PURSUE Release 01: DOW-UAP-D20, Catalog Title Southern United States, Incident Metadata Iraq 2023

The Department of War's May 8, 2026 PURSUE Release 01 catalog lists this item as DOW-UAP-D20, Mission Report, Southern United States, 2020, but the same catalog gives the incident date as March 31, 2023 and the incident location as Iraq.¹ The released PDF is a six-page Mission Report declassified by MG Richard A. Harrison, USCENTCOM Chief of Staff, on October 8, 2025 and marked approved for release to AARO.²

  F-16 Mission Report Over Iraq

The report describes a two-ship F-16CM flight from Prince Sultan Air Base in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. The flight was tasked for defensive counter-air in the ESSA area, checked on station with KINGPIN at 20:58Z on March 31, 2023, and recorded possible UAP observations beginning at 23:02:05Z.²

In the UAP section, the crew reported possibly 10 to 20 objects and described several bright objects maneuvering quickly from west to east northeast of RLZ. The aircraft acquired some of the possible UAP on a SNIPER targeting pod in TV mode for about 20 seconds before the objects dimmed and disappeared from the pod view.¹²

The report lists the friendly aircraft at flight level 265, speed 293, and the possible UAP altitude or trajectory as flight level 600 or above. Platform identifiers, precise locations, names, contact information, and some mission details are redacted under classification and FOIA markings.²

  Southern United States Title, Iraq File

Mission Reports are standardized military records used to document operational circumstances, and the PURSUE catalog notes that U.S. military services often use MISREPs to report UAP to AARO. The catalog also says the GENTEXT sections can carry qualitative context that is not captured by the more numerical parts of the report.¹

Here, the underlying document places the observation in an AFCENT and USCENTCOM Operation Inherent Resolve sortie rather than in the southern United States in 2020. That mismatch is part of the record: the public title and filename point one way, while the CSV incident fields and PDF content point to Iraq on March 31, 2023.¹²

  Metadata Needs Source Checking

This record is useful because it preserves timing, platform context, sensor reference, and the reporter's original description in a heavily redacted operational document. It also shows why public-release metadata should be checked against the source file before drawing conclusions from a title alone.¹²

The catalog cautions that descriptive and estimative language reflects the reporter's subjective interpretation at the time of the event. Read that way, the document is evidence of an official UAP report and associated sensor observation, not a conclusive identification of the objects involved.¹

  References

  References

1. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