PURSUE: What the Pentagon’s war.gov/ufo Files Actually Contain (2026)

This is a guide to a government records program that started in 2026. The incidents it covers go back decades.

What happened

On 19 February 2026, President Donald J. Trump posted on Truth Social that he would be “directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”

The Department of War (DOW) answered with PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, hosted at war.gov/ufo. The directive text on that page says DOW, “with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI),” is overseeing “government wide efforts to expeditiously find, review, identify, declassify and publicly release unresolved UAP-related records.” It describes “the review of tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper, spanning many decades,” with “tranches posted every few weeks.”

The footage

PURSUE’s videos are hosted on DVIDS, the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, and linked from the database. The Next Web reported that Release 01 held about two dozen videos “for a total of 41 minutes,” showing encounters between 2020 and 2026, “most captured by infrared cameras tracking white objects that appear as specks moving through the frame.” The War Department’s page lists “No Videos” for Release 07. No single clip is embedded here. Each release has its own post in this collection, with official links.

Timeline

• December 1972: A NASA Apollo 17 photo later included in Release 01 shows three dots in a triangle (The Next Web).
• 8 March 2024: AARO publishes its Historical Record Report, Volume 1.
• 19 February 2026: The Truth Social directive.
• 8 May 2026: Release 01. The database lists 158 records. The Next Web reported 162 files at launch, and Reuters covered the release that day.
• 22 May 2026: Release 02 (64 records).
• 12 June 2026: Release 03 (72 records).
• 10 July 2026: Release 04 (40 records).
• 7 August 2026: Release 05 (41 records).
• 18 September 2026: Release 06 (75 records).
• 23 October 2026: Release 07 (28 records). It includes Catalina Island reports from 1949, 1952, 1953 and 1955, a 1957 Saudi Arabia report and a 2010 Utah ranch investigation.

What believers claim

Some commentators treat the release itself as an admission that the government holds evidence of non-human craft. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s statement on the page says: “These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves.”

What the research found

What the page says it is. The directive defines everything archived at war.gov/ufo as an unresolved case. It says the government has not been able to determine what was observed, “for a variety of reasons, including a lack of sufficient data.” DOW “welcomes the application of private-sector analysis.” Resolved cases are reported separately, “as mandated by statute.”