The government posted its declassified UAP files to war.gov as a wall of links. That's where this archive started. PURSUE is the name we gave the collection once we pulled all of it together at ufopapers.com and did the thing war.gov never bothered to do: map every file by theater, graph the releases, and let you filter by agency, shape, and location. Want every disc sighting the Department of War logged in 1949? Two clicks. Want to see how CIA intelligence reports cluster by decade and region? It's a chart, not a download queue. The raw records came from the government. The way you read them comes from here.
This guide is about the first batch. PURSUE Release 01, 158 individual files spanning more than seven decades of U.S. government interest in unidentified aerial phenomena. It's the largest of the three releases archived so far, and it sets the baseline for everything that came after. Below: what's actually in Release 01, how the files split by agency and media type, which documents to open first, and how to read them without reading more into them than the records support.
One ground rule for the whole archive. This is a document collection, not an argument. The files contain observations, evaluations, intelligence reports, and bureaucratic correspondence. They don't confirm extraterrestrial origin for anything, and we don't either. Where a document calls an object a "disc" or "luminous," that's the document talking. Where it reaches a conclusion, we report the conclusion. Everything below comes from what the records say.
What Release 01 Is
PURSUE Release 01 went live on May 8, 2026, with 158 items. Release 02 followed on May 22 (64 items) and Release 03 on June 12 (72 items), putting the running total across all releases at 294 declassified files. Release 01 by itself accounts for more than half of everything in the archive, which makes it the natural place to start if you're working through the collection in order.
The 158 files come in a mix of formats. Across the full archive the media split runs 175 PDFs, 84 videos, 24 images, and 11 audio files, and Release 01 carries the heaviest share of the long-form documentary material. The PDFs are where the substance lives. Evaluation studies, intelligence information reports, mission documentation, interview narratives. The videos, images, and audio work as supporting exhibits, usually tied back to a written case file.
On a first pass, treat Release 01 as a library, not a feed. The best way through it is by agency. Each agency's files share a voice, a format, and a set of institutional worries, and the archive's filters let you isolate them one at a time.
Breakdown by Agency
Across the whole archive the agency count leans hard toward a few institutions: Department of War (143), FBI (86), NASA (33), CIA (19), Department of State (7), Department of Energy (3), plus one file each from an IC Agency, ODNI, and a general "U.S. Government" attribution. Release 01 sits at that same center of gravity. Here's how to think about the major contributors as you read.
Department of War
The Department of War is the largest single source in the archive, and its material is also the oldest. Mid-twentieth-century records: incident reports, weapons-program correspondence, staff assessments from the years when "flying saucer" was the working term inside the U.S. military. Newer standardized Mission Reports (MISREPs) from overseas operations sit alongside them.
A good Release 01 example is UFOP-16, the "319.1 Flying Discs 1949" file. It's a set of incident reports written to comply with the 1948 Flight Service Regulation (FSR) 200-4, witnessed by military and Civilian Aviation Authority sources. At the other end of the timeline, the Release 01 Mission Report series (for example DOW-UAP-D003, an Arabian Gulf MISREP from 2020) shows the same institution recording anomalous sightings in the present day. Later releases add formal evaluation studies for context. The U.S. Army "Flying Saucer" Evaluation Study, DOW-UAP-D084, dated 1949 (Release 03), and the 116-page Sandia Base file, DOW-UAP-D017, covering 209 sightings of green orbs, discs, and fireballs in New Mexico from 1948 to 1950 that became a basis for Project Grudge (Release 02). Read the Department of War files and you get a clear picture of the government's first instinct: assess and manage risk. What is this, who might be flying it, does it threaten us.
FBI
The FBI is the second-largest contributor at 86 files, and the Bureau's material reads nothing like the military's. The Department of War produced studies. The FBI produced field reports and case files. Memoranda, eyewitness testimonies, public correspondence. These are the closest thing in the archive to street-level documentation. A witness, an agent, a date, a description, often partly redacted.
Two Release 01 FBI files show the range. UFOP-22 is a 1958 Bureau memo on a Detroit man's sighting of a "circular object with a crystal-type dome," recommending the information go to "proper air force authorities." It's a snapshot of how the FBI routed these reports in the flying-disc era. UFOP-24 opens the Bureau's sprawling 62-HQ-83894 case file, which collects investigative records, eyewitness testimonies, and public reports on flying discs documented between 1947 and 1968. Modern standardized forms (the FD-1057 narrative, the FD-302 interview record, the Colorado Springs field reporting, the northeastern orb interviews) show up in Release 03, not here.
NASA
NASA contributes 33 files, and two of them rank among the most-requested documents in the whole collection. The next section handles the Apollo material in detail, because the Moon-mission documentation is one of the headline draws of Release 01.
CIA
The CIA's 19 files lean toward the intelligence-report format. HUMINT collection, foreign sightings, assessments of what other nations were observing or fielding. One catch: Release 01 contains no CIA files at all. The Agency's material enters the archive in the later releases, one file in Release 02 and the rest in Release 03. Worth flagging so you don't go hunting for CIA documents in this batch.
The cleanest example of the Cold War IIR format is CIA-UAP-D001 from Release 02. An intelligence information report dated December 20, 1973 that records, in its source's words, an incident from the summer of 1973: a luminous, bright-green object that formed concentric circles before dissipating. It shows how Cold War intelligence channels treated anomalous sightings as collection targets. From Release 03, CIA-UAP-017 is a never-before-released report on a July 2008 sighting at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe, recording an internal debate over whether the object was a foreign reconnaissance device or something genuinely unexplained. A useful reminder that these files often hold competing interpretations rather than settled answers.
