PURSUE Record — FBI Photo B21: FBI · Western United States · Late 2025

FBI Photo B21 is a declassified single-page PDF submitted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, released on May 8, 2026 as part of the PURSUE Release 01 disclosure. The record documents a UAP observation from late 2025 somewhere over the western United States, captured by a U.S. military imaging system. It is a formally processed but notably sparse record: one image, one submission, no accompanying mission report, and no identification.

What this record contains

The FBI submitted this report to AARO as a still image derived from a U.S. military system in 2025. The one-part PDF contains a monochrome photograph of notably grainy texture. At its center sits a crosshair reticle — a standard instrumentation overlay for targeting or tracking optics — and one to two small, dark objects are visible just above and to the right of that reticle's center. The image was altered with redactions prior to submission, and no accompanying mission report was provided with the filing. The operator on the original capture reported being unable to positively identify the UAP. One additional complication is noted explicitly in the official description: the date displayed within the image is incorrect, the result of the imaging system's internal clock not being properly set at the time of capture. The incident location is described broadly as the western United States; no finer geographic detail is included in the public release.

Historical & documentary context

The FBI's involvement in UAP documentation stretches back to the late 1940s, when the Bureau corresponded with the Air Force about recovered material and sighting reports from the early wave of Cold War-era observations. FBI Photo B21, however, represents the Bureau's contemporary institutional role: a formal administrative submission to AARO, the coordinating body Congress established in 2022 to centralize U.S. government UAP analysis. The imagery originates from a U.S. military sensor system rather than a civilian witness or field agent, placing this record in a different evidentiary category than the Bureau's historic case files. Military imaging systems of this type — calibrated for target acquisition and surveillance, not scientific observation — frequently produce the kind of grainy, high-contrast output visible here. The crosshair reticle confirms the sensor was in an active tracking or targeting mode at the moment of capture. Redactions applied before submission have withheld some contextual data, possibly unit identifiers or precise coordinates. This is standard practice for military-sourced imagery in a declassification context and does not itself imply anything about the nature of the objects observed.

What this does and does not prove

The documented facts are narrow: a military sensor captured one or two small, dark objects near the center of its field of view during a late 2025 operation over the western United States; the operator could not identify them; the FBI forwarded the imagery to AARO; and the record was subsequently included in PURSUE Release 01. Nothing in the public release establishes what the objects are, how large they were, how fast or in what direction they were moving, or at what altitude the encounter occurred. The corrupted timestamp compounds the ambiguity, removing one of the baseline anchors analysts would use to cross-reference imagery against other sensor data or flight records. "Unresolved" in the PURSUE framework means the case has not been explained — it does not indicate that anything extraordinary has been confirmed. The objects could represent sensor noise, debris, aircraft at range, or something genuinely uncharacterized. The record, as released, does not contain sufficient information to determine which.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

FBI Photo B21 belongs to a cluster of FBI-originated records within the 162-document PURSUE Release 01 set, a release that otherwise draws heavily on Department of War mission reports and NASA archival imagery. Its value to the release is partly methodological: it illustrates AARO's intake pipeline for non-DoD agency submissions and documents the Bureau's active role in routing military-sourced anomaly reports to the central resolution office. Readers who want to compare this record against the Department of War sensor videos, NASA archive materials, and other FBI submissions in the same release can browse the complete catalogue on the SkyLens UAP files page. Additional editorial analysis of other PURSUE cases is available on 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.