PURSUE Release 02

Document ODNI-UAP-D001 is two pages of plain narrative prose. The author identifies as a senior US intelligence officer. The document was prepared in Microsoft Word and submitted through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence USPER (US Person) channel. The narrative covers the events of one evening in late 2025.

The officer departed a Joint Operations Center in a helicopter with a colleague and two pilots. The mission was to investigate loud thuds heard in the mountains on the test range over the previous several nights, coinciding with reported UAP sightings of orb-like objects. The helicopter flew a low-altitude map-of-the-earth route through the mountains for several hours, descended on multiple debris sightings, and identified each as the remains of rockets and projectiles from years of weapons testing.

Late in the mission, ground teams reported a UAP on FLIR: super-hot, low to the ground, moving east then south at high speed, then splitting into two. The helicopter scanned the area with NVG, FLIR, and the naked eye. The object rose from the ground, approached within ten feet of the helicopter, dropped below it, and accelerated away. The pilots saw it through NVGs and watched it split into two as a smaller object emerged. The team briefly pursued, then broke off, unable to match its speed.

The Joint Operations Center then redirected the helicopter to fresh radar hits. The helicopter hovered at 700 feet above ground level. In the distance, the team saw countless orange orbs swarming in all directions against the backdrop of the mountain. Two large orbs flared up side by side close to the helicopter, stationary above the rotor disk to the right, oval-shaped, orange with a white or yellow centre, emitting light in all directions. A third orb flared below them. A fourth below that. Four to five orbs in a T formation. The orbs dimmed in reverse order and vanished. The entire event lasted 10 to 15 seconds.

The Joint Operations Center then advised that several fighter jets had launched on a training mission in the same operating area. The fighter jets entered visual range at about 2,300 feet above ground level. The same orbs appeared directly above them, flared in horizontal formation matching the jets' speed and flight path, then dimmed sequentially and disappeared. The sequence repeated several times as the jets transited the airspace. The officer remarked to the pilots that the same orbs appeared to be chasing the fighters.

James Leslie Tuck was a British physicist who came to Los Alamos in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project. He returned in 1949 to lead early controlled fusion research, became a senior figure in the Theoretical Division, and remained at the laboratory for the rest of his career. The two letters in document DOE-UAP-D002 were written in the late 1970s, when Tuck was an emeritus presence at Los Alamos and was still publishing on fusion and ball lightning.

The first letter is addressed to the US Army Engineering School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Department of Mechanical and Technical Equipment. Tuck writes: "I would like to have the recipe that was used for the simulated atomic bomb experiments. We are interested in the large atmospheric vortices which are produced as reported in the book Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects by Dr. Edward U. Condon."

The Condon Report was the 1968 University of Colorado study commissioned by the US Air Force to evaluate the UFO question. Tuck's request is for the technical recipe of Army simulated-bomb tests that the Condon Report had identified as producing UFO-like atmospheric effects. The Manhattan Project veteran was, in his own working notes, gathering data to test whether bomb-test-produced vortex phenomena could account for some of the observed UFO reports.

The second letter discusses ball lightning, the disputed natural phenomenon that Tuck had studied across his career. He references James M. McCampbell's 1976 book UFOLOGY, which he had located on the new non-fiction shelf at the Mesa Library, call number 629.1338 M125u. Tuck writes that McCampbell's chapter on Flight and Propulsion "strengthens my conviction that Einstein, while seemingly straying from the main current of physical research in his later years, was on scent like a bloodhound when he persisted in trying to lock in on a unified field theory." The Manhattan Project veteran, by then in his seventies, was reading civilian UFO research and weighing it against fundamental physics.

Beginning in late 1948 and continuing through 1949, residents and military personnel across New Mexico reported bright green meteor-like objects moving silently across the sky. The objects appeared over Sandia Base, Los Alamos, Kirtland Air Force Base, the Manzano Mountains weapons storage facility, the White Sands Proving Ground, and Walker Air Force Base at Roswell. Witnesses included Air Force officers, scientists, and police. The objects were uniformly the same shade of bright green. They travelled horizontally rather than on the typical meteor trajectory. They were silent. They were, by the assessment of the principal civilian investigator, not natural meteorites.

The principal civilian investigator was Dr. Lincoln La Paz, Director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico. La Paz was contracted by the Air Force to investigate the green fireballs because their flight characteristics did not match anything in the meteoritic record. La Paz personally observed two of the objects. He concluded that they were artificial, intelligently controlled, and concentrated in their appearances over sensitive defence installations in a way that no natural phenomenon would explain.

The 116 pages of DOW-UAP-D017 contain the Sandia Base correspondence file from this period. The earliest document is a 7 April 1949 security inspection letter from Headquarters Detachment D, 1100th USAF Special Reporting Group at Campbell Air Force Base, addressed to the Commanding General of Sandia Base. The file includes the 10 August 1949 cover letter from a Sandia scientist to La Paz, transmitting two copies of the Crozier and Seely report on the eighteen airborne particle collections taken at nine locations over the previous two days following the 24 July 1949 fireball over Socorro.

The Crozier and Seely report describes the impactment equipment, the adhesive-coated collection plates, and the chemical tests used to identify copper, cobalt, and nickel in the airborne particles. The investigators recovered copper-bearing particles on one collection (R-104L) taken on Highway 84 seventeen miles north of Highway 66. They recovered three remarkable particles in the 26 July collection that gave very strong cobalt indications, with each particle apparently a perfect twelve-micron sphere. The B-25 from Kirtland Field that attempted to intercept material from the 6 August 1949 fireball reached 23,000 feet and found copper particles attributed to surface origin rather than meteoritic source.

The Sandia file is the documentary foundation for Project TWINKLE, the Air Force programme established in 1950 specifically to monitor the Green Fireballs phenomenon. Project TWINKLE ran from 1950 to 1951 under AFOAT-1 and the Geophysical Research Directorate at Cambridge.