What Is PURSUE?

PURSUE - the Presidential Unsealings and Reporting System for UAP Encounters - is the Trump administration's program for declassifying and publicly releasing the U.S. government's accumulated Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena records. The first release went live at war.gov/UFO on May 8, 2026. Here is how the program is structured, what was in Drop 01, and what the disclosure does and does not establish.

The program in one paragraph

PURSUE is structured as a rolling-release declassification program. Rather than dumping a single archive at one point in time, the program publishes UAP records in periodic "drops" hosted on the U.S. Department of War's public website at war.gov/UFO. Each drop adds files to the canonical CSV catalogue that war.gov maintains, accompanied by released metadata describing each file - file type, the originating agency, mission or case identifiers, brief content summaries, and where applicable, sensor and witness context. Files are released into the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105 (works of the U.S. Government), so anyone can mirror, quote, or analyze them without licensing constraints.

PURSUE by the numbers

The first PURSUE release, published on May 8, 2026, contained 161 distinct file URLs from four federal agencies - the FBI, the Department of War, NASA, and the State Department - which war.gov restructured into 158 files on May 11. Later releases added the CIA, ODNI, and the Department of Energy (Release 02), an Intelligence Community analysis and U.S. Government correspondence (Release 03), the Executive Office of the President (Release 05), and local law enforcement (Release 06). The current breakdown across all releases:

By file type, the combined archive breaks down into 270 PDFs (investigative records, mission reports, transcripts, intelligence narratives, technical proposals), 150 videos (mostly infrared captures from U.S. military mission platforms, dominated by the Release 02 DOW-UAP-PR050-PR099 series), and 30 image files (NASA mission photography, from the Apollo 12 and 17 lunar missions to a 1996 Space Shuttle flight, plus FBI photographs and digital renderings). The full breakdown is searchable on this tracker; the top-10 page shows the highest-scoring files on this site's evidentiary rubric, and the Pentagon, FBI, NASA, State Department, and Intel + DOE category pages list every file in each agency.

What the agencies actually contributed

Each agency's PURSUE submission is structured around an internal organizing logic. Understanding what each contributed clarifies why the rubric scores them differently:

Department of War / DoD (257 files)

The largest single contribution, dominated by short infrared video captures from U.S. military mission platforms submitted to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO): CENTCOM and other combatant-command mission reports and AARO unresolved-report videos from roughly 2020-2026, together with the named sensor-video series in the DOW-UAP-PR catalogue (themed by spherical orbs, multi-UAP formations, USOs, and cigar shapes, geographically spanning CENTCOM, NORTHCOM, and U.S. domestic captures). Later releases also added historical Air Force records - Project Sign and Project Blue Book material from 1948 to 1967, and in Release 06 the 1952 Tremonton, Utah film with its Blue Book files - and, in Release 06, 44 records of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP, 2008-2012). 107 of these DoD files sit at score 66 - the densest single tier in the entire archive on this site's open six-axis rubric.

Central Intelligence Agency (23 files)

The CIA block grew sharply with Release 03, which added a run of historical Cold War-era records: the 1952-53 Robertson Panel report (CIA-UAP-002), the CIA's own history of U-2 overhead reconnaissance (CIA-UAP-003), Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 (CIA-UAP-015), and a series of mid-century analyses of Soviet and foreign UFO reporting - alongside the 1973 CIA-UAP-D001 Intelligence Information Report on USSR activity. Releases 04 and 05 added four more: two 1955 documents on unconventional aircraft sightings (a memorandum and an analysis), and two records on unidentified aircraft reported near Puerto Rico in 1964-65. See our CIA UFO files deep dive and the CIA category page.

ODNI, DOE, and other federal records (17 files)

The ODNI-UAP-D001 USPER narrative is a senior intelligence-community official's first-person account of a multi-orb UAP encounter from a helicopter near a sensitive U.S. military facility in late 2025. The five Department of Energy files document U.S. nuclear-weapons-complex sites: enhanced PANTEX imagery, James Tuck correspondence from the 1970s, and a 1986 Pajarito astronomers invitation (Release 02), plus a 1949 Los Alamos conference record and a 2015 Pantex incident report (Release 04). Release 03 introduced the first intelligence-community-analysis and general U.S. Government correspondence records; Release 05 added EOP-UAP-D001, a National Aeronautics and Space Council inquiry into a November 1963 incident at Bahia, Brazil, the first Executive Office of the President record; and Release 06 added eight local law enforcement records from Colorado - four cellphone videos and a transcript of each. See the dedicated intel + DOE category page.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (104 files)

The FBI's contribution centers on its internal case file 62-HQ-83894, which aggregated UFO and "flying disc" investigations between June 1947 and July 1968. The case file is broken into 10 sections (the chronological investigative record), 7 serial-numbered records (specific catalogued items), and 1 sub-file. The PURSUE release includes pages that the public FBI Vault has not previously posted. Release 03 added a set of modern FBI FD-1057 reports - including a 2022 Colorado Springs encounter and a series of 2024 Northeastern-United-States orb sightings. Release 05 added 17 more: eight FD-302 interview reports, eight digital renderings the FBI prepared in 2026 as visual aids from witnesses' descriptions, and one thermal-imaging video. See our deep dive on 62-HQ-83894 and our walkthrough of the modern FBI UAP reports.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (40 files)

NASA contributed a mix of Apollo-era records (Apollo 11, 12, 14, 16, and 17), Gemini-era astronaut audio and debriefings (Gemini 4, 5, 7, and 9 - notably the December 1965 Borman/Lovell Gemini 7 file, one of eight files tied for the highest score in the archive at 72), Mercury-program audio excerpts, a 1962 Gordon Cooper interview (also tied at 72), Skylab crew debriefings, and three 1996 images of an unidentified object from Space Shuttle mission STS-80 (Release 04). NASA's photographic submissions are notable because NASA modified the originals before release to highlight specific regions of interest containing "unidentified phenomena" - the agency did not assert what was in those regions, only that they were flagged. See our Apollo 12 deep dive.

