The UAP FilesExplainer
PURSUE, explained: the government’s rolling release of UAP records
Seven releases since May have put military, FBI, NASA and State Department records online. Here is what the program is and what it has published.
PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, is the White House’s name for a joint effort to find, review and declassify government records of unidentified anomalous phenomena held across federal agencies. The Department of War, as the Pentagon now also calls itself, publishes them at war.gov/UFO.
The first release went online on May 8, 2026. It included videos, photographs and original documents from the military, the FBI, NASA and the State Department, among them FBI case file 62-HQ-83894, which covers reports from 1947 to 1968, with several newly declassified pages. Much of the first batch had been public before, in partial or more heavily redacted form.
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said that day.
“Today’s release is the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort,” said Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
What is redacted
The department says the redactions that remain protect the identities of witnesses and the locations of government facilities. It says it made no redactions about the nature or existence of any encounter reported as a UAP.
The releases so far
The records mix material that had been published before with files that had not. None of them shows that any object was extraterrestrial, and the department says more will follow on a rolling basis.