PURSUE UFO Files Release 01
PURSUE UFO Files Release 01 was the first PURSUE tranche of government UFO files, released by the Department of War on May 8, 2026, with official videos, PDFs, images and case records.
PURSUE UFO Files Release 01 was the first tranche of government UFO files published under the federal PURSUE program, released on May 8, 2026. It opened the Department of War's WAR.GOV/UFO portal, created in response to President Trump's February 19 directive to begin releasing government files on "alien and extraterrestrial life," UAP and UFOs. The department, supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, promised new tranches "every few weeks" and presented the archive as unresolved cases, meaning the government "is unable to make a definitive determination" about what was observed.
News outlets working from the launch-day listing counted 162 files: 120 PDFs, 28 videos and 14 images from the Department of War, FBI, NASA and State Department, 108 of them redacted. The portal's data file later dropped duplicate rows and lists 158, reclassing a Gemini 7 recording as audio: 79 from the Department of War, 57 from the FBI, 15 from NASA and seven from the State Department. Military files were mostly mission reports and 27 sensor videos, nearly all infrared and largely from Iraq, Syria and the Persian Gulf. The portal's description ranked a summary of seven federal employees' sightings in the western United States in 2023, including "orbs launching other orbs," among the most compelling reports held by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The FBI added its 1947-1968 flying-disc case file with newly declassified pages, a senior intelligence official's interview about orbs at a western military facility in late 2025, and a composite of a bronze ellipsoid reported at a U.S. test site in September 2023. NASA supplied the Apollo 11 debriefing, Gemini 7's "bogey" transcript and an Apollo 17 photo of three dots that the department said might show a physical object.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the files, "hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation." NBC News described much of the video as grainy infrared footage and the photos as largely indiscernible. Researchers interviewed by DefenseScoop called the drop historic but thin: former Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon said "data alone is not disclosure," retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet objected that no metadata was included, and Australian researcher Grant Lavac said much of the material had long been public. Two weeks later, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the portal had drawn over 1 billion hits since launch.
Release 02 followed on May 22 with 64 files, mostly military videos, including the senior intelligence official's own written account of the late-2025 orbs, which Release 01 had offered only secondhand. With 158 files, Release 01 remains the largest of the first six tranches, and it set the series pattern of multi-agency files carrying official descriptions but no findings. Its lasting record is the western orbs summary and FBI interviews, a less redacted FBI flying-disc file and the Apollo 17 photo, whose original film the government said it had obtained for a NASA and Department of War analysis it promised to publish.
Disclosure: I work on VRAI's UAP source-control / evidence-literacy project. This is a public-records/source-control post, not event validation, object identity, origin, performance, authenticity, suppression, completeness, or agency endorsement. I am posting this here because PURSUE Release 01/02 is a useful test case for evidence classes: release availability, catalog provenance, custody, native/source-file status, public renditions, correction history, and event interpretation are differen...
Disclosure: I work on a UAP source-control / evidence-literacy project. This is a source-control note, not event validation, object identity, origin, performance, authenticity, suppression, completeness, or agency endorsement. I am posting this here because PURSUE is a useful test case for evidence classes: release availability is not the same thing as custody, native media, analysis, or event validation. My current read after the first two tranches: Release 01 is useful as a baseline for inv...
Disclosure: I work on VRAI's UAP source-control / evidence-literacy project. This is a team assessment of public PURSUE records, not event validation, object identity, origin, performance, authenticity, suppression, completeness, or agency endorsement. Short version: PURSUE Release 01 is most useful as a source-control baseline: inventory, public-source crosswalks, OCR/NARA/FBI/NASA/State provenance questions, and limits on what public records can support. PURSUE Release 02 is more about live...
PURSUE Release 02 dropped May 22. Six PDFs, mostly historical. But one document closes a distance Release 01 left wide open. Release 01 gave us the USPER Statement: AARO summarizing an FBI 302 summarizing a senior US intelligence officer who watched orbs over a weapons test range in late 2025. Three layers between us and the witness. Release 02 is the witness. Two pages, first person, his own words, filed as ODNI-UAP-D001. The mission was to investigate loud thuds in the mountains that lined...
Press coverage of PURSUE Release 01 has been calling the September 2023 FBI 302 case "the 130-195 foot bronze ellipsoid encountered by a senior intelligence official." That framing keeps showing up across CBS, the Guardian, and others. I went and read the actual FBI 302 document. Some of those details aren't in the source. What the document actually says: The witness is a defense contractor, not a "senior intelligence official." She'd worked around US military hardware for fifteen years and r...
RT @rpowell2u: The 162 UFO/UAP files in the PURSUE Release #1 contained 769 sightings. The graph below (courtesy of Miguel Pavon, PhD) show…
PURSUE Release 01 dropped 162 files on May 8. The bulk of the coverage went to the Apollo 17 photo and the "Eye of Sauron" line from the Western US orbs case. One of the documents in the release is titled "USPER Statement (Redacted)." USPER is FBI shorthand for "U.S. Person," the standard redaction for a named American witness. The document is an FBI 302 interview conducted with a senior US intelligence official. AARO's own description, verbatim: "This is an FBI 302 interview conducted with a...
RT @DefenseScoop: ‘Data alone is not disclosure’: UAP research community reacts to Trump’s first PURSUE file drop https://t.co/GEwmzEyamh
PURSUE Release 01 dropped 162 files. Most of the coverage went to the orb videos and the Apollo 17 photo. Buried in Section 4 of FBI case file 62-HQ-83894 (serial 62-83894-169) is a Dayton Journal-Herald clipping from April 27, 1948, preserved by the Bureau as an enclosure to a civilian letter forwarded to Hoover. It contains Captain Thomas F. Mantell's last radio transmission verbatim: "I'm closing in to take a good look. It looks metallic and of tremendous size. It's going up now as fast as...
Did anyone catch this buried in the PURSUE Batch 1 files? There's a 2023 incident over the western US where federal law enforcement officers independently reported orbs — and one of them specifically reported seeing "orbs launching other orbs." The Pentagon themselves labeled this "among the most compelling" reports they hold. Let that sink in. Not a blurry speck. Not a weather balloon. Orbs. Launching. Other. Orbs. And this is what they chose to put in the public batch. What are they sitting...
