The PURSUE files: the Pentagon opens its UFO drawer

Scene · reconstructed from the paperworkPicture it. A government website, a Friday in May, and a sentence nobody expected to read in a press release: no clearance required.

On 8 May 2026[dow-release-1] the Department of War opens a page at WAR.GOV/UFO and calls the project PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. UAP is the official word now, unidentified anomalous phenomena. The page itself still says UFO.

The road here is short. On 19 February 2026[pursue-site] the president writes on Truth Social that he will direct the Secretary of War and other agencies to begin identifying and releasing government files on alien and extraterrestrial life, UAP and UFOs. Eleven weeks later the first batch is up.

The launch statement names the partners: the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Energy, the Pentagon's AARO office, NASA, the FBI and components of the intelligence agencies[dow-release-1]. It promises more on a rolling basis. It also makes a political claim, that no other administration has gone this far, and says past administrations sought to discredit or dissuade[dow-release-1] the public. That is the department's own framing, and we file it as that. Reporters at the time pointed out that the Pentagon began opening up on UAP in 2020, and that Congress ordered more in 2022[ut-release-1].

The first batch holds 161 files[ut-release-1]. Most are reports, photos and videos from military missions, going back to the 1940s. There are grainy infrared clips and debriefs from Apollo 11, 12 and 17[nbc-release-1]. There is Buzz Aldrin describing a bright light source his crew tentatively took for a possible laser[nbc-release-1]. There is a 2023 incident the Pentagon calls among the most compelling it holds[abc-release-1]. Some pages are blacked out entirely[abc-release-1].

And there is one line that matters more than the rest, easy to miss on launch day. All of the files were reviewed for security. Many were not analysed to resolve any anomaly[dow-release-1]. In other words, somebody checked what may be shown. Nobody promised to say what it means.

The site explains the word on every folder. These are unresolved cases, meaning the government cannot make a definitive determination[pursue-site], for reasons that include a lack of data. Resolved cases are reported elsewhere. So the archive is sorted before you arrive: it holds what was left over after the easy answers were taken out.

NBC's first read of the papers is plain. They show no indication of contact with beings from other planets[nbc-release-1], and no sign of a wide-ranging cover-up of such contact. The public is invited to decide for itself.

Two weeks later the department reports more than one billion hits[dow-release-2]. Whatever else PURSUE is, it has an audience.

Seven releases in under six months. The dates are the one thing nobody argues about.

8 May, 22 May, 12 June, 10 July, 7 August, 18 September, 23 October[pursue-site]. The directive promised tranches every few weeks[pursue-site], and it has kept to that, though the gaps have grown from two weeks to five and six. The same page warns of the scale: dozens of agencies, tens of millions of records, many on paper only.

Each batch has its own character.

The third, on 12 June, holds 72 files[earthsky-r3]. It carries the memo everyone quotes, AARO's update on “orbs launching orbs”[aaro-d077], which gets its own chapter below. Its 10 image files look like evidence until you read the labels: all of them are artist's recreations[earthsky-r3]. Worth knowing before you share one.

The sixth, on 18 September, reaches back to a classic. It has the film Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert Newhouse shot near Tremonton, Utah, in 1952[tnd-r6], which Project Blue Book could not settle for lack of detail and fixed reference points. It also has two cellphone videos from a Colorado officer, with AARO warning that autofocus and digital processing can distort distant objects[tnd-r6]. And there is a talk by Blue Book's Edward Ruppelt saying about 20 percent of some 800 cases stayed unexplained[tnd-r6], while stressing that the Air Force had reached no conclusion.

The seventh, on 23 October, is paper only: 28 documents from four agencies[uapledger-r7]. Here the archive turns strange in a quieter way.

A B-52 crew over Saudi Arabia in January 1957[d155-1957] logs a radar contact for five to seven minutes at 39,000 feet. A resident of Avalon on Catalina Island writes to Kenneth Arnold on 1 May 1949[d181-1949] about six objects seen on the evening of 28 April, and offers to tell more if he is still interested. Arnold is the pilot whose 1947 sighting opens the whole saucer story[whyfiles-roswell], so even the mail has a history.

Then a one-page memo from 29 May 1963, subject “Fragments”[eop-d002]. NASA's Arnold Frutkin is very negative about a project to recover foreign materiel. He sees no need for an announcement. A White House statement, he thinks, would scare people needlessly[eop-d002]. He says the Pentagon and Air Force want NASA as a “cover”. The memo never says what the fragments are. That silence is an invitation, so note what the same release contains: a file of correspondence about space fragments from 1962 to 1964[uapledger-r7]. Read together they point toward falling hardware, but we have not read that second file line by line, so we leave it there.

Also in the batch: monthly reports from BAASS, the contractor behind AAWSAP, the Pentagon's advanced aerospace programme[uapledger-r7], and a 2026 AARO debrief of federal agents who watched a silent, matte black triangle climb over a ridge, hover and drop into a canyon[aaro-d176]. A survey the next morning found no wreckage or marks. No instrument measured its speed.

