PURSUE Record — FBI Photo B15: FBI · Western United States · Late 2025

FBI Photo B15 is a single-page PDF declassified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and released on May 8, 2026, as part of the U.S. Department of War's PURSUE Release 01. It documents a late-2025 unidentified anomalous phenomenon report originating from a U.S. military imaging system in the Western United States. The FBI submitted the underlying imagery to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) as part of the current interagency UAP reporting pipeline. The operator of the military system was unable to positively identify what was captured.

What this record contains

The record is a single-part PDF — one file, no supplemental attachments — released by the FBI on May 8, 2026, under PURSUE Release 01. The incident is dated to late 2025, placing it among the most recent events in this declassification batch, which also includes materials going back to 1947. The location is given only as the Western United States; no finer geographic detail is disclosed in the public release. The imagery was redacted before being submitted to AARO, and no accompanying mission report was provided alongside it.

The official description characterizes the image as a monochrome still with a grainy texture and a simplified central crosshair — consistent with a surveillance or targeting overlay. Two small, dark, circular objects appear near the center of the frame in the upper right quadrant. One notable metadata anomaly: the date embedded in the image itself is incorrect, attributed to the source system's clock not being properly set. The official description carries the standard AARO caveat that the narrative is informational only and does not reflect any analytical judgment or investigative conclusion about the event's nature or significance.

Historical & documentary context

Unlike the historical FBI files in PURSUE Release 01 that date to the 1947–1968 era of early UAP investigation, FBI Photo B15 is a contemporary record. It reflects the post-2021 UAP reporting architecture established through the National Defense Authorization Act, which formalized AARO as the central clearinghouse for anomalous aerial observations across military branches and federal agencies. The FBI's participation in that pipeline — submitting imagery derived from military systems — illustrates how domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies now feed into the same reporting structure as the services branches.

The image characteristics described — monochrome, grainy, crosshair overlay — are consistent with footage or stills from electro-optical surveillance systems, whether airborne ISR platforms, ground-based perimeter cameras, or fixed military installations. Such systems are designed for identification and tracking; the crosshair typically indicates a sensor lock or frame-center reference point. The fact that the system clock was misconfigured at the time of capture is a known operational issue in legacy sensor suites and does not, by itself, indicate anything anomalous — but it does mean the precise timestamp cannot be independently verified from the image data alone.

What this does and does not prove

What the record establishes: a U.S. military imaging system captured two small, dark, circular objects in a single frame during late 2025 somewhere in the Western United States; the operator reported an inability to positively identify them; the FBI found the observation sufficiently notable to submit to AARO; and the original imagery was partially redacted before entering the public record. What the record does not establish — and what the public release makes no claim about — is the nature, origin, altitude, speed, or size of the objects. The absence of a mission report means there is no corroborating sensor data, no operator narrative, and no broader flight or operational context available in this release. A single still image with redactions and a corrupted timestamp is, by definition, a thin evidentiary foundation. "Unresolved" in AARO's taxonomy means the case has not been explained, not that something anomalous has been demonstrated.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

FBI Photo B15 sits within the FBI-originated thread of PURSUE Release 01, which spans nearly eight decades of Bureau involvement in UAP documentation — from the early Cold War sighting reports of the late 1940s through to active 2025 submissions like this one. Across the broader 162-document release, it represents the contemporary end of that FBI arc: not a historical curiosity but an active, recent case still sitting in AARO's unresolved queue. Readers interested in comparing it against other FBI-submitted records and Department of War contemporary mission reports can browse the full catalogue on the SkyLens UAP files page.

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.