive, including the Tic Tac encounters.

Lower-confidence material

One video, DOW-UAP-PR133, is listed as “Unresolved UAP Report, Middle East, 2025,” with an accompanying mission report, DOW-UAP-D107, said to describe the object as “look[ing] like a white round orbit… moving as fast as 500 miles per hour” [11]. This rests on a single aggregator source, UFO FEED, dated the eighteenth of September 2026; the underlying war.gov page could not be fetched for verification, and the archive treats the detail as unverified [11]. The same page characterises the object as changing trajectory and velocity multiple times and manoeuvring intelligently — a description of the footage, not a measurement, and one that runs directly into the finding that apparent motion in PURSUE videos cannot be converted to physical velocity without range data [6][4]. Descriptions of a small luminous orb recur across the corpus; they are descriptions, and this file does not treat them as more.

Open questions

1. The primary Department statement gives no file counts, date ranges, redaction totals, contributing agencies or item list. All of those figures come from secondary reporting [1][5].
2. The war.gov item-level metadata file that drives the portal listing was not retrievable for verification at time of writing, returning HTTP 403 from outside the United States, so per-file titles beyond the nine named on the archived page are unconfirmed [3].
3. No release states why 64 of the 71 files remain redacted, nor which exemption categories apply [5].
4. Nothing in the fetched sources identifies what the objects in any release-06 video actually were. No case resolutions accompany the tranche.
5. The text of the fourteenth of September waiver does not state whether criminal liability is affected [7][8].
6. No fetchable source gives a duration, sensor type, or originating combatant command for DOW-UAP-PR133; figures circulating in search summaries could not be traced to any retrievable page.
7. No primary document was located confirming the total number of files released across all six PURSUE tranches to date.

Status

This file is CONFIDENTIAL — admitted on the strength of a named departmental statement and the archived government portal listing, which together document the release, its hosting, its rolling schedule and nine of its items [1][2][3]. The file counts, the AAWSAP document descriptions and the Colorado footage characterisation rest on single-outlet reporting and are marked as reported throughout [5]. The DOW-UAP-PR133 material rests on one aggregator and is held as unverified [11]. Imagery referenced in the release sits on war.gov and media.defense.gov; U.S. federal works are generally public domain, but individual release-06 thumbnails were not retrievable to confirm, so licence is treated as unverified. This file is open and expected to change: the Department has stated the next tranche is already in preparation [1].

References

1. Department of War (2026). “Department of War Publishes Sixth Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files on WAR.GOV/UFO”, statement attributable to Sean Parnell, 18th September 2026 (archived)
2. GlobalSecurity.org (2026). Reprint of the Department of War sixth-release statement, 18th September 2026
3. Department of War. PURSUE — Release 06 portal page, war.gov/UFO/release/06/ (archived 18th September 2026)
4. The Debrief (2026). “Scientists Just Analyzed More Than 100 UAP Videos Released by the Pentagon’s ‘PURSUE’ Program”
5. CBS News (2026). “Pentagon releases more UFO files, including documents on secretive military program”
6. Haqq-Misra, J. and Kopparapu, R. (2026). “Limits on Kinematic Inference from the PURSUE Airborne Sensor Videos”, arXiv:2608.12445 — preprint, not peer-reviewed
7. Department of War (2026). “Department of War Issues Legal Waiver to Authorize Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosures to PURSUE”, 14th September 2026, via GlobalSecurity.org
8. DefenseScoop (2026). “Pentagon offers new ‘targeted legal relief’ for UAP whistleblowers supporting Trump’s PURSUE work”, 14th September 2026
9. DefenseScoop (2026). “Pentagon seeks access to vast private UFO records collection”, 2nd September 2026
10. The Black Vault. “The Black Vault Launches Searchable UFO Files Release Archive”
11. UFO FEED (2026). “DOW-UAP-PR133 — object described as 500mph, changes trajectory and velocity multiple times”, 18th September 2026. Single aggregator source; underlying war.gov page unverified
12. Hanks, Micah (2026). “Pentagon Releases New Batch of UAP Videos and Historical Files, But Clarity Remains Elusive”, The Debrief, on the fourth PURSUE tranche of 10th July 2026