Explainer · PURSUE coverage
What Is PURSUE? The UAP Declassification Program, Explained
Updated July 7, 2026 · Alan E. Keene
The program
PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — is the U.S. government's rolling declassification of unresolved Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena records, published at war.gov/UFO beginning May 8, 2026. (A correction: an earlier version of this page expanded the acronym incorrectly; the expansion above is the one used across the release pages.) The program's defining choice is its filter: it publishes cases the government states it cannot resolve. Resolved cases — the balloons, the drones, the sensor artifacts that make up the vast majority of UAP reports — are handled in separate statutory reporting. PURSUE is, by design, a library of open questions.
What has been released
Release 01 — May 8, 2026. The opening tranche: 1.2 GB of documents and 1.3 GB of video, establishing the record format and the first agency contributions.
Release 02 — May 22, 2026. The tranche that made the program famous: 50 new videos and the archive's strongest files, including the Lake Huron F-16 engagement, the Syria 2021 recording, the Iran 2022 formation, the Sandia 1948–1950 correspondence, the Apollo 12 medical debrief audio, the 1973 CIA report, and the ODNI 2025 narrative.
Release 03 — June 12, 2026. 826 MB of documents and 4.6 GB of video, bringing the database to 294 files — heavy on historical paper, including a 1949 Army "flying saucer study," FBI field reports from 2022–2026, and a 2008 CIA alert record from Harare, Zimbabwe.
How the records are organized
Every file carries a structured ID: contributing agency, record type, and number — so DOW-UAP-PR071 is a Department of War press-release-tier record, CIA-UAP-D001 a CIA document, AARO-UAP-V001 an AARO volume audit. Eight agencies have contributed so far: the Department of War, FBI, CIA, NASA, DOE, ODNI, State, and AARO. Every record carries the same status label — unresolved — and our standing explainer covers precisely what that word does and does not mean.
How to read the archive skeptically — and why to read it at all
Three habits serve any reader of these files. First, distinguish the record from the coverage: what a document says is checkable; what commentary says it "proves" usually is not, and this site publishes corrections when we catch ourselves on the wrong side of that line. Second, respect the filter: an archive built exclusively of unresolved cases will feel more mysterious than the full population of reports actually is. Third, remember what is genuinely new here: not the incidents — many were reported at the time — but the primary sources. For seventy years the argument was about what the government's files might contain. Now the files are on a public server, and the argument can finally be about what they do contain.
Where the program stands
The release cadence — three tranches in five weeks — slowed after June 12, and as of this writing no Release 04 has been published. Whether the program is complete, paused, or awaiting review, no official statement says. This site archives every release in full as it appears, so the record remains available regardless of what happens at the source.
Start here
New to the archive? Read the Lake Huron case file for the program's strongest record, the "unresolved" explainer for the vocabulary, and the nuclear-sites analysis for the archive's longest-running pattern — then browse the full record archive ↗ and read the files themselves.