An apparition is a form that will not finish resolving: lights in formation against the night, a shape that might be vapor, a glow the eye assembles and loses again. It is the condition of nearly every image in the declassified record — and of the new sightings that arrive, by phone and news feed, faster than any agency can file them. These paintings work in that register. Some are composed — invented skies built to hold the archive’s recurring forms. Others are painted from the live record: the opening work on this page follows an unidentified formation filmed over Tehran on the night of September 20–21, 2026 — theories ranged from a children’s kite to advanced military equipment; the authorities offered no identification — painted while the event was still inside its window of not-knowing, before any file existed. The archive paintings answer the record. These answer the sky.