PURSUE Release 01 went live Friday with seventeen image assets, two Apollo entries, and a press-release numbering scheme that already implies a much larger internal catalog. Subsequent reporting has put the file count at roughly 162 across FBI, DoD, NASA, and State Department holdings, with incident geographies in Iraq, Syria, the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden, and Greece. That is more than I credited the portal with on launch day. It is still a fraction of what is publicly known to have happened to American strategic infrastructure in the last two and a half years alone.
The point of this piece is to lay out that wider map. Not the Apollo curiosities. Not the legacy infrared blooms from 2013. The places where, right now, large unidentified objects keep showing up at things we care about: bombers, carriers, missile fields, fighter wings, intelligence centers, oil rigs, nuclear power plants, and laboratories where the Q-clearance vault is kept.
The pattern is not subtle.
Air Force bases, modern wave
You probably know the headliners: Joint Base Langley-Eustis (December 2023, F-22 base, the case that broke the modern story), Wright-Patterson (December 2024, multi-night, NOTAM-closed airspace, FOIA-released sworn statements describing silver cubes and a black cube at 16,000 feet), and Barksdale (March 2026, B-52 base, multiple waves of 12 to 15 jam-resistant drones, “non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links, and resistance to jamming”).
Less reported in the same window:
Edwards AFB, CA. October 2024, US officials confirmed drone swarms similar to the Langley pattern.
MacDill AFB, FL, CENTCOM headquarters. Raised force protection to Charlie in March 2026 around the Iran strike window.
Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, NJ. Same FPCON Charlie posture, March 2026.
Whiteman AFB, MO, the B-2 base. Flagged in NORTHCOM commander Gen. Gregory Guillot’s congressional testimony as a strategic-asset base of concern.
Minot AFB, ND, B-52 plus ICBM. Photographed hosting NORTHCOM’s new Anvil counter-drone interceptor in October 2025.
RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Feltwell, RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom, all US-occupied. Sustained multi-day swarm November 20-26, 2024. Sixty British troops deployed with ORCUS counter-drone systems. Fairford is the only USAF heavy bomber field in Europe.
One unnamed German NATO airbase. Raised alert level during the same European wave.
One unnamed CONUS “strategic installation” where NORTHCOM’s Flyaway Kit jammed a small unmanned aerial system in the early hours of Operation Epic Fury, February 28, 2026. NORTHCOM refuses to identify the base for opsec.
Other US military installations
The pattern is not limited to AFBs. Same window, same character:
Naval Station Norfolk, VA. November-December 2023, the world’s largest naval port.
Picatinny Arsenal, NJ. Army research and development, confirmed drone sightings during the Northeast wave.
Naval Weapons Station Earle, NJ. Confirmed during the same wave.
Fort Lesley J. McNair, DC. March 2026. Worth noting that this is where Secretary of War Hegseth and Secretary of State Rubio reside.
An undisclosed nuclear-storage installation referenced in oblique terms by Guillot.
NORTHCOM acknowledged “hundreds” of incursions over Pentagon installations in the past few years and admitted the actual number is higher because most are not detected. The official line is that “the overwhelming majority” are local hobbyists. The forensic profile of the Langley, Wright-Patt, and Barksdale incursions is not local hobbyists.
Aircraft carriers and surface combatants
This is where the pattern gets harder for the Pentagon to hand-wave away, because the witnesses are flag officers and the sensors are classified.
USS Nimitz / USS Princeton, off San Diego, November 2004. The Tic Tac case. Princeton’s SPY-1 detected objects descending from 80,000+ feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds, multiple times, over two weeks. F/A-18Fs from Strike Fighter Squadron 41 vectored in. Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich on the visual, Lt. Cmdr. Chad Underwood on the FLIR. Peer-reviewed acceleration estimates run from hundreds to thousands of g with no observed air disturbance, no sonic boom, no thermal signature. Fravor testified under oath to the House Oversight Committee in July 2023.
USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group, East Coast, 2014-2015. Ryan Graves’s squadron (VFA-11) reported UAP “almost daily for months” during workups. The GIMBAL and GOFAST FLIR videos came from this period. Graves has testified that crews actively avoided airborne contacts they could not classify.
USS Russell, 2019. Pyramid-shaped object on FLIR, Pentagon confirmed authenticity April 2021. Mick West argued bokeh artifact; the Pentagon did not accept that explanation as final.
USS Omaha, off San Diego, July 15, 2019. Spherical object filmed in IR moving over the water and descending into it. The waterline transit makes it a USO incident in addition to a UAP.
USS Kearsarge area, July 2019. Multiple-ship drone swarm encounters off the California coast that have never been attributed.
USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, Red Sea, October 2023 to June 2024. Eight-month combat deployment characterized by the Navy as the most kinetic since World War II. The bulk of contacts are attributable Houthi KAS-04 and similar systems. Nick Pope, George Knapp, and Ross Coulthart have separately reported unattributable airborne contacts during the same deployment that Navy public affairs has not addressed. The categorical bucket of “Houthi drone” has done a lot of public-facing work this past year and a half. The PURSUE document set reportedly contains Strait of Hormuz, Persian Gulf, and Gulf of Aden incident reports that overlap Ike’s operating area, though I have not yet been able to confirm Eisenhower-specific items in the published files.
The 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment noted that Navy aircrew encountering UAP in restricted training airspace had become a near-daily occurrence in some squadrons. That is not a 2017 phenomenon. It did not stop.
Oil rigs and offshore infrastructure
Less covered than the carrier cases, but the Gulf of Mexico has a multi-decade thread of operator reports:
March 21, 2017, Gulf of Mexico, 80 miles southeast of New Orleans. The chief engineer of a 240-foot offshore supply vessel and four crewmates reported a craft estimated at five times the length of their ship hovering near a rig at dusk. NUFORC interviewed the witness by phone and characterized him as “unusually sober-minded.” Fifty additional witnesses on nearby vessels are estimated by the primary witness. None identified.
