PURSUE Release 01: DOW-UAP-D42, Catalog Title Japan 2023, Form Content Arabian Gulf 2020

  Japan Title, Gulf Form

The Department of War's May 8, 2026 PURSUE Release 01 catalog identifies DOW-UAP-D42 as a Department of War PDF titled DOW-UAP-D42, Range Fouler Debrief, Japan, 2023.¹ The same catalog assigns the incident date as August 31, 2020 and the incident location as the Arabian Gulf, while the released PDF itself is a one-page Range Fouler Debrief Form dated 08/31/20.¹²

That mismatch matters for basic provenance. The official title points readers toward Japan in 2023, but the structured metadata and the form content point to an ISR mission in the Arabian Gulf on August 31, 2020.¹² The form is marked USCENTCOM MDR 26-0028, approved for release to AARO, with FOUO and Privacy Act handling noted on March 16, 2026.²

The form identifies the reporting crew position as pilot, lists 482 ATKS in the squadron field, and leaves personal contact information redacted or sanitized. Its instruction block says SPEAR sanitizes identifying information from reports before analysis, so the released record preserves operational context without naming the individual observer.²

  Three Contacts at Dusk

The report records a dusk detection on an ISR mission, with the large-force-exercise field marked no. Location coordinates and grid details are partly redacted, but the form lists the contact altitude as 18,000 feet, says the altitude was constant, marks the contact as moving, and records direction and speed as 150/230.²

In the appearance and tracking fields, the form lists radar equipped as other and records three contacts in the group. The checkboxes and OCR are imperfect, but the clearly readable narrative says the observer saw an initial object cross the screen, began tracking it, then saw another object of the same size and shape overtake it at a much higher speed.²

The observer's narrative then reports that, at one point during tracking, three objects were visible at the same time and were moving among each other.² The release catalog summarizes that account as a military operator reporting an "object fly through the screen," a second object surpassing the first, and three UAP "moving amongst each other."¹

  D42 Has No Paired Video

The release metadata gives this D42 entry a remote PDF asset and a remote thumbnail, but its video-pairing, PDF-pairing, DVIDS-video-ID, and video-title fields are blank.¹³ That means this page treats DOW-UAP-D42 as an unpaired PDF record, not as a document formally attached to a public PR video in the release.

  Near-Source Debrief Value

DOW-UAP-D42 matters because it preserves a near-source reporting form rather than only a later catalog description. The record does not identify the objects, claim extraordinary performance, or present an investigative conclusion, but it does preserve the observer's account, mission setting, altitude and movement fields, redaction boundaries, and the administrative path by which the form became part of a public AARO-facing release.¹²

It is also useful as a caution about release metadata. The official title, incident date, location field, and form text do not all point in the same direction, so the strongest reading is to keep the title intact while describing the record according to the fields and form content that can be directly checked.¹²

  References

  References

1. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. war.gov ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

3. war.gov ↩