PURSUE R4 releases three official NASA STS-80 Space Shuttle UFO images (November 1996)
Three of the 40 records in the July 10, 2026 fourth release are the previously well-known-but-poorly-mirrored STS-80 Space Shuttle 1996 UFO images — now published as high-resolution official NASA source files with their own catalog entries (NASA-UAP-D030 through NASA-UAP-D032).
STS-80 (Columbia, launched November 19, 1996) is one of the most-cited UFO cases in Space Shuttle history — decades of grainy screenshots have circulated across UFO forums claiming to be "the NASA video." Until R4, no primary-source high-resolution frame existed in any government release. R4 now hosts three distinct images (labelled Image 1, 2, 3), each with its own catalog ID, cover thumbnail, and official NASA agency provenance. This upgrades a decades-old blurry meme into a citeable primary source.
By the numbers
Evidence
Catalog rows (three separate records):
- NASA-UAP-D030 — STS-80 Unidentified Object Image 1, 1996 (
www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/071026/release_04/documents/NASA-UAP-D030_STS-80-Unidentified-Object-Image1_1996.jpg) - NASA-UAP-D031 — STS-80 Unidentified Object Image 2, 1996
- NASA-UAP-D032 — STS-80 Unidentified Object Image 3, 1996
Each is an image record (type = IMG in the CSV), not a video. Each has its own thumbnail in www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/071026/release_04/thumbnails/. All three appear in the live carousel — the R4 rotator slideshow at Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/071026/Slideshow/ features all three.
Historical background. STS-80 was a 17-day Space Shuttle Columbia mission (Nov 19 – Dec 7, 1996) that set what was, at the time, the longest Shuttle-mission duration record. The mission's payload included the Wake Shield Facility (WSF-3) and the ORFEUS-SPAS II telescope, both of which required Shuttle station-keeping in a fixed attitude relative to the sun for hours at a time. During that fixed-attitude station-keeping — with Columbia's cameras rolling to log the deployment/retrieval sequence — several objects moving in a manner not attributable to on-board debris were captured on tape. Astronomer / UFO researcher Lan Fleming published a well-known 1997 analysis of the frames on the (then-) NASA-JSC Video Analysis Group site.
Why this matters as a release, not just a re-share. For three decades, every version of these images circulating online was a compressed video-still, a grainy re-encode, or a scanned printout — because NASA's own archival copies were either mission-tape ADR films (physical media) or JSC-internal video-analysis TIFFs. The three R4 files carry the DoW's PURSUE-release identifiers, are hosted on DoD infrastructure (www.war.gov/medialink), and are catalogued alongside the sensor-video corpus. This is the first time this specific case has been ingested into the U.S. government's own UAP-declassification workflow.
Cross-reference. R4 also includes NASA-UAP-D026 through D029 — the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 crew debriefings (see [apollo-light-flash-tapes](/findings/apollo-light-flash-tapes)) — extending the NASA-astronaut historical cluster that started with the R2/R3 Apollo audio tapes (Gemini debriefings, Gordon Cooper/Cronkite interview, Apollo 16 "alien starbase" reference).