PURSUE Release 03: The FBI's Orb Tapes Land, and the Internet Is Still Replaying May's

The third PURSUE tranche arrived today, June 12, 2026, and it is a different animal from the first two. Releases 01 and 02 were built around military sensor footage: targeting pods, infrared trackers, drone feeds. Release 03’s 72 new files include six videos, and every one of them came through the FBI. Which means the camera operators this time are not weapons officers. They are people standing in their backyards.

What the new clips show

The two featured clips are worth describing precisely, because the descriptions in the FBI case files are more interesting than the headlines.

“Orbs Over the Pond” (FBI-UAP-PR003, October 2024). At 6:51 p.m. local time somewhere in the northeastern United States, a witness filmed a light source hovering over a pond an estimated 2,700 feet away, below the horizon line, not in the sky. The FBI file describes a “plasma-like sphere” that intermittently changed shape and luminosity. That clip is embedded on this page, hosted from the official release. Watch the full four and a half minutes: the light brightens, dims, and at points appears to deform rather than simply move.

“Northeastern Orb Sighting” (FBI-UAP-PR004, July 2025). A witness arriving home from work at around 9 p.m. filmed an intense light hovering roughly 25 feet off the ground, below a tree line, not a celestial object, not an aircraft light at altitude. It is 49 seconds long and the proximity claim is what makes it notable: 25 feet is close enough that misidentified planets and distant aircraft, the two workhorse explanations for orb reports, do not apply if the estimate is right. If the estimate is right, distance estimation of a point light at night is notoriously unreliable.

The other two real-footage clips, “Triangle Orbs” (November 2021) and “Red Orb Rotation” (March 2022), also northeastern U.S., follow the same pattern: bright luminous sources, civilian cameras, no resolution.

Two of the six “videos” are not footage

Worth flagging plainly, because it will be missed in the sharing frenzy: FBI-UAP-PR005 and PR006 are labeled digital recreations, artistic interpretations of a reported incident near a sensitive national security site in the western United States in October 2023, built to accompany a witness’s narrative statement. They are illustrations of testimony, not evidence. If you see those clips circulating as “Pentagon UFO footage,” that framing is wrong.

The pattern: PURSUE is moving down the evidence ladder

Release 01 gave us military sensor data. Release 02 gave us the famous clips, more on those below. Release 03 gives us civilian cellphone video routed through FBI tip lines. That is not nothing: it shows the bureau actually ingests and archives these reports. But it is a step down in evidentiary weight, because a cellphone pointed at a distant light at dusk cannot establish distance, size, speed or anything else that separates an anomaly from a drone with an LED. The strongest material in this tranche may actually be the documents, including a 1949 U.S. Army “flying saucer” evaluation study and a 2008 CIA report on a sighting at Harare’s international airport that analysts debated as either foreign reconnaissance or something stranger.

Meanwhile, the May videos are still doing the numbers

The clips people are actually arguing about online are still the Release 02 drops from May 22. We now host the four most-discussed ones, re-encoded from the official DVIDS originals:

• Syrian UAP “instant acceleration” (DOW-UAP-PR051), the most-shared clip of the entire program so far. An MQ-9 Reaper holds an infrared lock on an object that then accelerates and changes direction abruptly. Skeptics argue the apparent jump is a camera tracking artifact; the file itself makes no claim either way.
• The Lake Huron shoot-down (DOW-UAP-PR071), 47 seconds of targeting-pod video of the February 2023 engagement, the only public footage of a U.S. fighter destroying a UAP. Our full analysis of what the footage does and doesn’t show.
• Four UAP in formation over water, Iran (DOW-UAP-PR050), ten seconds, four objects, trails visible, August 2022.
• East Coast UAP, December 2019 (DOW-UAP-PR086), a crosshair-locked object over water that predates the 2023 shoot-down wave by three years.

The honest summary

Three tranches in, PURSUE has published 294 files and 84 videos, and the score remains: zero resolved cases, zero physical evidence, and a growing public archive of things the U.S. government says it cannot identify. That archive is genuinely new, five years ago none of this had a release mechanism at all. But “unidentified” is still doing all the work in every file name, and nothing in Release 03 moves that needle. The FBI orb tapes are the government formally agreeing with thousands of civilian witnesses about one thing only: there was a light, and nobody knows what it was.