A new research paper analyzing more than 100 UFO videos released by the Pentagon found that they are so heavily redacted that they are useless in identifying what these objects are.

The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, was posted on the open-access repository, arXiv.org, on Aug. 12, 2026. It was co-authored by Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist and co-founder of the research organization Blue Marble Space in Seattle, and Dr. Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist and astrophysicist from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

(Here is a link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12445v1)

The researchers analyzed 112 videos released this year under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) initiative.

“Redactions to the on-screen displays limit the information available for identifying the nature of the reported unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP),” the researchers found.

In order for videos to reveal how fast UFOs are traveling, they must include “(1) the range to the object, (2) the velocity of the observing aircraft, (3) the aspect angle between the object’s path and the observer, and (4) the field angle of the camera sensor,” the researchers say in the paper, further expounding: “No sensor video in the PURSUE corpus provides this complete set of information … Without further information, the PURSUE sensor videos in their present form cannot fully resolve unidentified cases or conclusively indicate anomalous velocities.”

The videos in the study were released between late 2025 and mid-2026 under the PURSUE initiative (war.gov/UFO).

“This included 112 sensor videos of targeting-pod and other turret mounted cameras (including infrared and electro-optical, meaning an electronic camera capturing images at optical wavelengths) from military aircraft,” according to the paper.

The researchers note that the now-famous U.S. Navy “GOFAST” video, purporting to show a UFO traveling at extreme speed near the sea surface, contained the necessary unredacted data.

“However, trigonometric reduction using its on-screen telemetry showed the apparent motion to be dominated by parallax from the sensor aircraft, with the object’s implied speed consistent with wind-borne drift. In the GOFAST case, sufficient information was available to constrain the object’s motion relative to the observer and assess it in relation to reported wind conditions.”

Unfortunately, the researchers found, “Such information is either redacted or unavailable in all of the PURSUE sensor videos.”

They concluded: “The PURSUE sensor videos can neither demonstrate nor exclude anomalous kinematics. Cases with a visible prosaic explanation can be set aside, but the remainder cannot be resolved unless additional data become available.”

The researchers suggest other information could be helpful in identifying UFOs, including: “(i) the velocity of the platform … such as provided by flight logs; (ii) sensor metadata describing field-of-view and line-of-sight pointing angles; and (iii) range records or a correlated radar track. Not all of these data will exist for passive encounters, but releasing whatever does exist for a given case would help determine whether the objects in that video exhibit anomalous motion.”