Frequently Asked Questions

Presidential Unsealings and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. It is the Trump administration's official program to declassify and publicly release U.S. government records on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), spanning the FBI, the Department of War, NASA, and the State Department. The program landing page is at war.gov/UFO.

For a comprehensive explainer on how the rolling-release program is structured, the agency breakdown (Release 01 = 82 DoD + 57 FBI + 15 NASA + 7 State = 161; Release 02 added 52 DoD + 7 NASA + 5 CIA/ODNI/DOE = 64 for 222 combined; Release 03 added 12 DoD + 29 FBI + 11 NASA + 18 CIA + 2 IC/government = 72 for 294 combined), the May 11 CSV revision, and the boundaries of what PURSUE actually establishes, see our PURSUE program deep dive.

Release 01 went live on May 8, 2026, with 161 CSV rows describing 158 unique files at war.gov/UFO. On May 11, 2026, war.gov restructured the canonical CSV from 161 rows to 158 rows. Verified by URL-set comparison: zero PDFs added or removed, zero videos added or removed. 9 PDFs gained additional CSV row entries (multi-row representations of the same underlying file), and 1 PDF had its storage slug renamed.

Release 02 went live on May 22, 2026, adding 64 new files for a 222-row combined archive: 51 sensor videos in the DOW-UAP-PR050-PR099 series, 7 NASA crew audio files, and 6 documents including ODNI-UAP-D001 (the senior intelligence officer's helicopter encounter narrative). Three new agencies first appeared in Release 02: ODNI, CIA, and DOE - see the dedicated intel + DOE category page. For the 51-file DOW-UAP-PR sensor video series specifically, see our Release 02 Pentagon UAP videos deep dive.

Release 03 went live on June 12, 2026, adding 72 new files for a 294-file combined archive: 18 historical CIA records (now in their own CIA files section), 29 FBI files (modern UAP and Northeastern orb reports), 11 NASA debriefings (Gemini 4/5/7/9, Apollo 16, and a Gordon Cooper interview), 12 DoD files, and the first intelligence-community-analysis and U.S. Government correspondence records.

Our automated war.gov poller detected the May 11 revision within hours. The Release 02 ingest itself required a manual fix once war.gov renamed the canonical CSV from uap-csv.csv to uap-data.csv around the Release 02 cutover. Full verified diff with data tables: /changes. (See also /revisions for the timestamped corrections history.)

No. None of the released files contains a body, a craft, biological material, or any artifact whose origin can only be extraterrestrial. They also do not prove aliens don't exist.

What they DO show is that trained military and government personnel have reported observations the federal record continues to log as "unresolved," and that the U.S. government has been collecting such reports continuously for at least 80 years. The single highest-scoring file in the archive is the December 1965 Gemini 7 air-to-ground audio in which astronaut Frank Borman reports an unidentified object to NASA mission control - see our Borman Incident deep dive. The densest cluster of similarly-scored reports is the 27-file score-66 tier of unresolved military mission captures submitted to AARO - see our AARO Unresolved UAP deep dive.

Read our full honest verdict on what these files prove and don't prove →

UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) is the historical, public-facing term used since the 1940s. UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly Unidentified Aerial Phenomena until 2022) is the current official U.S. government term, adopted to cover underwater and transmedium objects, not just aerial ones.

The Pentagon, AARO, and ODNI use UAP in formal documents. War.gov runs the PURSUE program but kept the public URL at /UFO/ because that's the term most people search.

A 0-100 score reflecting evidentiary weight that an encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. It is NOT a probability of extraterrestrial origin. Anyone publishing a "percent chance aliens" number is selling something.

The score is calculated from six weighted components:

• Sensor quality (weight 0.25)
• Witness credibility (0.20)
• Corroboration (0.20)
• Kinematic anomaly (0.15)
• Mundane-explanation availability (0.10)
• Official disposition (0.10)

The full rubric and weights are open JSON at /data/scoring-rubric.json. Anyone can recompute every score on this site. The rubric in practice produces a single 72 (Borman / Gemini 7 audio), a 27-file cluster at 66 (the AARO unresolved military captures), 6 files at 65 (the Apollo 12 lunar photographs and the Apollo 17 triangular-formation image), and a long tail of scoring tiers below.

Yes. All files are works of the U.S. Government and are in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. You may cite, embed, screenshot, redistribute, and commercialize them freely.

Attribution to the source agency (FBI, Department of War, NASA, State Department) is courteous. Attribution to this index is appreciated but not required.

Every file has a SHA-256 hash on its detail page and in the public verification manifest. Steps:

1. Re-download the file from war.gov/UFO
2. Hash it locally:
   • Windows PowerShell: Get-FileHash file.pdf -Algorithm SHA256
   • macOS / Linux: shasum -a 256 file.pdf
3. Compare against the SHA-256 on our detail page. They should match exactly.

This is how journalists fact-check our archive.

The video files in PURSUE are hosted on DVIDS (Defense Visual Information Distribution Service), the U.S. military's public media platform. We retrieve them via DVIDS' public API.

Each video page includes the closed captions provided by DVIDS and a Whisper-generated full transcript, and we link back to the official DVIDS page on every video detail page.

Yes. The Department of War has stated PURSUE is a rolling-release program. This site polls the official war.gov UAP CSV every 30 minutes during U.S. weekday business hours and hourly off-hours via an automated GitHub Action.

New drops trigger an indexing run within hours of release. Subscribe via RSS for next-drop alerts.

Both numbers are correct, for different snapshots.

294 files across three releases. Release 01 (May 8 2026) contributed 161 unique files (119 PDFs, 28 videos, 14 images). On May 11, war.gov restructured how the canonical CSV represents the file inventory (161 rows became 158).

Release 02 (May 22 2026) added 64 new files - 51 sensor videos in the DOW-UAP-PR050-PR099 series, 7 NASA crew audio files, and 6 documents including ODNI-UAP-D001 - bringing the archive to 222 rows (verified SHA-256 6be2c64e7605...).

Release 03 (June 12 2026) added 72 new files - 18 historical CIA records, 29 FBI files (modern UAP and orb-sighting reports), 11 NASA debriefings (Gemini 4/5/7/9, Apollo 16, Gordon Cooper), 12 DoD files, and the first IC-analysis and U.S. Government correspondence records (verified SHA-256 48db08be3960...). Combined breakdown: 175 PDFs + 95 videos + 24 images = 294 total.

Verified differences: zero PDFs added or removed, zero videos added or removed, 9 PDFs gained additional CSV row entries (multi-row representations of the same underlying file), and 1 PDF had its storage slug renamed.

The Release 01 row delta (-3, from 161 to 158) reflects multi-row aggregation, not file removals. We preserve all original file URLs for citation stability across all releases. Total indexed: 294.

Full verified diff with data tables →

An independent operator, not affiliated with the Department of War, the FBI, NASA, the State Department, or any U.S. government entity.

The site is independently run and never paywalled. Press inquiries: see the press kit.

Yes, for three things, all human-supervised:

• Rubric application. Claude (Anthropic) reads each file's publicly reported description and selects which rubric value matches each of the six components. The rubric and weights are human-designed and live as open JSON.
• Video transcription. OpenAI Whisper generates the .vtt subtitle tracks and full transcripts you see on every video page.
• PDF text extraction. pdfplumber (open-source, not AI) pulls searchable text out of every PDF.

We do not use AI to decide whether files prove aliens exist. No model can honestly do that and we refuse to publish such a number.