Frequently Asked Questions
Honest answers about the Trump administration's PURSUE UAP disclosure: what it is, what the files do and do not prove, how the scoring rubric works, war.gov's May 11 revision, and how to verify everything yourself.
What does PURSUE stand for?
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.
When did the Trump administration release the UFO files?
Drop 01 went live on May 8, 2026, with 161 files at war.gov/UFO. Additional drops are planned on a rolling basis.
On May 11, 2026, war.gov silently revised the canonical list: 28 files renamed with DOW-UAP-PR## prefixes, 5 removed, 3 added, and 6 "Arabian Gulf 2020" entries consolidated under "Middle East 2020". Net: 158 files. Our automated war.gov poller detected the change within hours. See the full revision log.
Do these files prove aliens exist?
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 prove is that trained military and government personnel have observed objects with flight characteristics that no known aircraft can replicate, and that the U.S. government has been collecting such reports continuously for at least 80 years.
Read our full honest verdict on what these files prove and don't prove →
What's the difference between UFO and UAP?
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.
What is the Anomalousness Index?
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.
Are the files free to download and republish?
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.
How can I verify a file matches what's on war.gov?
Every file has a SHA-256 hash on its detail page and in the public verification manifest. Steps:
- Re-download the file from war.gov/UFO
- Hash it locally:
- Windows PowerShell:
Get-FileHash file.pdf -Algorithm SHA256 - macOS / Linux:
shasum -a 256 file.pdf
- Windows PowerShell:
- Compare against the SHA-256 on our detail page. They should match exactly.
This is how journalists fact-check our archive.
Where do the videos come from?
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.
Will more files be released?
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 or watch the public repo at github.com/FongShuiLabs/pursueufotracker.
Why does this site say 161 files when war.gov says 158?
Both numbers are correct, for different snapshots.
The original PURSUE Drop 01 on May 8, 2026 contained 161 files. On May 11, 2026, war.gov silently revised the canonical list. Net delta: -3 files (161 → 158).
We preserve all 161 original URLs for citation stability and have added the 3 new entries as stubs. Total currently indexed: 164.
Who runs this site?
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 reader-supported via affiliate links and tasteful sponsorships - never paywalled, never with autoplay ads or interstitials. Press inquiries: see the press kit.
Do you use AI? How?
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.