UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 02 · MAY 22, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · ODNI-UAP-D001USPER Narrative, Senior USIC Official
Most files in the PURSUE release are forms, clips or short summaries. This one is a story, told in the first person by a serving senior official of the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC). “USPER” in the title is government shorthand for a U.S. person, a category that brings privacy protections. The narrative covers a single evening in late 2025 on a weapons test range in the western United States, and it is unusually detailed.
How the evening unfolded
The author writes that the team set out by helicopter in daylight to look into loud thuds in the range’s mountains, which had coincided with orb reports on earlier nights. Hours of low, terrain-hugging flight turned up only debris the team identified as wreckage from years of rocket and weapons testing, plus a large cave entrance they could not land beside.
After sunset, with the pilots using infrared and night-vision equipment and the author watching unaided, radar returns sent them up range. A ground team reported a “super-hot” object on infrared that split in two; by that team’s account it rose to within ten feet of the helicopter before speeding off, and the pilots, watching through night-vision goggles, also saw it split. Hovering at about 700 feet, the author describes a distant swarm of orange orbs, then two oval orbs flaring just above the rotor disk, joined by more below them in a “T” for 10–15 seconds. The author says similar orbs later seemed to pace a flight of fighter jets, and says they took no photos.
Reading it carefully
This is one participant’s recollection, not an analysis, and it offers no explanation. “Nap-of-the-earth” means flying as low as the terrain allows; the file was corrected after first saying “map-of-the-earth,” and the jets’ altitude is printed as “23,00 feet,” which leaves the intended figure unclear. Infrared images taken from the ground by other federal officials during the same exercise were published on May 8, 2026, though the release does not say which files they are. On the terms used, see FLIR and UAP.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released May 22, 2026, quoted in full
This document is a first-hand account written by a currently serving (May 2026) senior U.S. intelligence official. The official was part of a team investigating reports of unusual noises and sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena in and near a sensitive U.S. military facility in late 2025. From the official’s vantage point as a helicopter passenger, the official recounts encountering unidentified “glowing orbs” both at close range and at a distance. The account describes an apparent high-speed object moving low to the ground, which appeared to split in two and accelerate away in two different directions. It also describes numerous higher-altitude “orbs,” some of which the official assessed to be in close proximity to the helicopter. This account is accompanied by infrared imagery taken during the same exercise by other federal officials from the ground, originally released on war.gov/UFO on May 8, 2026.
May 26, 2026, correction: The document originally posted to the PURSUE collection of UAP-related records on May 22, 2026, under the name “ODNI-UAP-D001, USPER Narrative, Senior USIC Official,” contained a typographic error in the second paragraph, describing a helicopter flight profile as “map-of-the-earth.” The correct military aviation term for this profile is “nap-of-the-earth.” This document has been updated to reflect this correction.