May 11, 2004, off Campeche. Mexican Air Force C-235 maritime patrol aircraft tracked 11 objects on FLIR for several minutes. Then-Defense Minister Gen. Clemente Vega authorized the public release of the cockpit video and audio. The objects were not navigation lights; they appeared on infrared while invisible to visible-light imaging.
Tampico region, October 2023. Single-source rig-worker photographs of saucer-shaped objects during seabed leg deployment. The provenance chain is weaker on this one (passed through an intermediary identified only as “Pat,” cultural overlay of the Amupac underwater-base mythology). Worth flagging because the geographic and operational context (rig deployment) matches the 2004 and 2017 cases.
Eglin AFB Gulf coast telemetry site. Reportedly stood up specifically for UAP detection over the Gulf, per public sourcing during 2021-2022. Eglin has its own UAP file going back to a February 2, 1976 incident.
North Sea sectors (UK and Norwegian). Periodic rig and platform sightings have been logged with the British UFO Research Association and the Norwegian Project Hessdalen since the 1980s. Less centralized documentation than US cases.
Jacksonville coast, off Florida. The Navy GOFAST video was captured here in 2015. Same general region as the offshore Atlantic platforms.
Nuclear power plants, laboratories, and weapons facilities
This is the oldest and most documented thread, going back to Hanford in January 1945. The modern wave:
Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, AZ, the largest nuclear plant in the United States. Drone swarm September 29, 2019. FOIA released to journalist Douglas Johnson revealed 57 separate drone incursions across 24 nuclear sites between 2015 and 2019. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Sandia produced a classified joint analysis in October 2019.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA. April 30, 2019. Witness described a “round silver drone flying around the Process Area and periodically stopping and hovering for several seconds.”
Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, NY. 1984. Massive diamond-shaped object reported by security guards and local police.
French nuclear plants, October-November 2014. Over a dozen sites overflown by unidentified small aircraft over several weeks. Never attributed.
Belgian Doel Nuclear Power Plant. Mystery drone overflights, multiple incidents.
Swedish nuclear plants, January 2022. Coordinated drone activity across multiple sites, suspected Russian linkage but never confirmed.
Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, India. Summer 2023, lights and unidentified small aircraft.
Chernobyl, USSR. UAP sightings reported the night of the April 1986 disaster.
Fukushima Daiichi, Japan. Multiple sightings reported in March 2011 around the meltdown window.
Ukrainian reactors during the current war. IAEA has issued public warnings about drone activity around Ukrainian nuclear sites.
The Department of Energy’s own incident logs include years of UAP sightings at Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River, and Oak Ridge. The 1945 Hanford plutonium-processing sightings predate the Trinity test. Robert Hastings’s primary-source archive runs to over 160 veteran interviews. The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies’s pattern-recognition study mapped 590 incidents from 1945 to 1975 and found statistically significant clustering around the American atomic warfare complex. Bruehl and Villarroel’s 2025 preprint correlated transient star-like flashes in the Palomar Observatory plates from 1949 to 1957 with above-ground nuclear tests at p = 0.00013.
What the map is telling us
If you stack everything I just listed onto a single sheet, what you are looking at is not a list of UAP sightings. It is a thumbnail map of US strategic capability. Every leg of the nuclear triad. Every aircraft carrier strike group. Every major intelligence center. Every nuclear power plant the FOIAs cover. Every offshore hydrocarbon production zone in the Gulf. The principal forward-deployed naval theaters in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific.
There is a version of this argument that a sober institutionalist will offer back, and the version is roughly: collection bias. We have the most sensors, the most witnesses, and the most reporting infrastructure pointed at our own strategic assets, so naturally that is where the reports cluster. Sean Kirkpatrick has made this case explicitly. It is a real consideration. It is not a complete answer to a French nuclear plant overflight in 2014, a Mexican Air Force C-235 FLIR track in 2004, a Tajik commercial pilot’s State Department cable from 1994, an Indian reactor in 2023, or a Kazakhstani UAP making 90-degree turns and corkscrews while a Tajik pilot and three Americans watched. The pattern crosses adversaries, alliances, and decades. It is denser than collection bias accounts for, and it survives the obvious controls.
What PURSUE didn’t print
Compare the map I just laid out to what you can actually see on war.gov/UFO today. PURSUE Release 01, even at the now-expanded 162-file count, conspicuously omits:
Any file tagged Ohio or Wright-Patterson
Any file tagged Louisiana or Barksdale
Any file tagged Langley or Joint Base Langley-Eustis
Any file tagged Norfolk
Any file tagged Palo Verde or Indian Point
Any file tagged Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, Nimitz, or Princeton (the actual carrier-strike-group encounters in the public record)
Anna Paulina Luna’s 46 whistleblower-identified videos, which she confirmed Friday are not in this drop
What did make the cut: Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 transcripts, archival NASA frames, Roswell-era FBI memos from 1947, State Department cables from the 1990s, and a generous helping of FLIR clips from Greece, the UAE, and the Middle East where Sean Kirkpatrick’s hot-jet-engine-bloom explanation can be deployed without much friction.
That is not the absence of disclosure. That is the shape of disclosure. The Pentagon picked the angles where the operational explanation does most of the work. They left the angles where the operational explanation breaks down for Release 02, or 03, or never.
The map will get filled in either by PURSUE or by the FOIA pipeline that already filled in Wright-Patterson via The Black Vault, Palo Verde via Douglas Johnson, and Langley via The War Zone. Pick the cadence you prefer. The map exists either way.