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; Release 04 added 28 DoD + 7 NASA + 2 CIA + 2 DOE + 1 FBI = 40 for 334 combined; Release 05 added 19 DoD + 17 FBI + 2 CIA + 2 State + 1 EOP = 41 for 375 combined; Release 06 added 67 DoD + 8 Local Law Enforcement = 75 for 450 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.

Release 04 went live on July 10, 2026, adding 40 new files for a 334-file combined archive: 19 Department of War unresolved-UAP-report videos, nine DoD documents (three range-fouler debriefs from 2019-2020 and six Air Force records from 1948-1967, including a 1948 Project Sign progress report), seven NASA records (four Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 debriefing recordings and three STS-80 Space Shuttle images), two 1955 CIA memoranda, two Department of Energy records, and one FBI file.

Release 05 went live on August 7, 2026, adding 41 new files for a 375-file combined archive: 17 FBI records (eight FD-302 interview reports, eight FBI digital renderings prepared as visual aids, and one thermal-imaging video), 19 Department of War files (historical records from 1947 to 1953 and Gulf of Oman, Pacific Ocean and Middle East unresolved UAP report videos), two CIA records on a Puerto Rico incident, two State Department cables from the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, and the first Executive Office of the President record, a National Aeronautics and Space Council inquiry into a November 1963 incident at Bahia, Brazil.

Release 06 went live on September 18, 2026, adding 75 new files for a 450-file combined archive: 44 records of the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), a Defense Intelligence Agency program active from 2008 to 2012; five files around a July 2, 1952 film shot near Tremonton, Utah (the film, two Project Blue Book files, the Navy personnel record of the man who filmed it, and an Air Force file of 1952 flying disc records); a March 1952 presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, as audio and a transcript; four mission reports and 12 unresolved UAP reports from Iraq, the Middle East, the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea; and the first local law enforcement records, eight files from Colorado: four cellphone videos and a transcript of each, three of the transcripts added to war.gov's list on September 24. See the Release 06 breakdown.

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. Among the highest-scoring files in the archive - eight are tied at the top score of 72 - 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 scoring band is the 108 files tied at 66 - unresolved military mission captures, anchored by the 27 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 eight files tied at the top score of 72 (the Gemini 7 Borman audio, the Gordon Cooper interview, and the Apollo 14, 16, and 17 debriefings), 108 files tied at 66 (the AARO-submitted and Release-02 military captures), 9 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.

More releases are coming - PURSUE is a rolling-release program - but no schedule has been announced. The observed pattern across the six releases so far: Release 01 on May 8, 2026, Release 02 on May 22 (+14 days), Release 03 on June 12 (+21 days), Release 04 on July 10 (+28 days), Release 05 on August 7 (+28 days), and Release 06 on September 18 (+42 days). All six landed on a Friday. The gaps have ranged from 14 to 42 days, but five intervals are not a schedule and no cadence has ever been announced. We do not publish a predicted date for the next release.

This site polls the official war.gov UAP CSV automatically, several times a day, via a public GitHub Action, so a new drop is detected on the next check after it lands, and added to the archive once its files are downloaded and verified. Watch the release tracker or subscribe via RSS for next-drop alerts.

You will see different totals quoted, and each is correct for a different snapshot. The current total is 450 files across six releases, as of September 24, 2026: 270 PDF documents, 150 videos (16 of them audio recordings), and 30 images.

Release 01 (May 8 2026) contributed 158 unique files (116 PDFs, 28 videos, 14 images), published as 161 CSV rows. On May 11, war.gov restructured how the canonical CSV represents the file inventory (161 rows became 158). 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 row delta (-3, from 161 to 158) reflects multi-row aggregation, not file removals.

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 - for 294 rows (verified SHA-256 48db08be3960...).

Release 04 (July 10 2026) added 40 files for 334 rows (verified SHA-256 13e730c18d6e...). Release 05 (August 7 2026) added 41 for 375 rows (5f5698f13224...). Release 06 (September 18 2026) added 72 for 447 rows (19e6dd7a69d5...), and war.gov added three more Release 06 files on September 24, for 450 rows (c3f8209ef5f5..., fetched directly from war.gov).

We preserve all original file URLs for citation stability across all releases. Total indexed: 450.

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.

The video is real: DOW-UAP-PR116, a 32-second infrared sensor capture from a 2020 Atlantic Ocean military encounter, released in PURSUE Drop 04 (July 10, 2026) and submitted by U.S. Northern Command to AARO. The "two-tiered structure" description is a social-media characterization - that phrase appears nowhere in the released record.

What the record does contain: a paired Range Fouler debrief (DOW-UAP-D091) in which the military observer describes the object as "darker, maroonish color, approximately 12-15 feet in height," notes it "travel[ing] with the wind" without maneuvering, and says it appeared "similar to a 'large, somewhat deformed balloon.'" War.gov explicitly cautions that the observer's language is subjective interpretation, not a determination - the file remains formally unresolved. Both documents, read quote by quote: DOW-UAP-PR116, Explained.

Because the Anomalousness Index measures evidence quality, not mystery. Four files tied at the archive's top score of 72 are Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 crew debriefings about the "light flash phenomena" - streaks of light astronauts perceived, often with their eyes closed, now understood as high-energy cosmic-ray particles striking the retina.

They score at the top because astronaut testimony on the official federal record is the rubric's highest witness tier, the recordings are preserved official debriefings, and they were released as open records. None of the six axes asks "is the cause unknown?" A high score means the evidence chain is strong - not that the object is unidentified. Full walkthrough, with the crews' verbatim words: The Astronaut Light Flashes.

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 generated the .vtt subtitle tracks and full transcripts you see on the astronaut audio recordings and other narrated videos this site has processed; most PURSUE videos are silent sensor captures. Release 06 also brought official war.gov transcripts, published as separate PDFs: DOW-UAP-D154 for the 1952 Ruppelt presentation audio (DOW-UAP-PR160), which this site has not transcribed itself, and LLE-UAP-D001 to D004 for the four Colorado police videos, whose audio AARO removed before release.
• 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.