UFO Sightings: The 2026 Pentagon Catalog
Comprehensive index of declassified U.S. government UFO/UAP sightings released under the 2026 PURSUE program — 162 files spanning 1947 to 2025 with locations, sources, and primary documents.
UFO sightings on the U.S. federal record fall into three categories: historical FBI/USAF memos from the 1947–1960 era, modern Navy and Air Force aircrew encounters from 2004 onward, and trans-medium events catalogued by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). The Pentagon's PURSUE Release 01, published 2026-05-08, consolidates 162 files — 120 PDFs, 28 videos, 14 images — covering 26 named incidents and a longer tail of 400+ catalogued reports. AARO has resolved one marquee case (the 2017 Navy GOFAST video, attributed to parallax at ~13,000 feet altitude) and rates eight cases formally "unresolved." The most-witnessed historical sighting outside the federal catalog remains the Phoenix Lights (March 1997, thousands of Arizona witnesses). UAP.WATCH provides an interactive map and full-text index of every PURSUE entry.
“Continued and recent reports from qualified observers concerning this phenomenon still makes this matter one of concern.”
Historical sightings (1947–1960)
The earliest U.S. government UFO records are FBI and U.S. Air Force memoranda from the late 1940s. The 1947 FBI Dallas field memo to Director Hoover described a hexagonal object "suspended from a 20-foot balloon by cable" recovered in New Mexico. The same year, Wright Field's Air Material Command formally acknowledged "continued and recent reports from qualified observers concerning this phenomenon" — the predecessor document to Project SIGN. A 1948 Top Secret Air Force Intelligence report opened with the line: "For some time we have been concerned by the recurring reports on flying saucers." A 1950 Idaho FBI memo expressed concern that unexplained sightings could cause "hysteria, or panic" among the public.
Cold War era (1960–2000)
Cold War-era sightings on the U.S. record include the Apollo 12 (1969) and Apollo 17 (1972) lunar anomalies — released in PURSUE as NASA-sourced imagery — and a series of State Department diplomatic cables from Papua New Guinea, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, and Mexico spanning 1985 to 2025. The 1994 PanAm Tajikistan cable is the most-quoted of these: a commercial pilot at 41,000 feet observed an object making "circles, corkscrews and 90-degree turns at rapid rates of speed and under very high G's" and assessed it as "possibly extraterrestrial and under intelligent control." The Phoenix Lights of March 1997 are not in the federal catalog but are widely considered the highest-witness-count modern U.S. event.
Modern military encounters (2004–present)
Modern military UAP encounters dominate the post-2004 record. The USS Nimitz "Tic Tac" event (2004) and the USS Theodore Roosevelt GOFAST/GIMBAL clips (2015) defined the modern Navy UAP narrative. AARO resolved GOFAST in 2026: "the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet." PURSUE adds U.S. Air Force CENTCOM mission reports from Iraq (May 2022), Syria (July 2022), the Mediterranean (January 2024), and the Indo-Pacific (2024 "football-shaped object" and INDOPACOM "misshapen ball of white light" with halo). FBI black-hot infrared captures from September and December 2025 round out the most-recent record.
How to read the PURSUE catalog
Every entry in PURSUE Release 01 has a unique DOW-UAP identifier (e.g., DOW-UAP-D14 for the Iraq May 2022 mission report) and a classification status — DECLASSIFIED, SECRET//DECLASSIFIED, or UNCLASSIFIED. AARO assigns one of four statuses: corroborated, anomalous, unresolved, or resolved. UAP.WATCH lets you filter by year, region, agency, and status, and shows the underlying PDF or DVIDS video link for every entry. For incidents with redacted text, the redaction reason — national security (b)(1), statute (b)(3), personal (b)(6), law enforcement (b)(7) — is rendered as a clickable bar.