{"it":{"id":"REC-PURSUE","name":"US UFO files / PURSUE (2026)","kind":"gov","sub":"Released record","place":"Washington, DC, USA","lat":38.897,"lon":-77.036,"date":"2026-05-08 onward","rep":"Released from 8 May 2026.","off":"Further releases followed on 22 May, 12 June, 10 July and 7 August 2026. It is a scheduled programme with video as well as paper, and the material still needs checking.","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: United States UFO files","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_UFO_files"}],"tags":["Records"],"sum":"From 8 May 2026, the US government began releasing UFO files through PURSUE: more than 160 files and 20 videos in the first release.","nsrc":1,"new":1,"qs":["The US released over 160 UFO files and 20 videos in one batch in 2026. Does scheduled disclosure build trust, or make it easier to control?","What would one of these releases have to contain to genuinely change your view of the UFO question?","After decades of secrecy, files are now coming out on a timetable. Who decides what's in each batch, and should we know?"],"yt":"Pick one released file and summarise it.","rel":["GOV-NARA"],"hook":"The US has posted seven tranches of UFO files since 8 May 2026, many never analysed for answers.","why":"Since 8 May 2026 the US has posted UFO files in tranches every few weeks. The government says they are unresolved cases, many not yet analysed."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"REC-PURSUE","sum":"One photograph from the Apollo 17 flight, according to the files, shows \"three 'dots' in a triangular formation in the lower right quadrant of the lunar sky.\" In May 2026 it reappeared on a public website, along with astronaut transcripts, military reports, witness interviews and grainy videos, all gathered under a single label: unresolved.\n\nThe website is the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, PURSUE for short, and its address is war.gov/UFO. UAP stands for unidentified anomalous phenomena, the government's current term for what most people still call UFOs. The site is run by the Department of War, which Wikipedia's account still calls the Department of Defense, with the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Energy, the Pentagon's UFO office AARO, NASA, the FBI and other intelligence agencies all taking part. Anyone can open it. As the department's announcement put it, the files are \"all in one place\" with \"no clearance required.\"\n\nThe programme began with a post. On 19 February 2026 President Trump wrote that, \"based on the tremendous interest shown,\" he would direct the Secretary of War and other agencies to begin identifying and releasing government files on \"alien and extraterrestrial life,\" UAP and UFOs. The move followed years of renewed attention: the Pentagon UFO videos first disclosed in 2017, the creation of AARO in 2022, congressional hearings, and pressure from members of Congress who argued the government was holding back. A month after the directive, one of them, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, set the defence secretary a deadline to hand over UFO videos. According to the Associated Press, the deadline \"came and went, and no videos were produced.\"\n\nThe first tranche went up on 8 May 2026. It held more than 160 files and 20 videos, reaching back to 1944 and 1945. There were Apollo photographs, NASA transcripts of astronauts describing lights and objects, witnesses reporting a \"cigar-shaped\" object at a restricted government test facility, and a law-enforcement video of \"orbs launching other orbs\" that AARO called \"among the most compelling.\" Then came more. A second release on 22 May added 222 documents, including about 51 audio recordings and over 40 videos, one said to show an object being shot down, and another showing four objects in formation near Iran in 2022, captured by military infrared systems. A third, on 12 June, included a report by AARO's director, Dr. Jon Kosloski, dated 5 June 2026, describing an orange \"mother orb\" seen launching smaller red ones. The fourth came on 10 July, the fifth in August, the sixth on 18 September and the seventh, 28 PDF files including a 2002 eyewitness account of the 1947 Roswell incident, on 23 October. The department's own page dates the fifth release to 7 August; the Wikipedia article gives both 7 and 8 August.\n\nWhat makes the archive unusual is not its contents but its definition. The department says the files are \"unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena.\" That can happen, it adds, for many reasons, \"including a lack of sufficient data.\" Resolved cases are reported separately, as the law requires. So by design, everything on the site is a question rather than an answer. The first announcement admitted more: \"While all of the files have been reviewed for security purposes, many of the materials have not yet been analyzed for resolution of any anomalies.