Special Episode: Inside the PURSUE UFO Files | What the Pentagon's 2026 Disclosure Actually Contains

n May 8, 2026, the United States Department of War launched a website at war.gov/UFO and released 161 records under a program called PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. Scientific American headlined the release: skeptics aren't impressed. The War Zone said the archives would leave you shrugging. MSNBC told readers to prepare to be underwhelmed. The dominant takeaway across mainstream coverage was that the Pentagon had published a lot of paper and almost nothing of substance. This is Special Episode 3 of Unresolved Signals. We read every word, watched every frame, and ran our own forensic analysis on all 28 videos in the release. We organize the corpus into three honest buckets: material that survives skeptical scrutiny, material that does not survive scrutiny and we say so, and material that Congress specifically named in writing and which did not arrive. Bucket one. A SECRET//NOFORN incident report by a senior US intelligence official describes a six-hour helicopter encounter in 2025 with multiple orbs in a redacted location in the western United States. One orb came within ten feet of the helicopter. In the witness's own first-person words, the orbs appeared to break off and pursue a US military aircraft. The Pentagon's own analysis office, AARO, designated a second file, the Western US Event briefing slides, as among the most compelling within its current holdings. Three teams of federal law enforcement officers, six agents in total, witnessed orange orbs launching smaller red orbs at least five times over two days in 2023. AARO went out afterward and measured the geometry. The 12-to-18-meter orange orb is on the record. Apollo astronaut testimony from Michael Collins, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott is preserved verbatim in the release. The FBI Hoover continuity from 1947 to 1966 is in the file, with the 1949 SAC Letter stating that flying discs were believed to be Soviet missile experiments, and the 1950 order to investigate UFO author Frank Scully for Communist ties. Bucket two. Of the 28 videos, our forensic pass concludes 18 do not resist prosaic explanation on visual evidence alone. We name them. We name what they look like. We are honest that the skeptics are partly right. Then there is the COMETA file. For 25 years the UAP community has cited COMETA as a French government report. The Pentagon released the file with the original delivery cover and Jon Cypher's own handwritten retraction preserved inside: I misspoke. It is a private. Not government. Report. We make the correction cleanly. Bucket three. Representative Anna Paulina Luna sent the Pentagon a list on March 31, 2026, naming 46 specific UAP videos by callsign, IIR number, and date. PURSUE delivered 28 generically labeled videos. The Lake Huron F-16 AESIR11 AIM-9X shootdown of February 12, 2023, the most famous modern domestic-airspace incident, is confirmed absent. All 19 callsigns Luna named are absent. The USCG C-144 Tic Tac and the Columbus, Ohio airport incident are also absent. Either PURSUE silently relabeled Luna's files with operational metadata stripped, or PURSUE delivered different material. Both interpretations are stories. Tranche 2 is rumored for June. We will know more soon. The most important file the Pentagon released this week is not what the press has been talking about. Every claim is sourced. Full bibliography: unresolvedsignals.com/episodes/special-ep03-inside-the-pursue-files Sponsored by What's Near Me Now: nearmenow.us