UAP Science Advisory Council Scientists: PURSUE Videos Lack Data to Confirm Anomalous Velocities

Jacob Haqq-Misra (Blue Marble Space Institute) and Ravi Kopparapu (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) — both members of the White House UAP Science Advisory Council chaired by Avi Loeb — published a preprint, 'Limits on Kinematic Inference from the PURSUE Airborne Sensor Videos,' examining all 112 sensor videos released across the five PURSUE tranches since May 2026. The authors found that calculating an object's true physical velocity requires four data points — range to object, aircraft velocity, aspect angle, and camera field angle — and 'no PURSUE video provides this set of information,' with on-screen sensor readouts redacted. One clip (DOW-UAP-PR113) allows partial field-of-view reconstruction but still cannot distinguish a nearby bird from a distant hypersonic craft; a second clip with a visible reference vessel yields only an upper bound of Mach 0.4. The authors conclude the PURSUE videos in their current form cannot resolve unidentified cases or demonstrate anomalous speeds, citing the 'GOFAST' Navy video — later shown via telemetry to likely be a wind-drifted balloon — as a cautionary precedent.