\" Some cases, in other words, may be unresolved simply because the analysis has not yet been done.\n\nThe scale explains part of that. The department describes the job as coordination among dozens of agencies and a review of \"tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper, spanning many decades.\" The downloads alone are large: the first release ran to about 1.2 gigabytes of documents and 1.3 of video, the second to 5.6 gigabytes of video. The department says it \"welcomes the application of private-sector analysis, information and expertise,\" which amounts to an invitation for the public to do part of the analysing.\n\nThe mainstream reading came quickly, and it was cool. The first release did not confirm life elsewhere, and the Pentagon and the president both said the documents did not provide confirmed evidence of it. The New York Times called some of the images \"murky still images that show what could be anything.\" New Scientist noted that several of the Apollo pictures had \"already been investigated and explained as micrometeoroid impacts on the Moon or the spacecraft, bits of floating debris, and camera or film defects.\" The astrophysicist David Whitehouse saw \"optical artefacts,\" \"fuzzy blobs\" and some obvious balloons. The astronomer Michael Narlock called eyewitness accounts \"notoriously unreliable.\" Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute said there was still \"no compelling evidence\" for life beyond Earth. The writer Jason Colavito said most of the material \"had been made public decades ago.\" The physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO's former director, said nothing in it was unexpected. The sixth release made the point by example: it included a copy of the 1952 film from Tremonton, Utah, which a government panel examined in 1953 and judged most likely to show birds.\n\nThe turn is in what remained. Even with old material and easy answers set aside, Wikipedia's summary of the third release says a report in it found that 40% of reported phenomena lacked a reasonable explanation. The same summary lists a 1992 CIA admission that it could not tell letter writers the true cause of UFO sightings going back to the 1950s, and that Project Blue Book had given the public false explanations. A government was now publishing, under its own seal, a library of cases it says it cannot close. The president's post had used the words \"alien and extraterrestrial life\" in the same breath as the files. The department's own description of the archive does not.\n\nTwo readings sit side by side. To officials it is transparency, \"maximum transparency,\" in the defence secretary's phrase, with the public free to \"make up their own minds.\" To sceptics, a rolling release, a few weeks at a time, lets the government decide what appears and when. And the photograph of three dots in the lunar sky still sits in an archive of cases the government says it cannot close, even though some of the Apollo pictures were explained long ago. If the people who hold the records say they cannot tell what was seen, who is now meant to decide?","qs":["The US is releasing UFO files every few weeks, many not yet analysed. Does scheduled disclosure build trust, or make it easier to control?","The archive holds only unresolved cases. How might a collection of unanswered cases shape what the public believes?","The government invites private-sector analysis of the files. Who should get to decide what a sighting was?"],"gal":[],"ms":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: United States UFO files","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_UFO_files"},{"id":"VREC-PURSUE-2","t":"US Department of War news release, 8 May 2026: first tranche of UAP files","u":"https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4480582/"},{"id":"VREC-PURSUE-3","t":"US Department of War: UFO/UAP records page","u":"https://www.war.gov/UFO/"}],"pts":[{"p":"Released from 8 May 2026 via PURSUE.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: United States UFO files","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_UFO_files"},{"p":"First release: over 160 files and 20 videos.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: United States UFO files","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_UFO_files"},{"p":"Followed a Feb 2026 directive.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: United States UFO files","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_UFO_files"},{"p":"Further releases 22 May, 12 Jun, 10 Jul, 7 Aug 2026.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Wikipedia: United States UFO files","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_UFO_files"}]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/REC-PURSUE-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Illustration: setting associated with US UFO files / PURSUE (2026), Washington, DC, USA","by":"Illustration made for The Nommo","lic":"","lu":"","p":"","g":true,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}