Department of State (9 files)

One of the smaller contributions: diplomatic cables forwarded back to the State Department from U.S. embassies reporting foreign-government or foreign-aviation-authority UAP communications, spanning 1952-2004. The set is five embassy cables - Papua New Guinea (1985), the 1994 Dushanbe cable on an encounter over Kazakhstan, Georgia (2001), Mexico (2003), and Turkmenistan (2004) - plus two earlier internal State memoranda from 1952 and 1963, and, from Release 05, two November 1963 cables from the U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro on the Bahia, Brazil incident. These files document what foreign governments and aviation authorities told U.S. diplomats about UAP encounters - the State contribution is a record of diplomatic reporting, not a record of U.S. domestic observations.

The May 11 CSV revision

On May 11, 2026 - three days after the initial drop - war.gov restructured the canonical PURSUE CSV without public announcement. The file count appeared to change: the CSV went from 161 rows to 158 rows. This tracker's auto-poller caught the change within hours and published a verified diff at /changes.

The actual change, verified by URL-set comparison against the May 8 snapshot:

• Zero PDFs were added, zero PDFs were removed.
• Zero videos were added, zero videos were removed.
• Nine PDFs that previously had a single CSV row now have 2-4 CSV rows each (12 extra rows total) - the same PDF cross-referenced from multiple incident-report rows.
• One PDF had its storage slug renamed (the file content unchanged - byte-identical SHA-256, verified).

The 161 → 158 row delta is fully explained by those two facts. No files left the disclosure, and the row reduction is an artifact of how war.gov chose to represent multi-incident reports in the CSV. This is the kind of structural change that surface-level reporting easily mistakes for "files removed" or "redactions added," which is why this tracker maintains the URL-set diff as the authoritative comparison rather than relying on row counts.

What is NOT in PURSUE

The boundaries of what PURSUE actually establishes are worth stating explicitly, because the disclosure has been described in some coverage in terms that overstate it:

• PURSUE does not establish that any of the released encounters involved extraterrestrial craft. Each file's released metadata explicitly caveats that the descriptions provided should not be interpreted as analytical judgments about the nature of the observation.
• PURSUE does not contain kinematic-grade telemetry. The released videos show area-of-contrast tracking with timestamps but not published speed, acceleration, or trajectory measurements at analytical precision. Observer-estimated speeds appear in some accompanying mission reports but are characterized as estimates.
• PURSUE does not exhaust the federal UAP record. The release is what the program has chosen to publish so far. The rolling-release structure implies more is forthcoming; the file count almost certainly grows in subsequent drops.
• PURSUE does not include the AARO formal-review conclusions for most files. The score-66 cluster of AARO-submitted military captures, for example, is catalogued as "unresolved with no formal review" - meaning AARO has the report logged but the office's review process has not concluded for those reports.

How this tracker reads PURSUE

This site is an independent, non-governmental project. It exists because the official war.gov interface is a flat list of file thumbnails with no full-text search, no transcripts on the videos, no per-file analysis, and no cross-file comparison. The tracker addresses each of those gaps:

• Text search across titles, summaries, video transcripts and the opening text of every PDF at /search.
• Whisper-generated transcripts on the videos that carry speech (most PURSUE videos are silent sensor captures). The Borman/Gemini 7 audio is the highest-stakes example - the original release is just an audio file, and the transcript is what makes the astronaut's words searchable and citable.
• An open six-axis evidentiary rubric applied to every file, scoring on sensor quality, witness credibility, corroboration, kinematic anomaly, mundane-explanation availability, and official disposition. The rubric and weights are published as JSON at /data/scoring-rubric.json so anyone can recompute every score. The rubric measures evidentiary weight that an encounter remains structurally unexplained after conventional analysis - it explicitly does NOT publish a probability of extraterrestrial origin, because that number is not honestly computable from the available data and this tracker refuses to invent one.
• SHA-256 verification on every file against the war.gov original, so the mirror is provably the same bytes the government released.
• An automated poller running on a public GitHub Action that checks war.gov several times a day and opens an issue on this repo when the CSV changes. This is how the May 11 revision was caught within hours, and how every release since has been detected.

Where the program is now

The Department of War published Release 02 on May 22, 2026, fourteen days after Release 01, then Release 03 on June 12, Release 04 on July 10, Release 05 on August 7, and Release 06 on September 18, 2026, adding three more of its files to the canonical CSV on September 24. That brought the archive to 450 files. No schedule has been announced; the gaps between releases have ranged from 14 to 42 days. Every release, with its file counts, is on the release tracker, and every version of war.gov's CSV is logged with its SHA-256 hash on the uap-data.csv revision table.

Every file page on this site is built from war.gov's own CSV and the files it links to, fetched directly from war.gov and DVIDS and SHA-256 verified. We do not backfill files from third-party aggregator sites, because that would break the chain of custody that makes each file page verifiable byte-for-byte against the government source.

Whether or not PURSUE eventually establishes anything definitive about the nature of UAP, the program has already done something concrete: it has moved a substantial body of federal records from internal classification into the public domain. The files are now citable, searchable, and verifiable byte-for-byte against the government source. That is the program's actual product so far, and it is what this tracker indexes.