PURSUE/pajarito-astronomers-1986 / 1986-05 / PURSUE / DOE
DOE-UAP-D003 — Pajarito Astronomers Newsletter: A Los Alamos UFO Talk, May 1986
PURSUE / DOE (1986). DOE-UAP-D003 — Pajarito Astronomers Newsletter: A Los Alamos UFO Talk, May 1986. The UFO Files. https://the-ufo-files-site.netlify.app/dossier/pajarito-astronomers-1986
"DOE-UAP-D003 — Pajarito Astronomers Newsletter: A Los Alamos UFO Talk, May 1986." PURSUE / DOE. 1986. https://the-ufo-files-site.netlify.app/dossier/pajarito-astronomers-1986.
DOE-UAP-D003 — Pajarito Astronomers Newsletter: A Los Alamos UFO Talk, May 1986 Case ID: PURSUE/pajarito-astronomers-1986 Agency: PURSUE / DOE Date: 1986-05 Source: https://www.war.gov/UFO/?releaseDate=Release+02#records Mirrored on The UFO Files, an archive by Dead Pixel Design. The file is the file. Anything in question is one click from the original.
Summary
A one-page meeting announcement from the Pajarito Astronomers, an amateur astronomy club in Los Alamos, New Mexico, released in PURSUE Release 02 as DOE-UAP-D003. Dated Tuesday, May 20, 1986, it announces the club’s next meeting for Thursday, May 29, 1986, in the Ranch Room at Fuller Lodge. The guest speaker is Dr. John Warren of AT-6 (an organizational code consistent with a Los Alamos National Laboratory technical division), and the announced topic is:
“Why Should a Scientist be Concerned about UFO’s?”
That is the entire substance of the document. It is a club bulletin, not a sighting report or an incident file.
Why This Document Matters
Its value is contextual, not evidentiary. It is one more data point in the Los Alamos science community’s sustained, decades-long engagement with the UFO question that runs through this release:
- 1948-1950: the Sandia / green fireball investigations, with University of New Mexico and AEC scientists.
- ~1976: the James Tuck correspondence on atmospheric vortices and ball lightning.
- 1986: a Los Alamos lab scientist giving a talk titled “Why Should a Scientist be Concerned about UFO’s?” to the local astronomy club.
The throughline is that credentialed scientists at the nation’s premier weapons lab treated UFOs as a topic worth serious discussion across nearly forty years. That a routine club newsletter was captured and declassified into a federal UAP release also illustrates how broadly the PURSUE document-collection effort cast its net.
Caveats
- This is the lightest document in Release 02. It contains no sighting, no incident, no data — only the title of a talk that was to be given.
- We do not have the content of Dr. Warren’s talk, only its title and date.
- “AT-6” is read from the newsletter as Dr. Warren’s affiliation; it is consistent with a Los Alamos division/group code but is not further identified in the document.
- The OCR of the club’s stylized letterhead is garbled; the meeting details (date, location, speaker, topic) transcribe clearly.
Provenance
- Document ID: DOE-UAP-D003 (PDF title: “DOE-UAP-D003”)
- Official source: U.S. Department of War (DOE record), PURSUE Release 02, cleared for release May 22, 2026. Release 02 records.
- Release announcement: DOW press release, May 22, 2026.
- Document bundle (official): release_02_document_bundle.zip (70.1 MB).
- Note: No standalone slideshow preview image was published for this document; it appears in the downloadable document bundle.
- Local OCR transcript:
raw/pursue-release-02-ocr/DOE-UAP-D003.txt.
Connections
- James Tuck correspondence (DOE-UAP-D002) — Los Alamos science community on UFOs
- Sandia green fireballs (DOW-UAP-D017) — the New Mexico nuclear-science cluster
- PURSUE program
- Release 02 full inventory
- Release 02 master report
Open Questions
- Who was Dr. John Warren of AT-6, and is there a record of what he actually said on May 29, 1986?
- How did a 1986 amateur astronomy club newsletter end up in a DOE holding that fed PURSUE Release 02?