One loose end in the counting. The database shows 478 files[pursue-site], while press counts of the individual batches add up to more. We have not reconciled the two.

Here is where a careful memo becomes a loud headline, and it is worth slowing down.

The memo is DOW-UAP-D077[aaro-d077], signed by AARO's director in June 2026. Over two days in October 2023, six federal agents near a sensitive national security site in the western United States report an orange “mother orb” appearing for a second or two, releasing two to four red orbs, and vanishing. Again and again, for hours. One red orb reportedly sits over a ridgeline for several hours.

AARO takes the report seriously. The agents are consistent, seen from several angles, and familiar with military systems[aaro-d077]. They also have no video, no photos and no technical data[aaro-d077]. AARO notes the limits of the human eye in low light, and says these contextual factors still justify more work.

Then come the numbers. The memo says about 60 percent of the reported activity is plausibly attributable to military aircraft[aaro-d077]. Flight logs confirm aircraft in the area were dropping infrared countermeasure flares in an exercise. The agents say these did not look like flares. AARO answers that the flares carried there differ from standard illumination flares.

That leaves 40 percent with no known aircraft in the line of sight[aaro-d077]. Of the hypotheses for that remainder, military exhaust is ruled out. Foreign activity is highly unlikely. Natural causes and drones are unlikely. U.S. military technology is plausible but inconclusive[aaro-d077]: the descriptions match certain systems, the records cannot place them there.

The last option is “unrecognized technology”, marked pending. It may account for up to 40 percent of the phenomena associated with this incident[aaro-d077]. The next sentence takes the air out of it: this is provisional, built on testimony and elimination, and unsubstantiated by technical data or physical evidence.

So the 40 percent describes the observations in one incident. It is not a share of all UFO reports. It is not a finding of alien craft. “Unrecognized” means exactly that: AARO does not recognise it.

Elsewhere the same pattern repeats. Some of the most striking material turns out to be old. Gemini 7's “bogey” has been argued over for decades[ut-release-1], and James Oberg long ago put it down to booster debris. Mick West says one of the best-looking videos was already identified as a camera artifact[ut-release-1]. Many sightings cluster near military activity[abc-release-1], which ABC reads as a sign of where the sensors are. A later summary is blunt: files are labelled unresolved because of too little information, not because of any link to extraterrestrial activity[tnd-r6].

The critics are not all on one side. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former AARO director, says the release will only fuel speculation without analysis or context[sciam-release-1]. The Disclosure Foundation calls it a meaningful step towards transparency[sciam-release-1]. West's verdict fits on a stamp: more dots, more parallax[sciam-release-1].

Both can be true. The archive is real, and open, and unusually complete. It also comes without the one thing a public archive needs most, which is someone who says what each paper is worth.

A promise on a web page lasts as long as the page. That is the argument now moving through Congress.

PURSUE rests on a directive, not a law. On 22 July 2026 the House adopted an amendment by Rep. Eric Burlison[burlison-2026] to the annual defense bill. It would put UAP records in a permanent collection at the National Archives, create an independent, Senate-confirmed review board with subpoena power, and reach covered government contractors. The House tracker records it as agreed to by voice vote[hasc-tracker]. The whole bill then passed 216 to 212[crs-ndaa].

The Senate is another matter. The last official status report we can link, dated 1 September, says a procedural vote on the Senate's own version failed on 14 July, with no further floor steps[crs-ndaa]. An advocacy group says in October that the two chambers are negotiating a final text and that the provision could be stripped[npi-uapda]. That is a campaign page, so we report the claim and not the outcome. Nothing here is law yet.

The department says the next release is in preparation[dow-release-7]. It gives no date.

What would change this file? A physical object, for one. EarthSky noted after the third batch that none of the releases had mentioned physical evidence[earthsky-r3], and we have seen nothing since that changes that, though we have not read every page. A case with instrument data that survives outside analysis would be another. The department says it welcomes private-sector analysis[pursue-site], and independent readers have already started: UAP Ledger[uapledger-r7] indexes each file against the official copy.

What would close it? Not much. A rolling release has no natural end. The tens of millions of records the department mentions could take years, and the site does not say what would count as finished.

There is also the question of what is still held back. Redactions remain, sometimes whole pages[abc-release-1]. In the 2026 triangle debrief the date and location are cut under a statute[aaro-d176]. That may be routine. It also means the most recent cases are the ones you can check least.

And there are the numbers we would like to pin down. The site's count of 478 files[pursue-site] does not match the sum of the press counts. The second batch's contents we know mainly second-hand. Some claims made about these files go further than the files do. We list those under To Verify, and we will strike them or confirm them as we go.

So this is a living folder. New rows go in the timeline as each batch lands, dated to the day of publication. We will say what is new in it and what it confirms, which so far has been a great deal about how governments file things and very little about what was in the sky.

The papers are below. The drawer is open, and for once nobody needs a clearance to look.