UFOs Near U.S. Nuclear Weapons Facilities
Declassified PURSUE Release 02 records document a recurring pattern of UAP sightings near U.S. nuclear-weapons facilities — Sandia Base, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Kirtland AFB, and the Pantex Plant in Texas — spanning 1948 to the present.
Declassified U.S. government UAP records show a recurring association between UAP sightings and U.S. nuclear-weapons facilities. The PURSUE Release 02 catalog (2026-05-22) consolidates this pattern across four primary documents: 116 pages of 1948–1950 green-fireball correspondence centered on Sandia Base and Los Alamos (DOC-141); a Pantex Plant ground-surveillance image of a domed object (DOC-138); James Tuck Los Alamos correspondence on atmospheric vortices and ball lightning (DOC-139); and a 1986 Pajarito Astronomers Club invitation to a Los Alamos physicist's UFO talk (DOC-140). The cluster spans seven decades and three U.S. nuclear-handling sites. AARO does not assert causation, but the geographic and institutional concentration is documented in the primary record.
“A Pantex Unidentified Object Incident Report that includes an enhanced image from ground surveillance radar tower.”
The 1948–1950 Sandia and Los Alamos cluster
The earliest documented U.S. UAP cluster is centered on the New Mexico nuclear-weapons complex. The Office of Special Investigations 17th District tabulated 209+ sightings between August 1949 and May 1950 over Sandia Base, Kirtland AFB, Los Alamos, Holloman, Albuquerque, and Alamogordo. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, the U.S. military's lead meteoricist, investigated and concluded the green-fireball phenomenon was not meteoric. His Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Reports are in DOC-141.
Pantex Plant (Texas)
The Pantex Plant outside Amarillo, Texas is the United States' principal nuclear-weapons assembly and disassembly facility. DOE-UAP-D001 (UAP.WATCH ID DOC-138) is a Pantex Unidentified Object Incident Report containing an enhanced ground-surveillance-radar tower image of an unidentified object. The PURSUE-released enhanced image shows a domed/bell-shaped object captured by the facility's perimeter surveillance system. The Department of Energy has not released the specific date of the incident; the document was redacted with reference '(b)(3) (UCNI)' — Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information.
James Tuck and Los Alamos atmospheric vortex research
James L. Tuck — a British physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and led Los Alamos ball-lightning research in the 1950s and 1960s — wrote to the U.S. Army Engineering School at Fort Belvoir in December 1970 requesting 'the recipe that was used for the simulated atomic bomb demonstrations' to study 'the large atmospheric vortices' referenced in Dr. Edward Condon's 'Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects.' Tuck also received a 1970 handwritten eyewitness account from a LANL employee describing 'green lights weaving in and out of Mountain peaks' over Los Alamos and the Jemez Mountains during 1948–1951. DOE-UAP-D002 (DOC-139).
Pattern in the federal record
The four nuclear-facility records in PURSUE Release 02 — Sandia, Pantex, Los Alamos correspondence, Pajarito Astronomers — are concentrated within a 400-mile radius across New Mexico and Texas. They span 38 years (1948 to 1986). AARO has not published a formal assessment connecting these incidents to one another, but the underlying primary documents are now public in machine-readable form. Researchers can cross-reference DOC-138 through DOC-141 against the broader 209-entry OSI sighting log for spatiotemporal correlation.