PURSUE Changes Log
FIRST PUBLISHED 20 MAY 2026 · VERIFIED BY URL SET COMPARISON
What this page contains. The verified row-by-row diff between the May 8 PURSUE CSV (161 rows) and the May 11 PURSUE CSV (158 rows), computed by direct URL-set and DVIDS-ID-set comparison. (War.gov later added 64 more files in Release 02 on May 22, bringing the canonical CSV to 222 rows - see the Release 02 card above.) Each claim on this page is a direct count from the underlying CSV files. No interpretation of war.gov's intent. No characterizations of "renames," "consolidations," or "reclassifications" - those would be inferences and are kept off this page.
Headline finding: zero PDFs added, zero PDFs removed, zero videos added, zero videos removed. The 161 -> 158 row delta is fully explained by 9 PDFs that previously had one CSV row now having multiple, and 1 PDF having its storage slug changed.
🛰️ Release 03 verified · CSV in hand · 294 rows confirmed · 294/294 SHA-256 verified
The U.S. Department of War published a third PURSUE release on June 12, 2026. We fetched the canonical war.gov CSV directly and verified it: SHA-256 48db08be39605efd86e1d92fe6af3cda7730e1da6a4b5741d37a30712ebf5e04, 294 data rows (158 from Release 01 + 64 from Release 02 + 72 new from Release 03). The 72 new files: 18 historical CIA records (the Scientific Advisory Panel on UFOs, a study titled "The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance," the Leon Davidson / CASE 17708 correspondence, and mid-century sighting reports), 29 FBI files (modern UAP reports including the 2022 Colorado Springs incident and Northeastern "orb" sightings), 11 NASA debriefings (Gemini 4/5/7/9, the Apollo 16 scientific debriefing, and a Gordon Cooper interview), 12 DoD files (a 1949 U.S. Army flying-saucer study and an AARO "Western United States" case), and the first intelligence-community-analysis and U.S. Government correspondence records. War.gov also added a new "Featured" column to the CSV schema and corrected three filename typos (re-slugged, not withdrawn); zero files were removed.
🛰️ Release 02 verified · CSV in hand · 222 rows confirmed · ingested + SHA-256 verified
The U.S. Department of War published PURSUE Release 02 on May 22, 2026. We have fetched the canonical war.gov CSV directly (now hosted at /Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv, the older uap-csv.csv URL was retired and 404s) and verified its byte-identity: SHA-256 6be2c64e760534a567e13ebaac939bf2cea3bd9de4864d9ae98c5c8b5df1b963, 222 data rows. Breakdown: 158 rows from Release 01 (5/8/26) plus 64 new rows from Release 02 (5/22/26).
War.gov restructured the CSV schema for Release 02 - the new file has 27 columns including Redaction, Release Date, Video Pairing, PDF Pairing, Description Blurb, DVIDS Video ID, Video Title, Agency, Incident Date, and Incident Location columns. The 64 Release-02 records include the DOW-UAP-PR050 - PR099 sensor-video series (51 entries), the 7 NASA crew audio files, and 6 documents including ODNI-UAP-D001 (a first-person narrative from a senior U.S. intelligence officer describing a one-hour multi-witness UAP encounter from a military helicopter in late 2025).
The 64 Release 02 files are indexed, scored, and live on the site. Live status JSON: data/poll-state.json.
🔬 File-integrity audit · war.gov re-processed 62 documents · verified: no content removed
Sometime between our May 8-9 capture and June 10, war.gov silently replaced the file bodies of 62 Release-01 PDFs at the same URLs - same filenames, same CSV rows, same page count. The replacement files are about half the size (the audited corpus went from 2.49 GB to 1.25 GB). A CSV-row poller cannot see this, because the CSV did not change. This was first flagged publicly by a reader hashing every file daily; we independently verified it before publishing, and credit the catch. The natural worry - "they shrank the files, are they hiding something?" - is answerable here because we keep the original bytes.
What we verified, file by file, against our archived originals (all 62):
Conclusion: re-processing, not removal. War.gov re-compressed the raw scanned images and added searchable OCR text layers. The originals had no extractable text (they were image-only scans); the new versions are text-searchable. The files got smaller and more usable. We checked every one of the 62 changed files - page counts are identical, and the single file that showed fewer extracted characters turned out to be garbage OCR being replaced with clean text, not content loss.
Scope of this claim: we compared page counts and extractable-text layers on all 62 changed files against our SHA-256-matched originals. We did not pixel-compare every page image, so we cannot rule out a localized visual change on an individual page - but no pages were dropped, no images cropped, and OCR text was added rather than removed. The exact date of the swap is bounded by our two data points (May 8-9 and June 10); a reader with daily snapshots dates it to mid-May. Full machine-readable per-file audit (old size, old SHA-256, current size): wargov-file-integrity-audit-2026-06-10.json.
TL;DR (plain English)
War.gov changed how they label their UFO file list on May 11, 2026, but the files themselves are exactly the same. 130 PDFs and 28 videos exist in both versions. The row count in their published spreadsheet dropped from 161 to 158 because 9 PDFs that used to appear as one row each now appear as multiple rows (the same file referenced under different incident titles), and one PDF had its storage filename renamed. That accounts for the entire change. The data tables below show every PDF affected, with links to the actual files.
