The FBI's 2026 Western United States Reports (PURSUE Release 05)
Four FBI witness interview forms, two artist renderings apiece for the red light reports, and ten seconds of thermal video shot by a federal agent who had just been told a radio frequency was detected. All of it happened this year, and the government has published no explanation for any of it.
What did witnesses see at Western United States (exact location redacted by the FBI)?
Four of the eight FBI FD-302 interview forms in PURSUE Release 05 carry the same two entries in the Department of War's own release manifest: Incident Date 2026, Incident Location "Western United States". They are FBI-UAP-D032, "Slow-moving Objects"; FBI-UAP-D033, "Thermally Elevated Aerial Object"; FBI-UAP-D037, "Multiple Red Lights"; and FBI-UAP-D040, also "Multiple Red Lights". An FD-302 is the Bureau's standard form for writing up a witness interview, the document an agent produces after sitting down with somebody and taking their account. It is not an analysis and it is not a finding. It is a record of what a person said, in the agent's summarising third person, and the Bureau's own practice is to write it as soon after the interview as possible.
The clearest of the four is D032, because the Department released the video that goes with it. FBI-UAP-PR007 is ten seconds long. Its official description, published by the FBI on DVIDS, reads: "A U.S. Government Special Agent captured this video footage via hand-held optical thermal imaging device during a 2026 incident in the western United States, as described in FBI-UAP-D032. The footage features two, slow-moving 'black-hot' areas of contrast, visible in infrared imaging." So the cameraman was not a bystander. He was a federal agent, working, holding a thermal optic.
Stefan Becket of CBS News, who read the partially redacted D032, reported the sequence that led to the footage: the agent received a report about a radio frequency being detected and soon pointed a handheld infrared sensor in its direction. The form itself then says, in the agent's words as quoted by CBS: "He saw a black object in the sky. It was not moving fast. He took pictures using the optical device. While observing he saw a second object to the right of the first and took additional photos/videos. The objects were moving together at the same speed." And then, in the same document: "Both were black hot. He lost view of the objects when they traveled a distance out of view. Total observation time was approximately 5 - 10 minutes."
The two red light forms describe something different again. Joe Edwards of Newsweek, reporting on 7 August 2026 after reading the released forms, describes a witness account that begins with a single red light above mountains which then began moving eastward and appeared to be thousands of feet above the ground. Six to 10 additional red lights then appeared overhead. The lights, in the form's phrasing, appeared to "sync up" and travelled together toward the east southeast, with one of them descending before the group went out of sight. The observation ran to roughly fifteen minutes.
The second red light record covers a longer stretch of the same evening. Newsweek gives two episodes, one running from about 8 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. and a second from about 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. One light was estimated at 500 feet above the witness's vehicle. Another, in the form's language, "appeared to stop roughly 6 feet off the ground". That last detail is the one that does not belong to any of the familiar distant light categories, because six feet off the ground is not a range estimate, it is a thing standing next to you.
D033, the "Thermally Elevated Aerial Object", is the one record of the four that the Department flagged in its title as running hot. Newsweek describes a government special agent observing an object that registered as hot on thermal sensors, travelling southbound, and estimated at roughly half the size of a Black Hawk helicopter. A Black Hawk is about 65 feet long including the rotor, so the agent was describing something in the order of 30 feet across, close enough to judge against a familiar airframe.
The FBI also drew what it was told. D037 is paired with two digital renderings, D038 and D039; D040 is paired with D041 and D042. The Department's official alt text for each is precise about what is depicted. D038: "A digital rendering of a person standing next to a vehicle, looking at two red lights in the sky over a mountainous landscape." D039: "A digital rendering of a night sky with a large, bright object surrounded by concentric circles, viewed through binoculars." D041: "A digital rendering of a person standing in a desert landscape at night, with several red light sources visible in the sky." D042: "A digital rendering of a light streak in the sky over a mountainous landscape, as viewed through binoculars." Two of the four are framed through binoculars, which means the witnesses were not glancing up. They went and got optics.
