On July 10, 2026, the Department of War posted its fourth batch of declassified UAP files to WAR.GOV/UFO — the dedicated public portal established under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, known by its pointed acronym, PURSUE. The release adds roughly 40 new records: videos, documents, and images pulled from Pentagon archives, NASA mission files, Department of Energy vaults, and the CIA. Every file carries the same uncomfortable label: unresolved.

The most striking footage in this drop was captured on January 1, 2025, by an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform operating under Indo-Pacific Command. The 18-second clip, catalogued as DOW-UAP-PR104, shows what military analysts describe as "an area of contrast resembling a six-pointed star" moving across the Yellow Sea — near the intersection of Chinese, North Korean, and South Korean airspace. A second clip from the East China Sea, captured later in 2025 under the same Indo-Pacific Command, shows another unresolved contrast shape against cloud cover. Neither object has been identified. Neither event was publicly acknowledged at the time of the encounter.

Historical material rounds out the release and, in some ways, hits harder than the recent footage. Three still images from NASA's STS-80 mission in 1996 — Space Shuttle Columbia in low-Earth orbit — show unidentified objects whose nature has never been officially determined. Those images, catalogued under NASA-UAP-D030 through D032, join a 1949 Department of Energy transmittal letter documenting a high-level conference at Los Alamos National Laboratory convened specifically to address a wave of "green fireball" sightings by military and scientific personnel near the nation's premier nuclear weapons facility. A corresponding 1949 Army analysis of flying-object incidents includes a hand-drawn sketch of a cylindrical craft. These are not crackpot letters mailed to a senator. They are classified internal communications between the people who built the atomic bomb.

Previous releases under PURSUE surfaced material that pointed toward something the government finds genuinely difficult to explain. A 1948 Project Sign Progress Report — also included in this fourth batch — predates the establishment of the more famous Project Blue Book and represents the U.S. military's earliest systematic attempt to catalogue the phenomenon. The document includes a photograph of a delta-winged aircraft prototype, offered as a possible explanation for some sightings; the implication, of course, is that other sightings had no such neat answer. A 1955 CIA memorandum on unconventional aircraft sightings is also newly declassified here — the intelligence community was apparently no less perplexed than the military.

Among the more viscerally strange entries is DOW-UAP-PR115, infrared footage from 2019 over what is now officially called the Gulf of America — a blob-shaped object with trailing appendages that has circulated in UAP research communities as the "floating brain" video. A military service member with 28 years of experience described the object as "unlike anything I had seen" in their career. That is not a fringe witness. That is a trained observer with nearly three decades of military aviation experience telling the government, on record, that they cannot categorize what they saw. The government's response was to classify it for years and then release it without explanation.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth framed the release in explicitly political terms, stating that it demonstrates "the Trump Administration's earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency" and that the Department of War is "in lockstep with President Trump" on the matter. That framing is worth examining plainly. The executive push for UAP disclosure is real and is producing tangible results — actual files, actual footage, actual documents that were previously withheld. But transparency that is managed, sequenced, and branded as a political achievement is still managed transparency. PURSUE coordinates review across dozens of agencies and tens of millions of records. The public is seeing what survives that review process. What doesn't survive it remains invisible.

The PURSUE initiative, which also involves the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, defines its scope as records where "a definitive determination cannot be made due to insufficient data." That is a carefully constructed legal standard. It means files for which the government does have an explanation — classified advanced drone programs, sensor artifacts, misidentified foreign aircraft — are almost certainly being filtered out before they reach WAR.GOV. What the public gets, by design, is the genuinely weird residue. That residue is still substantial: sightings near nuclear weapons facilities, unidentified objects photographed from a Space Shuttle in orbit, and whatever is making six-pointed infrared signatures over contested Pacific waters in 2025.

A fifth release is coming. The Department of War stated that additional files will be published on a rolling basis. The UAP disclosure story, whatever its ultimate shape, is no longer a matter of leaked footage and congressional whisper campaigns. It is now a live, ongoing government publication record — one that the public can access, download, and examine without clearance. That is new. What the files actually prove remains, as the government itself keeps admitting, unresolved.