State, Energy, and the Rest
The remaining agencies (Department of State with 7, Department of Energy with 3, and single files from an IC Agency, ODNI, and a general U.S. Government source) round out the picture. Smaller in volume, but they show how widely the topic spread across the federal government, from diplomatic cables to energy-sector facilities.
The single IC Agency document is a good example of why even the small-count sources matter, though it sits in Release 03 rather than this batch. ICA-UAP-D001 is an intelligence analysis produced by AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, concerning the same Colorado Springs matter documented in the FBI's 2022 field reporting (also Release 03). Put them side by side and you see two very different parts of the government looking at one event through their own lenses. One treats it as a field report to be recorded, the other as an analytic problem to be resolved. That kind of cross-agency overlap is exactly why reading the archive by case beats reading it by agency in isolation, even when the paired files land in different releases. The archive's location and agency filters make the pairing easy to find.
Spotlight: The NASA Apollo Moon Files
If Release 01 has a centerpiece, it's the pair of NASA Apollo documents tied to the lunar program.
NASA-UAP-D001 is Apollo 12 lunar-mission documentation, dated 1969, that references anomalous observations. NASA-UAP-D002 is Apollo 17 documentation, dated 1972, the sixth crewed lunar landing and the last of the Apollo Moon missions. Both are filed under the Moon as their location, which alone makes them stand out in an archive otherwise full of terrestrial sightings. On the map view, they're the only two pins that aren't on Earth.
A caution on how to read them. Apollo-era documentation is thick with mission telemetry, crew procedure, and routine observation logging. The phrase "anomalous observations" in the record doesn't by itself imply anything exotic. Anomaly here is an engineering and observational term, meaning something that didn't match expectation and got flagged for follow-up. The value of these files is that they show what was logged, by whom, and how it was handled, straight from primary NASA documentation instead of a secondhand summary. If you're after the space-and-orbit slice of the phenomenon (17 of the archive's derived regional tags), the Apollo files are where to start.
Breakdown by Media Type
Release 01's strength is its documentary weight, but the archive overall is multimedia, and it pays to know what each format is good for.
- PDFs (175 across the archive). The backbone. Evaluation studies, intelligence reports, mission records, interview forms. To understand a case fully, the PDF is where the reasoning and the redactions live.
- Videos (84). Visual exhibits, often tied to a written case. Best read next to the corresponding document rather than on their own.
- Images (24). Stills, diagrams, photographic exhibits.
- Audio (11). The smallest category. Recordings that supplement written narratives.
The practical takeaway for Release 01: start with the PDFs to build a factual spine, then use the videos, images, and audio as corroborating exhibits where a case provides them. A single dated incident might carry a written interview, a short clip, and a still image, each filed under its own case reference but pointing back to the same event. Treat those exhibits as a set and you're actually understanding a case. Treat them as standalone curiosities and you're just skimming.
This is also where the archive rewards patience. A redacted PDF on its own can feel like a dead end. The same file read next to its exhibit, or next to a second agency's take on the same event, often fills in what a single redacted page leaves out.
What the Sighting Descriptions Actually Say
The archive includes a set of derived sighting descriptors, pulled heuristically from the language of the documents. Across the collection the most common shape is the disc or disk (27 references), then spheres (12), luminous objects (8), orbs (6), triangles (5), metallic objects (4), with smaller counts for cylinders, balloons, and "tic-tac" forms (2 each). The shape filter on the archive turns each of these into a one-click view.
That distribution maps cleanly onto the history. The disc-heavy vocabulary reflects the Department of War's mid-century "flying saucer" years. The orb and luminous descriptors show up in newer material, including the luminous USSR observation in the Release 02 file CIA-UAP-D001. The two "tic-tac" references both come from one 2024 incident: U.S. Coast Guard C-144 infrared records from Tyndall (Release 02), where "tic-tac" is the observers' own shorthand for the object's shape, not a label tying it to any other case.
Worth repeating. These are descriptions, not classifications. A document calling an object a "disc" tells you what an observer reported or what an analyst wrote down. It doesn't tell you what the object was.
How to Work Through Release 01
Starting cold? Here's a sensible reading order.
- Begin with the Department of War incident files to get the institutional framing. UFOP-16 ("319.1 Flying Discs 1949") and the Mission Report series such as DOW-UAP-D003 bracket the timeline from the flying-disc era to present-day overseas operations.
- Read the NASA Apollo files (NASA-UAP-D001 and NASA-UAP-D002) for the primary-source space material.
- Work through the FBI case files. UFOP-22 and the 62-HQ-83894 series (UFOP-24 onward) ground the abstract back into individual, dated, witness-level accounts.
That sequence runs from policy to mission to eyewitness, a good slice of the pipeline the U.S. government has used to process these reports. Release 01 holds no CIA files; for the Cold War intelligence-report format, see CIA-UAP-D001 in Release 02. You can browse all of it in the archive, filter by agency, shape, location, or media type, graph it however you want, and follow the case IDs cited here straight to their source files.
The Bottom Line
PURSUE Release 01 is the foundation: 158 files, weighted toward long-form documents, drawn from the Department of War, FBI, NASA, and Department of State, with the CIA's material arriving in the later releases. The highlights are the Apollo documentation in NASA-UAP-D001 and NASA-UAP-D002 and the early Department of War flying-disc files. Open those first. The real payoff comes from reading the collection as a whole and letting the documents speak for themselves. They describe a government that took the question seriously enough to study it, collect on it, and file it away for decades. They don't hand you a conclusion. That part is left, as it should be, to the reader and the record.
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