How we verify every file
An index you can't check is just a claim. So every file on this site is fingerprinted against the government's own bytes, and you can confirm any of them yourself in about two minutes. This page explains exactly how, and what we do when war.gov quietly changes a file.
The guarantee. Every one of the 222 files in this archive - all 122 documents, 86 videos, and 14 images - carries a SHA-256 hash computed from the exact bytes war.gov (and, for videos, DVIDS) served. If the hash on a file's page matches the hash you compute from the government copy, the file you read here is byte-for-byte the file the U.S. government published. No "trust us."
What "verified" means here - and what it doesn't
Verification on this site is a precise, narrow claim, and we keep it narrow on purpose:
- What it proves: the file indexed here is identical to the file the government published at its source URL. Not a re-encode, not a screenshot, not an edited copy. The same bytes.
- What it does not prove: that the contents are true, complete, or unredacted. A SHA-256 hash cannot tell you whether a redaction hides something, whether a report is accurate, or whether an object was really anomalous. It tells you that what you're reading is what the government released - no more, no less. The honest verdict covers what the files do and don't prove; this page is only about file integrity.
That line matters. Plenty of UFO content circulates as cropped images and re-uploaded clips with no way to tell what was altered. The hash closes that gap for this archive.
Verify any file yourself
You don't have to take our word for any of it. Pick any file and check it against the government source in four steps:
- Get the published hash. Open the file's detail page and read the SHA-256 in its Verification section, or look it up in the open
verification-manifest.json. - Download the file from the source - war.gov/UFO for PDFs and images, or the linked DVIDS page for videos. Download it from the government, not from us - the whole point is to check this site against the original.
- Hash it locally:
# Windows (PowerShell)
Get-FileHash file.pdf -Algorithm SHA256
# macOS / Linux
shasum -a 256 file.pdf- Compare. The 64-character fingerprint should match the one on this site, character for character. A match means the bytes are identical. A mismatch means war.gov has changed the file since we captured it - which is itself worth knowing (see below).
This is the same check a journalist or a skeptic would run to fact-check us, and we built the site so it passes.
The open verification manifest
Every hash is published in one machine-readable file: /generated/verification-manifest.json. It lists all 222 files, each with its title, government source URL, byte size, and SHA-256 fingerprint. It is CORS-enabled, public domain, and free to mirror - cite it, script against it, or use it to audit us in bulk. (Each file's detail page also shows the date its fingerprint was last verified against war.gov.)
When war.gov changes a file
War.gov does not treat its file URLs as immutable. Between our first capture (May 8-9, 2026) and a re-check on June 10, 2026, 62 of the Release-01 PDFs had their bytes silently replaced at the same URLs - the changed set shrank from about 2.34 GB to 1.09 GB. A naive index would never notice; our per-file fingerprints did.
Because we keep the original files we downloaded, we could do the forensics rather than guess. We compared the new versions against our archived originals page by page: the page counts were identical, nothing was removed, and the size drop was re-compression plus newly added searchable OCR text. The files got smaller and more searchable - not censored. We published the full file-by-file diff and the methodology on the revision log rather than asserting a dramatic conclusion the data didn't support.
Two things make that possible, and we maintain both: (1) we keep the original downloaded files as a forensic baseline, and (2) we keep a recorded byte-integrity baseline for every file, so any future change war.gov makes to a published file is detectable and provable rather than invisible.
Why we hold this line
This is a UFO site, a subject with a long history of doctored images, anonymous "leaks," and confident claims no one can check. The entire value of this archive is that it is the opposite of that: every file traceable to a government source, every byte accountable, every score recomputable from an open rubric, and every correction logged in public. The hash is the foundation the rest of it sits on.
If you ever compute a hash that doesn't match what we publish, that's not a problem to hide - it's the system working. Send it to us and we'll run it down in the open.
For further reading on this site
- War.gov revision log - the full file-by-file diff of what changed, with the byte-integrity forensics
- The Anomalousness Index - how scores are computed, and how to recompute them yourself
- The honest verdict - what these files do and do not prove
- Audit notes & corrections - how we handle war.gov data changes
- FAQ - common questions in Q&A form