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.

Drop 01 by the numbers

The first PURSUE release, published on May 8, 2026, contained 161 distinct file URLs distributed across four federal agencies. The release covered records from 1947 through 2026 - nearly eight decades of accumulated federal documentation of UAP encounters and investigations. The breakdown:

By file type, the combined archive breaks down into 175 PDFs (investigative records, mission reports, transcripts, intelligence narratives, technical proposals), 95 videos (mostly infrared captures from U.S. military mission platforms, dominated by the Release 02 DOW-UAP-PR050-PR099 series), and 24 image files (lunar surface photography from NASA plus FBI archival photographs). 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 (143 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). 77 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 (19 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. See our CIA UFO files deep dive and the CIA category page.

ODNI, DOE, and other federal records (6 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 three 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 03 also introduced the first intelligence-community-analysis and general U.S. Government correspondence records. See the dedicated intel + DOE category page.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (86 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. See our deep dive on 62-HQ-83894 and our walkthrough of the modern FBI UAP reports.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (33 files)

NASA contributed a mix of Apollo-era records (Apollo 11, 12, 16, and 17), Gemini-era astronaut audio and debriefings (Gemini 4, 5, 7, and 9 - notably the December 1965 Borman/Lovell Gemini 7 file, the highest-scoring single file in the entire archive at 72), Mercury-program audio excerpts, a 1962 Gordon Cooper interview, and Skylab crew debriefings. 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 (7 files)

The smallest contribution: 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. 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 27-file score-66 cluster, 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:

• Full-text search across all PDFs and video transcripts at /search.
• Whisper-generated transcripts on every video file. 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 every 30 minutes during U.S. weekday business hours (hourly otherwise) and opens an issue on this repo when the CSV changes. This is how the May 11 revision was caught within hours, and how Drop 02 will be caught when it lands.

Where the program is now

The Department of War published Release 02 on May 22, 2026, fourteen days after Release 01. Multiple independent sources put Release 02 at approximately 64 new files - 51 sensor videos in the DOW-UAP-PR050 - PR099 series, 7 NASA crew audio files, and 6 documents - for a combined 222-file PURSUE archive. Release 03 followed on June 12, 2026 with 72 more files - 18 historical CIA records, 29 FBI files (modern UAP reports and Northeastern orb sightings), 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 - bringing the archive to 294 files across three releases. The Department's stated cadence has been "every few weeks."

This site's verified file pages still reflect the Release 01 manifest (158 rows, last fetched 2026-05-12 by our auto-poller). War.gov hardened its anti-bot defenses around the time of Release 02 and our automated fetch path is currently blocked. We do not backfill files from third-party aggregator sites because that would break the SHA-256 chain of custody that makes each file page verifiable byte-for-byte against the government source. See /changes for the current Release 02 ingest status; the per-file diff will be published there once our verified fetch is restored.

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 what this tracker indexes for Release 01 - and what it will index for Release 02 the moment the verified fetch path is back.