PURSUE Record — FBI Photo B13: FBI · Western United States · Late 2025

FBI Photo B13 is a declassified single-file PDF submitted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, released publicly on May 8, 2026 as part of PURSUE Release 01. The record documents a still image derived from a U.S. military system, captured in late 2025 in the Western United States. No accompanying mission report was provided. The operator who recorded the image stated they were unable to positively identify what the sensor had captured.

What this record contains

The document is a single-part PDF originating from the FBI and attributed to an incident in late 2025. Geographic attribution is limited to the Western United States — a broad designation that likely reflects operational security constraints or the absence of precise coordinate data in what was submitted. The original imagery was redacted before the FBI forwarded it to AARO, meaning the public version has been altered from its source form. Significantly, the timestamp embedded in the image is incorrect: the capturing system's date and time were not properly configured, making the internal clock an unreliable record of when the event actually occurred.

AARO's official narrative describes the image as a monochrome frame with a grainy texture and a simplified central crosshair. Two small, dark, elongated objects appear near the center of the frame, specifically in the bottom right quadrant. No other contextual objects or reference points are described. The narrative is explicitly labeled for informational purposes only and does not represent any analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination about the event's validity or nature.

Historical & documentary context

FBI Photo B13 belongs to the contemporary layer of PURSUE Release 01 — not the agency's historic mid-twentieth century UAP archive, but its active post-AARO reporting pipeline. Since the National Defense Authorization Act of 2022 mandated a unified multi-agency UAP reporting structure, federal law enforcement has been formally integrated alongside military branches and NASA under AARO's coordination. This record is a product of that framework: the FBI receiving or originating sensor imagery from a military platform and routing it through the interagency resolution process.

Monochrome imagery with crosshair overlays is characteristic of targeting, surveillance, and long-range optical sensor systems, which commonly produce grainy output at the limits of their resolution range. Under those conditions, small objects at distance can register as indistinct dark shapes with few measurable features. The misconfigured system clock is a known operational artifact in UAP reporting — it does not invalidate the image content, but it does underscore a recurring challenge: metadata that should anchor an observation to a precise moment often cannot be independently verified without corroborating records, which in this case were not submitted.

What this does and does not prove

The documented facts are narrow: a U.S. military sensor captured two small, dark, elongated objects somewhere in the Western United States in late 2025; the FBI submitted the still frame to AARO as a UAP report; the operator could not identify the objects; the image was redacted before public release; and the embedded timestamp is unreliable. What the record does not contain is any altitude, speed, trajectory, sensor type, platform identity, precise location, mission narrative, radar correlation, or secondary sensor data. AARO has not issued an analytical conclusion on this case. The record is classified as unresolved — which means it has not been explained, not that anything anomalous has been established. Those are meaningfully different claims, and the release does not conflate them.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

FBI Photo B13 sits within the FBI-contributed thread of PURSUE Release 01, a release that spans FBI materials from 1947 through contemporary 2025 submissions. That the FBI's contribution here is a recent incident — not an archival relic — illustrates that the agency's UAP-reporting role is actively operational, not merely historical. Within the broader 162-document release (28 videos, 14 images, 120 PDFs across multiple agencies), this record represents one of the sparser contemporary submissions: a single image, no mission report, and no resolved determination. The full case inventory, including every FBI-originated record in the set, is catalogued on the SkyLens UAP files page. For additional context on how this case compares to other contemporary sensor submissions in the release, see PURSUE coverage across the SkyLens blog.

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.