  The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) VIRUS Parallel Survey (HETVIPS) is a blind
spectroscopic program that sparsely covers approximately two-thirds of the
celestial sphere and consists of roughly 252 million fiber spectra. The spectra
were taken in parallel mode with the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit
Spectrograph (VIRUS) instrument when the HET was observing a primary target
with other HET facility instruments. VIRUS can simultaneously obtain
approximately 35,000 spectra covering 3470A to 5540A at a spectral resolution
of ~800. Although the vast majority of these spectra cover blank sky, we used
the Pan-STARRS1 Data Release 2 Stacked Catalog to identify objects encompassed
in the HETVIPS pointings and extract their spectra. This paper presents the
first HETVIPS data release, containing 493,012 flux-calibrated spectra obtained
through 31 March 2023, as well as a description of the data processing
technique. Each of the object spectra were classified, resulting in a catalog
of 74,196 galaxies, 4,087 quasars, 259,396 stars, and 154,543 unknown sources.