More footage and images of this sighting
DVIDS record for FBI-UAP-PR007, carrying the FBI's own verbatim description of the footage View source
Archived Department of War PURSUE Release 05 page, showing the four 2026 western United States renderings with their official captions View source
What is the official explanation?
The Department of War published PURSUE Release 05 on 7 August 2026 at war.gov/UFO. PURSUE is the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, the rolling declassification programme set up under an executive order President Trump signed in January 2026. The tranche runs to 41 records drawn from the Department of War, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of State and the Executive Office of the President, and spans 1950 to 2026. It followed releases on 8 May, 22 May, 12 June and 10 July 2026. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell framed it in the department's own words, quoted by Misty Severi of Just The News: "Today, the Department of War is publishing the fifth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files". CBS News reported the department's commitment that it "will release additional files on a rolling basis".
CBS put the number of FBI interview forms in this tranche at eight. All eight carry redactions, and most are paired with artist renderings prepared by the Bureau showing the objects the witnesses described. Newsweek gives the department's stated redaction rationale: material was withheld to protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP. That is the reason there is no town, no county and no state attached to any of these four records. The location line in the manifest reads "Western United States" and stops there.
The machine readable manifest is where the pairings are established. It lists D032 as an FD-302 titled "Slow-moving Objects" with a video pairing to FBI-UAP-PR007; D033 as an FD-302 titled "Thermally Elevated Aerial Object" with no paired media; D037 as an FD-302 titled "Multiple Red Lights" paired to renderings D038 and D039; and D040 as a second FD-302 also titled "Multiple Red Lights", paired to renderings D041 and D042. The renderings themselves are published on the release page under a single shared caption, identical on all four: "This image is an artistic interpretation of a reported incident potentially involving unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) in the western United States in 2026." The FD-302 records carry the plainest alt text in the entire tranche: "An FBI interview transcript."
The video record is the most fully documented single artifact. FBI-UAP-PR007, "Slow-moving Objects," 2026, sits on DVIDS with a Date Posted of 08.07.2026 at 07:15, a VIRIN of 260101-D-D0360-9099, a runtime of 10 seconds, a category of B-Roll and a location field reading simply "US". It is marked public domain as a work of the United States federal government, and the record is filed against the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The Date Taken field reads 01.01.2026. Across the PURSUE corpus that first-of-January value has now been shown repeatedly to be a systematic placeholder rather than a real incident date, so the honest publication is the year and nothing finer.
There is a limit to this file that the archive states plainly rather than papering over. www.war.gov returns HTTP 403 to every non-browser client, and the FD-302 PDFs themselves were therefore not readable when this page was written. Everything above about the contents of D032, D033, D037 and D040 rests either on the Department's own published manifest titles and captions, on the FBI's own verbatim video description on DVIDS, or on named reporters at CBS News and Newsweek who did open the forms and quoted them. The archive has not read the transcripts. Where a quotation appears here it is credited to the outlet that published it, and no characterisation of the documents beyond those quotations should be read as the archive's own reading of the paper.
On the substance, the Department has offered nothing. PURSUE records are published as unresolved by definition. No agency has produced an identification for the slow-moving pair, for the thermally elevated object, or for either red light episode. The All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office has published no case resolution for any of the four. The official record, as of publication, consists entirely of the observations themselves.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The most unusual thing about this group of records is who the witnesses are. At least two of the four accounts come from federal agents. The FBI's own DVIDS description for PR007 does not hedge: the footage was captured by "A U.S. Government Special Agent" using a hand-held optical thermal imaging device. Newsweek's account of D033 likewise describes a government special agent watching an object register hot on thermal sensors and sizing it against a Black Hawk. These are people whose day job includes writing down what they saw accurately and being cross-examined on it later.
What the agent in D032 actually did is worth reading as behaviour rather than as testimony. He was told a radio frequency had been detected. He did not shrug it off. He picked up a thermal optic and pointed it at the bearing. He photographed what he found, kept watching, noticed a second object appear to the right of the first, took further stills and video of that one too, tracked the pair until they went out of range, and then wrote down that the total observation ran approximately 5 to 10 minutes. Nothing in that sequence is the behaviour of someone who thought he was looking at a satellite pass or an airliner. It is the behaviour of someone documenting an unknown while it is still in front of him. That the Department later published his ten seconds of footage means the Bureau treated the material as worth declassifying rather than filing.
