About
PURSUE UFO Tracker is a solo project. I built it because the official war.gov interface for the PURSUE disclosures is a flat list of thumbnails with no search, no filters, and no transcripts on the videos. That seemed like a fixable problem.
Who runs it
One person. An attorney by training, not a journalist and not a defense industry insider. The site is one operator plus a Python pipeline plus a public GitHub Action that polls war.gov every 30 minutes during US weekday business hours and hourly the rest of the time. There is no team. There is no funding. There is no affiliation with the U.S. Department of War, the Department of Defense, AARO, or any other government agency. The operator stays anonymous to keep the focus on the data, not the person.
Why the site exists
On May 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of War published the first batch of files under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The official landing page at war.gov/UFO is a useful-enough thumbnail wall, but if you wanted to search across the 161 files, filter by agency or geography, read transcripts of the 28 videos, or know within hours when war.gov made silent edits to the canonical list, you were on your own.
So this site indexes all of that. It SHA-256 hashes every mirrored file so the bytes can be verified against war.gov's CDN. It transcribes the videos (well: it will, once that pipeline stage finishes for all 28). It applies a six-factor scoring rubric called the Anomalousness Index to every file so you can quickly find the entries most likely to be evidentiarily interesting. And it logs every revision war.gov makes after the fact, with the original URLs preserved for citation stability.
How it's built
- Static site served by Cloudflare Pages. No backend server, no database, no API key required to browse.
- Python pipeline (pdfplumber, openai-whisper, Jinja2, curl_cffi). Open source, runs locally, full pipeline documented at PIPELINE.md.
- Auto-poller as a GitHub Action that hits the war.gov CSV every 30 min on weekdays and hourly off-hours. When the CSV changes, the bot commits the new state and opens a public issue. The audit log on /revisions is the human-readable consequence.
- Privacy-first analytics via Plausible (no cookies, no PII). See /privacy.
- Open source at github.com/FongShuiLabs/pursueufotracker. Anyone can fork, audit, or recompute every number on the site.
What this site refuses to do. It does not publish a "probability of extraterrestrial origin" number, ever. The Anomalousness Index measures evidentiary weight that an encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. That is a fundamentally different question from "is this aliens." Anyone publishing the latter number is, in my view, the actual disinformation vector. We mirror, score on a transparent rubric, and let you read the underlying files.
What we got wrong and corrected
I published a wrong characterization of war.gov's May 11 revision on May 14, then a slightly-less-wrong characterization on May 20, before settling on a verified version on May 21 after a reader on r/UFOs (u/Narrow_Market45) pointed out the original framing. The audit chain with all three versions visible is at /revisions, and the verified diff is at /changes. I think keeping the corrections visible is more useful than silently rewriting and pretending the mistakes did not happen.
The editorial position
- URL stability. No detail page URL is deleted, even if war.gov withdraws the underlying file. Bookmarks, citations, and inbound backlinks continue to resolve. Withdrawals get a banner; deletions do not happen.
- Transparent methodology over confident-sounding numbers. The scoring rubric is open JSON. Argue with specific components. The whole point is that anyone can recompute or replace it.
- Corrections live forever. If we publish a wrong claim and have to correct it, the correction is dated and the original framing is preserved alongside. The credibility cost of a quietly-edited page is higher than the cost of an honest mea culpa.
- No oversell. We refuse to call any of this "proof of aliens" because the underlying data does not support that claim. We also refuse to call it "definitely mundane" because the underlying data does not support that either. The honest position is "unexplained after conventional analysis," and that is what the rubric measures.
If you find a factual error on the site (a misread of the CSV, a broken hash, a score component you can argue against), email [email protected]. Documented corrections are added with a dated entry rather than silent edits. See /revisions for the standard.
Contact
Press, corrections, technical questions, or general note: contact page.