PURSUE Release 01

Release 01 is the inaugural tranche of the Department of War's PURSUE program, published May 8, 2026 at war.gov/UFO under President Trump's February 19, 2026 directive: 162 records comprising 120 PDFs, 28 videos, and 14 images.

Records originate from the Department of War (82), FBI (56), NASA (12), and State Department (8), with four unattributed, assembled through AARO's records infrastructure. Videos stream from the military's DVIDS service. The page's file list is driven by a published CSV, and the department states future tranches will appear in place "every few weeks."

Every record is by policy an unresolved case. The headline items: the Western US Event (Record #162), seven federal agents' 2023 orb and translucent-object reports that AARO calls "among the most compelling within AARO's current holdings"; the September 2023 test-site ellipsoid package with an FBI Lab composite sketch of a 130-to-195-foot object; a fuller, less-redacted version of FBI case file 62-HQ-83894 (1947-1968); FBI infrared photo sets from late 2025; the Army's first UAP video submission (2026); curated NASA mission transcripts from Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab; five State Department cables including a kinematically striking 1994 Kazakhstan report; and an announced active investigation into an Apollo 17 photograph, for which the government has retrieved the original 1972 film. The department states no redactions conceal the nature of any reported encounter.

An official release; the records are authentic government documents. Their contents remain, by definition, unresolved reports rather than findings, and every record carries a disclaimer that descriptions imply no analytical judgment.

It is the largest proactive UFO records release in U.S. history and the operational form of the disclosure the 2023 UAPDA sought. Its structure (unresolved-only, agency mix, rolling cadence) will shape years of reporting, and its omissions define the follow-up questions.

Skeptics note the conspicuous absences (nothing from CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA, or DOE; nothing on crash retrieval; no technical analysis), that the NASA material repackages long-public transcripts whose astronauts mostly attributed sightings to prosaic causes, and that many operational reports contain the operators' own mundane explanations. Sean Kirkpatrick cautioned against expecting alien interviews. Advocates answer that the FBI packages and the Western US Event are genuinely new, that "among the most compelling" is the government's own phrase, and that Release 01 is a floor. Both readings are correct so far.