PURSUE Record — FBI Photo B10: FBI · Western United States · Late 2025

FBI Photo B10 is a declassified PDF submitted as part of PURSUE Release 01, the U.S. Department of War's May 8, 2026 public disclosure of unresolved UAP records. The document originates from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and concerns a still image captured by a U.S. military sensor system during late 2025 over the Western United States. The case was formally reported to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and remains unresolved. It is one of the more recent records in the release — a contemporary incident, not a historical file.

What this record contains

The record is a single-part PDF released by the FBI on May 8, 2026. The reported incident occurred in late 2025 at an unspecified location in the Western United States. According to the official description, the FBI submitted to AARO a report consisting of a still image derived from a U.S. military system. That original imagery was redacted before submission, and no accompanying mission report was provided. The operator who filed the report stated they were unable to positively identify the object. The release also notes that the timestamp embedded in the image is incorrect, the result of the recording system's date and time not having been properly configured — a detail the government has flagged explicitly to prevent misinterpretation of the chronological record.

The document's narrative description is precise but limited: a monochrome, grainy image centered on a crosshair reticle. A small, dark, circular object appears just above and to the right of the reticle's center point. The background shows an indistinct mountain range. The public release does not include additional sensor data, altitude, speed, or any other contextual telemetry beyond what is described above.

Historical & documentary context

Unlike the FBI's historical UAP files — which stretch back to 1947 and reflect the Cold War-era anxieties that drove early UFO investigations — FBI Photo B10 is a product of the modern UAP reporting architecture. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office was established by Congress through the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, creating a formal interagency pipeline for exactly this kind of submission: a credentialed federal agency forwarding sensor-derived evidence for centralized analysis. The FBI's participation in that pipeline is itself significant context. The bureau does not typically operate the military optical systems that produce crosshair-reticle imagery; its role here is as a reporting intermediary, channeling a military sensor record into the AARO process.

The image characteristics — monochrome rendering, grainy texture, and a precision crosshair overlay — are consistent with footage from optical targeting, surveillance, or tracking systems used across multiple military platforms. Such systems often record in conditions of variable lighting and at distances where atmospheric interference degrades resolution. The mountain terrain visible in the background places the imaging geometry at some remove from the object, further limiting what the sensor could resolve. The misconfigured system clock, while minor administratively, is the kind of metadata gap that complicates forensic reconstruction of an event after the fact.

What this does and does not prove

What the record establishes is narrow: a U.S. military optical system captured a small, dark, circular object in the Western United States during late 2025; the operator could not identify it; the FBI escalated it to AARO; and the agency released it as unresolved. That is the full extent of the documented facts. The record does not establish object size, velocity, altitude, material composition, or origin. "Unresolved" is a classification of investigative status, not a determination of anomalous origin. The redactions applied before submission to AARO mean the publicly available image is already one step removed from the original capture. Readers should treat the circular shape and the mountain backdrop as descriptive facts about a photograph — not as evidence of any particular explanation.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

FBI Photo B10 sits within the FBI-contributed tier of PURSUE Release 01 — a subset that spans nearly eight decades of bureau involvement in UAP documentation, from the famous 1947 Roswell-era memos to this 2025 sensor submission. Its inclusion alongside the full PURSUE Release 01 case set illustrates one of the release's stated purposes: demonstrating that contemporary UAP reporting, even from credentialed federal operators using modern military hardware, can still produce imagery that resists definitive analysis. It complements the Department of War's own mission-report submissions and the NASA archive materials in the same release by showing that sensor ambiguity is not a relic of older, cruder technology. For additional coverage of records across the release, see the SkyLens PURSUE coverage index.

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.