PURSUE Record — PURSUE Case PR-071: declassified UAP analysis: U.S. Department of War / AARO · · Feb 12, 2023 · NORTHCOM · Infrared · See case metadata

PURSUE Case PR-071 is a single-part military sensor video declassified and released by the U.S. Department of War and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) on May 8, 2026, as part of PURSUE Release 01. The record is drawn from U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) operational holdings and documents an aerial encounter captured on infrared sensor on February 12, 2023. Like all materials in this release, it is investigative source material — not a conclusion.

What this record contains

PR-071 is a single video file (one file part) attributed to NORTHCOM, the combatant command responsible for the defense of the North American homeland and adjacent airspace. The incident date is February 12, 2023. The sensor modality listed in the metadata is infrared, consistent with the forward-looking and wide-area electro-optical systems routinely used by U.S. military aircraft and ground platforms for surveillance and intercept operations. The releasing authority is AARO — the office stood up in 2022 specifically to centralize UAP data collection and analysis across the Department of Defense — coordinating with the newly designated Department of War for public disclosure.

The public release metadata for PR-071 is sparse. Beyond the date, command attribution, and sensor type, the official description blurb does not include information about the object's altitude, size, speed, flight characteristics, or resolution status. The record is catalogued among the 28 video files in the broader 162-document PURSUE Release 01 set; you can review its full entry alongside every other case on the SkyLens UAP files page.

Sensor & operational context

Infrared video captures thermal radiation rather than reflected visible light, making it effective in low-light conditions, through haze, and against objects whose temperature differs from the ambient background — including propulsion plumes, heat-soaked airframes, or unusual thermal signatures. Military IR systems used in airspace surveillance typically produce grayscale imagery in which warmer objects appear bright (white-hot mode) or dark (black-hot mode) against the cooler sky. Interpreting IR footage requires accounting for sensor gain settings, atmospheric attenuation, and the distance to target — variables that are rarely disclosed in declassified clips and that can dramatically affect how an object appears to move or behave.

February 12, 2023 fell within one of the most operationally intense periods in NORTHCOM's recent history. In the ten days prior, U.S. and Canadian forces had responded to multiple high-altitude airborne objects over North American airspace, triggering a surge in ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) activity and a temporary broadening of radar and sensor sensitivity thresholds. Whether PR-071 is connected to that operational tempo is not stated in the available metadata, but the date places it squarely within that window. That context is worth holding — not as proof of any particular explanation, but as the environment in which this sensor data was collected.

What this does and does not prove

The documented facts for PR-071 are limited: an infrared video was collected under NORTHCOM authority on February 12, 2023, and AARO deemed it worth including in a public declassification release. That inclusion reflects some threshold of analytical interest, but it does not establish that the object recorded is anomalous, exotic, or unexplained. PURSUE Release 01 explicitly contains resolved cases — balloons, birds, sensor artifacts — alongside unresolved ones, precisely to demonstrate analytical rigor. Without access to the full video, accompanying sensor metadata, or AARO's case notes, it is not possible to characterize what the footage shows. "Unresolved" in AARO terminology means the case has not been given a confirmed explanation, not that something extraordinary has been documented.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

PR-071 sits within the Department of War / AARO contemporary mission-report strand of PURSUE Release 01 — the cluster of recent military sensor records that represent the most operationally current material in the release, as opposed to the historic FBI archive files dating back to 1947 or the NASA program imagery also included. For more context on how these contemporary military records compare to the rest of the release, see our broader PURSUE Release 01 coverage. Taken together, this strand of videos represents the clearest window into how the U.S. military is currently documenting and categorizing airspace anomalies — an investigative baseline rather than a final answer.

Editorial note: This analysis is independent commentary on a publicly released document. The original record, source links, and full release metadata are catalogued on the SkyLens UAP files page alongside every other case in the PURSUE Release 01 set.