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

On January 13, 1981, on United States Air Force letterhead, a deputy base commander typed two words at the top of a one-page memorandum and sent it to the British Ministry of Defence. Unexplained Lights. The memorandum was unclassified. It described a pulsing red light that maneuvered, broke into five separate white objects, and was seen by three patrols across two nights at Royal Air Force Bentwaters and Royal Air Force Woodbridge in Suffolk, England. Near the end of the first paragraph, in dry military prose, the deputy commander wrote a sentence that did not behave like military prose. The animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy.

This is Episode 10 of Unresolved Signals. It picks up where the Project Blue Book triptych ended: with Brigadier General Carroll H. Bolender's October 1969 memorandum stating, in writing, on Air Force letterhead, that UFO reports of national security significance were processed through JANAP 146 and Air Force Manual 55-11, not Project Blue Book. Episode 9 read the sentence. Episode 10 follows what the channel actually carried after Project Blue Book closed. It runs the September 1976 Iran encounter, where two Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantoms were vectored toward an unidentified object south of Tehran, both aircraft experienced electromagnetic effects, and the second F-4's weapons control panel failed when the pilot attempted to fire on a smaller object that had detached from the primary. The October 12, 1976 DIA Defense Information Report Evaluation called the report, in its own words, an outstanding report, and distributed the package to the Joint Chiefs, NSA, CIA, and the White House. Then Rendlesham. Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt's December 1980 patrol with a radiation survey meter and a micro-cassette recorder. Eighteen minutes of live tape. The unclassified memorandum to the Ministry of Defence. Then the centerpiece. From late 1979 through 1988, the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations, with Special Agent Richard C. Doty as the named operational lead, ran a sustained psychological operation against Paul Frederic Bennewitz Jr., a physicist and Coast Guard veteran whose company sat directly adjacent to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. Bennewitz had picked up emanations from a classified program. AFOSI's response was not to ask him to stop. It was to feed him forged United States government documents, hand-delivered, until his picture of reality was unrecoverable. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital in September 1988. Doty has since acknowledged the operation on camera, in Mark Pilkington's 2013 documentary Mirage Men and George Knapp's 2019 Mystery Wire interview. Then the ending. From 2001 to 2004, Major General William Neil McCasland served as commander of the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base. On the morning of February 27, 2026, McCasland was last seen at his residence on Quail Run Court Northeast in Albuquerque. As of recording, he remains missing. Of the eight individuals currently tracked in the open-source corpus on the missing-and-deceased scientists pattern, four have direct institutional links to Kirtland, Sandia, Los Alamos, or the Air Force Research Laboratory. An intelligence analysis paper attached to the present-day investigation explicitly cites the AFOSI Bennewitz operation of 1980 as the documentary precedent for the risk environment it is describing. Forty-five years. The same city. The same kind of ground. The channel Brigadier General Bolender named in 1969 is still operational. We do not know what it carries today. Every claim is sourced to an original document. Full bibliography: unresolvedsignals.com/episodes/ep10-what-got-classified Sponsored by What's Near Me Now: nearmenow.us

On August 9, 1966, three months before the Condon Committee began its formal work, the committee's own coordinator sat down at a typewriter and produced a one-page memorandum. He addressed it to two senior administrators of the University of Colorado. He called it "Some Thoughts on the UFO Project." He surveyed the internal politics. He laid out the case for the school accepting the Air Force contract. He used the word "trick" to describe the structure he was proposing. The trick, he wrote, would be to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study, while the scientific community would see a group of nonbelievers with almost zero expectation of finding a saucer. The next sentence was the operating instruction: stress investigation, not of the physical phenomena, but rather of the people who do the observing. Three months before the work began, in writing, the coordinator of the United States Air Force's independent scientific review of unidentified flying objects had laid out how the verdict would be reached.

This is the third and final episode of the Project Blue Book triptych. It picks up where Episode 8 ended, in April 1966, with Gerald Ford's hearings ordered and an independent civilian review on its way to the University of Colorado. It runs through the Portage County chase of April 17, 1966, where four Ohio and Pennsylvania officers chased an unidentified object 85 miles across two states and were told by Project Blue Book they had chased the planet Venus. Six months later, in a Cleveland Plain Dealer interview carried on the Associated Press wire, Officer Dale Spaur told the country what the Venus explanation had cost him. The Air Force itself, on its own letterhead, in a May 17, 1966 letter from one of its information officers, conceded that one of the four officers had been driven off his police force by the consequences of the explanation.

Then the Condon Committee. The Low memo, read in full. James E. McDonald walking into a House Committee on Science and Astronautics hearing on July 29, 1968, alone, the only senior atmospheric physicist of his rank in the country saying on the record that Project Blue Book was scientifically incompetent. The leak of the Low memo to Look magazine in May 1968. Mary Louise Armstrong's resignation. Saunders and Levine fired. J. Allen Hynek's October 7, 1968 letter to Colonel Raymond Sleeper, eight numbered observations, twenty years of complicity finally written down. The Condon Report. The National Academy of Sciences endorsement. The 1997 CIA admission, by Gerald Haines, that high-altitude reconnaissance flights accounted for over half of the late 1950s and 1960s UFO reports. The December 17, 1969 termination announcement, dated to avoid extending the project into a fourth decade.

And the Bolender Memo. October 20, 1969. The single sentence on Air Force letterhead that establishes that UFO reports of national security interest were not, and as of that date had not been, processed through Project Blue Book. They went through JANAP 146 and Air Force Manual 55-11, the operational reporting channels. Project Blue Book was not the destination of the reports the Air Force itself considered nationally significant. Sixteen pages of attachments referenced in the memorandum are missing from the Air Force's files. They have never surfaced.

Every claim is sourced to an original document. Full bibliography at unresolvedsignals.com.

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