The red light witnesses are less identifiable, because the redactions strip everything that would identify them, but the renderings tell you something about how they observed. Two of the four images the Bureau drew are explicitly framed through binoculars. In D039 the witness is looking at a large bright object surrounded by concentric circles; in D042 at a light streak over mountains. A witness who fetches binoculars and holds an unresolved light in them for long enough to describe concentric structure has moved well past a glance at the horizon. The vehicle in D038 and the desert setting in D041 also suggest people out in open country at night with a clear horizon and no city glow, which is the best possible viewing condition and also, awkwardly, the condition under which distance is hardest to judge.
There is at least one corroborating account. Reporting on the release noted a civilian phone interview logging similar incidents which a second witness backed up, and the two separate red light forms are themselves two separate interviews producing the same object description under the same manifest title. Whether D037 and D040 record two witnesses to one event or two events on different nights is not established by anything the Department has published, and the archive does not claim to know which.
What the witnesses believed the objects were is entirely absent from the public record. The FD-302 is a summary of an interview, not an interpretation, and every one of these forms is redacted. No witness name, no agency affiliation, no stated conclusion and no follow up has been released. The one inference the documents do support is that these people reported. Somebody went to the FBI, or was already in it, and sat for an interview that produced a numbered form. In 2026, with the reporting stigma that still attaches to this subject, that is not a small act.
Is the FBI's 2026 Western United States Reports (PURSUE Release 05) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one: how could all of this be entirely ordinary. The candidate that reflexively gets raised for any train of lights is a Starlink pass, and it deserves the first look, because the constellation now exceeds 10,000 satellites and a freshly deployed batch stays bunched into a line of moving points for one to three days. Starlink trains have generated genuine UFO flaps over Washington State, Southern California and Texas. But the fit is poor here on three counts. Starlink flares are white, not red. A satellite train crosses the visible sky in a few minutes on a fixed great circle heading, it does not have members that descend out of the group, and it certainly does not put one member 500 feet over a parked vehicle or stop one six feet off the ground. And a satellite pass is not a thermal contrast in a hand-held optic at short range.
Drones are the strongest prosaic candidate for the red lights and should be conceded that much. A multirotor carries a red navigation light, several flown together can hold loose formation and appear to "sync up", they hover, they descend, and a group of hobbyists or a commercial light show operator could account for six to 10 lights over open country. The western United States also has extensive military test and training airspace where unpublicised UAS activity is routine. What drones do not comfortably explain is an object roughly half a Black Hawk's size running hot and southbound, or a slow silent pair tracked on thermal for up to ten minutes and cued by a radio frequency detection, or a light that comes to rest six feet above the ground with a witness present and does not resolve into a visible airframe.
Aircraft landing lights account for a great many red and white light reports, particularly the apparently stationary ones, since an aircraft inbound on a long final looks motionless for minutes at a time. Chinese lanterns are a real and underrated source of drifting orange and red lights that rise, hover, and go out one by one, and a group of them released together will drift on a common wind and look exactly like lights that "sync up" and travel east southeast. Planets can be ruled in for a single bright unmoving object but not for a moving group. Thermal camera artifacts are worth taking seriously in D032 specifically: uncooled microbolometers produce fixed pattern noise, dead pixel clusters and non-uniformity blotches that can read as small persistent dark shapes, and a hand-held sensor moving with the operator can carry such an artifact across the frame in a way that mimics motion. Ten seconds of released footage is not enough for anybody outside the government to test that.