The arithmetic
The row-count delta of -3 (161 May 8 rows -> 158 current rows) decomposes cleanly:
May 8 CSV: 161 rows
= 130 unique PDFs + 16 video rows + 15 PDF rows that were duplicates within the May 8 file
= 130 PDF URLs + 28 video DVIDS IDs in the unique set
May 11+ CSV: 158 rows
= 130 unique PDFs + 16 video rows + 12 additional cross-reference PDF rows
= 130 PDF URLs + 28 video DVIDS IDs in the unique set
(same unique set after accounting for 1 PDF slug change; see Table 2 below)
Net delta: -3 rows
= 15 historical PDF-row duplicates - 12 new cross-reference rows
= -3
The unique-file inventory between the two dates is identical. The CSV structure changed; the file set did not.
Table 1: 9 PDFs that gained extra CSV rows (12 extra rows total)
Each of these 9 PDFs had exactly 1 CSV row on May 8 and now has 2-4 CSV rows in the current CSV. The PDF file at the URL is unchanged (we have not yet re-hashed it; see "verification status" below). The new CSV rows describe what appear to be discrete incidents contained within the same PDF, but we do not assert this without diffing the PDF contents.
| PDF URL (war.gov) | Site detail page | Current CSV row titles (2026-05-11+) | Rows |
|---|---|---|---|
| dow-uap-d32-mission-report,-syria-october-2024.pdf | Syria, October 2024 | D32, PR31, PR32, PR33 | 4x |
| dow-uap-d23-mission-report-united-arab-emirates-october-2023.pdf | UAE, October 2023 | D23, PR26, PR27 | 3x |
| dow-uap-d10-mission-report-middle-east-may-2022.pdf | Middle East, May 2022 | D10, PR19 | 2x |
| dow-uap-d14-mission-report-iraq-may-2022.pdf | Iraq, May 2022 | D14, PR21 | 2x |
| dow-uap-d16-mission-report-syria-july-2022.pdf | Syria, July 2022 | D16, PR22 | 2x |
| dow-uap-d18-mission-report-iraq-december-2022.pdf | Iraq, December 2022 | D18, PR23 | 2x |
| dow-uap-d33-mission-report-greece-october-2023.pdf | Greece, October 2023 (1) | D33, PR34 | 2x |
| dow-uap-d35-mission-report-greece-october-2023.pdf | Greece, October 2023 (2) | D35, PR35 | 2x |
| dow-uap-d38-range-fouler-debrief-middle-east-may-2020.pdf | Middle East, May 2020 | D38, PR36 | 2x |
Table 2: PDF storage-slug changes (title unchanged)
One PDF on war.gov's storage backend had its file slug renamed between May 8 and May 11. The CSV Title and human-facing metadata are unchanged. SHA-256 verification (2026-05-23): bytes IDENTICAL. The rename was purely a storage-slug change with no underlying content modification.
| Title (unchanged) | Old URL (May 8) | New URL (May 11+) | Verification |
|---|---|---|---|
| DOW-UAP-D20, Mission Report, Iraq, 2023 | .../dow-uap-d20-mission-report-southern-united-states-2023.pdf |
.../dow-uap-d20-mission-report-iraq-2023.pdf |
SHA-256 verified identical |
Verification details: Both files share SHA-256 71ca8826db94d61583083ef8465a6902564532dcab7d49d0d2db3e86aaf85b2f (3,698,245 bytes). The current PDF was fetched 2026-05-23 from the new URL via curl_cffi chrome120 impersonation. The May 8 hash was recorded in our manifest at the time of initial parse. Verification methodology: sha256sum on both file bytes, byte-identical match.
Note: 2 additional URL-pair differences exist in the diff (involving FBI file series 59_64634 and 65_HS1-..._Section_6) but the data is currently ambiguous between "URL slug change" and "the old URL was withdrawn while a similarly-titled new URL was added." We are not asserting either reading until we have re-fetched both files and compared bytes. See the methodology note below.
Verification status by file class
| What's verified | How | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Unique PDF URL set (May 8 vs current) | Set diff on normalized URLs | Done |
| Unique video DVIDS ID set (May 8 vs current) | Set diff on DVIDS IDs | Done - identical |
| Multi-row PDF count and identities | Counter on URL field in current CSV | Done |
| PDF byte equivalence on slug-changed files (D20) | Re-fetch + SHA-256 compare | Done 2026-05-23 - bytes identical |
| Multi-row PDFs - are extra rows describing the same content or distinct incidents within the PDF? | PDF text extraction + comparison | Pending |
| Resolution status changes (e.g., the "Middle East 2013" question) | PDF content read | Pending |
How to verify this page yourself
Anyone can re-run the diff. The inputs are public:
- Current war.gov CSV: war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-csv.csv (warm a session at war.gov/UFO/ first or the CDN will 403)
- May 8 manifest snapshot: /generated/api/files.json (our parsed copy; the original war.gov May 8 CSV is no longer hosted but its SHA-256 is preserved in our poll-state history)
- The diff itself: extract the
PDF | Image Linkcolumn from the CSV, normalize to lowercase, set-difference against thesource_urlfield from our manifest. The result will match the tables on this page.
Why this page exists
An earlier version of /revisions characterized the May 11 change as including removals, additions, geographic consolidation, and reclassification. None of those characterizations are supported by the URL-set comparison. Rather than silently rewriting and pretending the mistake didn't happen, we kept the correction visible on /revisions and built this page to host the verified data tables. Per the site's editorial policy, transparency about our own errors is part of the credibility moat.