What Is PURSUE?

After President Trump signed a directive on February 19, 2026, the government was ordered to dig up every file related to UFOs, UAPs, and extra terrestrial life and make them public. The Department of War yes, the Pentagon was renamed became the home for all of it. The idea is that new batches of files will drop every few weeks, and private citizens, scientists, and researchers are actively being invited to analyze them.

It's a major shift. For decades, the government's default answer to UFO questions was silence or dismissal. Now they're crowdsourcing the investigation.

The Files 

Classic government IT. The actual records were accessible by going directly to the file folder, and the full list was buried in a downloadable spreadsheet called uap-csv.csv. Once researchers cracked it open, here's what they found: 162 total records 120 PDFs, 28 videos, and 14 images from five agencies: the Department of War, FBI, NASA, the State Department, and ODNI.

The catch? Over 108 of those 162 entries are still heavily redacted. You're just getting the skeleton.

5 Files That Are Actually Interesting

1. The Diamond UFO Mediterranean, January 2024 A U.S. military operator using an infrared camera tracked a diamond-shaped object with a "probe" hanging off its base. It flew at a steady 434 knots for roughly two minutes. The report was originally classified as SECRET and shared with Five Eyes intelligence partners. Nobody knows what it was.

2. Frank Borman's "Bogey" Gemini 7, 1965 During the 1965 Gemini 7 space mission, astronaut Frank Borman reported seeing an unidentified "bogey" alongside hundreds of small floating particles and a brilliantly bright object. The government has now released both the written transcript and the original audio recording — and their own archive labels it a "UFO sighting." This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's NASA's own metadata.

3. The "Space Alien Race" Policy Memo 1963 Perhaps the most quietly shocking document in the release. A formal memo from the Executive Office of the President, dated July 1963, discussing contingency plans in case humanity discovers alien intelligence. Written during the Cold War. Treated as a real diplomatic and scientific scenario. It sat classified for over 60 years.

4. WWII "Foo Fighters" Reports 1944–1945 Pilots from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron filed reports describing blinking lights, cylindrical objects, and unexplained aerial phenomena over wartime Europe. These are the oldest UAP encounters in American military records predating the modern UFO conversation by years. Whatever pilots were seeing back then, the military took it seriously enough to document it.

5. Five Unidentified Tracks Middle East, May 2022 An operator tracked five unknown objects on screen at the same time. Best guesses: one might be a missile, four might be birds. None confirmed. A formal report was filed precisely because none of those explanations held up. This kind of "we don't know, and we're admitting it" transparency is exactly what researchers have been asking for.

So What Does Any of This Actually Prove?

Less than the headlines might suggest but more than nothing. The government is being clear: every file in Release 01 is an unresolved case. They're not claiming aliens are visiting Earth. They're saying, "We saw things we couldn't identify, here are the reports, help us figure it out."

What it does confirm is that unexplained aerial incidents have been documented continuously by trained military pilots, NASA astronauts, and intelligence analysts for over 80 years, across dozens of countries. The pattern is undeniable even if the explanation isn't settled.

What's missing is also worth noting. Some high-profile UAP videos that Congress has been pushing for are nowhere in this release. And internal file numbering suggests only about one in five tracked documents has actually been made public so far. This is an opening chapter, not the whole book.

What Next

PURSUE is designed to keep going. New tranches of files are expected every few weeks. The government has explicitly said it "welcomes private-sector analysis" meaning researchers, universities, and independent analysts are encouraged to dig in and publish what they find.

The archive is live. The files are real. And for the first time in decades, the burden of proof has been shifted from the person who saw something strange in the sky, to the government that's been sitting on the paperwork ever since.

Resources:

• Official portal: war.gov/UFO
• File index spreadsheet: war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-csv.csv
• AARO (Anomaly Resolution Office): aaro.mil