One technical point in the official description needs stating carefully rather than repeated as a slogan. "Black hot" is the name of a thermal display polarity, not a property of an object. In black hot mode the sensor renders warmer things dark and cooler things pale, the inverse of the familiar white hot view. Read by that standard trade definition, the agent's line that both objects were black hot says they were warmer than the sky behind them, which would point toward anything with an engine, an exhaust or a sun warmed skin. There is a competing reading, that the agent was loosely describing two dark shapes on a screen without naming the polarity, in which case the objects would have been colder than the background and the prosaic candidates thin out sharply. The Department has published neither the sensor model nor its settings, so the released material does not settle which reading is right. Cutting slightly against the warm reading is that the Department gave a different record in the same group the explicit title "Thermally Elevated Aerial Object", which suggests the FBI does distinguish objects that ran hot and did not apply that label to D032. The archive flags this as unresolved rather than picking a side.
Pass two: what resists the ordinary explanations. Start with the fact that is easiest to lose in the file numbers. These are witness interviews from the current calendar year, conducted, written up, declassified and published inside a single year, and one of them comes with the interviewing agency's own agent's own footage. Almost every case in this archive is a document about something that happened decades ago. This is the FBI writing down what its own people saw a few months before publication.
The cue is the second thing that resists. The D032 encounter did not begin with somebody looking up. It began with a radio frequency detection, and a federal agent then pointed a thermal optic along that bearing and found two objects there. That is a sequence in which an independent sensing modality preceded and directed the visual acquisition, which is a materially stronger evidential shape than a lone eyewitness account. It also implies the objects were emitting or reflecting something in the radio spectrum, which is not a property of lanterns, planets or camera noise.
Then the repetition. Four separate interview records, two of them under an identical title, all filed against the same broad region and the same year, describing red lights in formation over mountains and desert. If these were four unrelated misidentifications the Bureau would be unlucky in a very specific way. And the behaviour described inside them does not average out into one prosaic profile. A pair of slow objects holding station relative to each other on thermal, a group of six to 10 red lights that assemble overhead and depart on a common heading with one member peeling off downward, one light 500 feet over a car, one apparently at head height, and a hot object half the size of a Black Hawk going south. That is not a single misperception repeated. It is a cluster.
Weigh honestly against all of it that the archive has not read the transcripts, that no radar data has been published, that the renderings are artists' impressions commissioned after the fact and carry no evidential weight beyond illustrating testimony, that the released video is ten seconds long with no metadata beyond a placeholder date, and that the redactions remove exactly the information which would allow independent checking against flight tracks, launch schedules or airspace notices. Nobody outside the government can currently falsify any of these accounts, and that cuts both ways.
The tier is Unknown. There is no official narrative to dispute: the Department publishes these as unresolved, the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office has offered no finding, and no named analyst has advanced a method shown identification of any of the four objects. Drones and lanterns are live possibilities for the red lights and thermal artifacts are a live possibility for the video, but each is a plausible reconstruction rather than a demonstrated cause, and none of them addresses the radio frequency cue or the object reported six feet off the ground. The case stands on the FBI's own paperwork and its own agent's camera, and it stands unexplained.
Sources
- web.archive.org/web/20260808030642/https://www.war.gov/UFO/?releaseDate=Release+05
- www.dvidshub.net/video/1017801/fbi-uap-pr007-slow-moving-objects-2026
- www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-pentagon-5th-release-documents-videos/
- www.newsweek.com/new-ufo-files-details-fbi-records-of-2026-sightings-12296595
- justthenews.com/government/security/pentagon-releases-fifth-batch-ufo-files-comprised-41-records
- www.actionnews5.com/2026/08/07/fifth-batch-ufo-files-released-contains-cia-notes-artistic-renderings/
- insiderpaper.com/pentagon-releases-new-ufo-files-5th/
- yournews.com/2026/08/07/7148390/pentagon-releases-fifth-batch-of-declassified-ufo-records-including-unresolved/
- www.leonarddavid.com/pentagon-uap-release-5-sky-sightings-of-black-triangles-highlighted/
- www.tampafp.com/pentagon-releases-41-new-ufo-files-covering-decades-of-sightings/
- www.cnn.com/2026/08/07/us/video/pentagon-ufo-files-video-fbi-renderings-vrtc
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
