PURSUE Release 01 went live on war.gov on May 8, 2026: 158 declassified files, the first and largest of three batches. Release 02 followed on May 22 with 64 files, Release 03 on June 12 with 72, which puts the archive at 294. All of it is indexed and cross-referenced at ufopapers.com. This guide accounts for every file in the first release, using the archive's own case data.
The release never announces its most useful fact about itself. Billed as seven decades of records, it counts out as two collections filed together. One layer is historical: mid-century flying-disc paper, 1960s and 1970s NASA flight records, State Department cables. The other layer, the bigger one, is recent: standardized mission reports, sensor videos, and photo submissions that military commands and the FBI routed to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), mostly between 2020 and 2025. Nearly every file below falls cleanly on one side or the other.
Ground rule, same as everywhere else on this site: the descriptions come from the records. Where a file says "possible missile" or "crystal-type dome," that is the document talking. Where the record stops short of a conclusion, so does this page.
The count
Four agencies contributed. The Department of War accounts for 79 files, exactly half. The FBI has 57, NASA 15, the Department of State 7. That sums to 158 with nothing left over, and it leaves one notable absence: zero CIA files. The Agency's 19 documents arrive later, one in Release 02 and eighteen in Release 03, all collected under CIA UAP files.
By media type, Release 01 runs 116 PDFs, 27 videos, 14 images, and one audio file. The whole 294-file archive holds 175 PDFs, so this single release carries about two thirds of the collection's documentary paper.
Department of War: 79 files
The oldest layer is nine paper files from the 1940s and 1950s. UFOP-16, the "319.1 Flying Discs 1949" file, is the type specimen: incident reports written to comply with the 1948 Flight Service Regulation 200-4, witnessed by military sources and some Civilian Aviation Authority ones. Around it sit correspondence treating disc sightings as a matter of concern for the Air Materiel Command (UFOP-10), a November 1948 Air Force intelligence report on flying saucers (UFOP-14), a 1955 Air Intelligence Information Report on an eyewitness account of an unconventional aircraft ascending in the trans-Caucasus region of the USSR (UFOP-15), a 1944-1945 file on German armament equipment (UFOP-13), a 1948 general file (UFOP-11), and three boxes of incident summaries built around a standard "Check-List - Unidentified Flying Objects" form (UFOP-17 through UFOP-19). This is where the archive's disc and saucer material is densest.
Then the modern machine. Thirty files are Mission Reports, MISREPs, the standardized form the U.S. military uses to record the circumstances surrounding its operations and, often, to report UAP to AARO. The dated ones run from a November 2016 Syria report through late 2024, with one titled Djibouti 2025; the heaviest single cluster is the Arabian Gulf in 2020. DOW-UAP-D003, an Arabian Gulf MISREP from 2020, shows the format: structured fields plus a GENTEXT free-text section where the qualitative detail tends to live.
Twenty-seven more files are short videos, every one titled "Unresolved UAP Report" and every one submitted to AARO by a military organization. Twenty came from Central Command; the rest came from Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command, Africa Command, the Department of the Air Force, and the Department of the Army, with title dates running from 2013 to 2026. UFOP-116 is representative: five seconds of infrared footage from 2022, described in the accompanying mission report as a "possible missile" crossing the field of view, with four other objects, absent from the clip, listed as "possible birds." The set lives under Pentagon and military UAP videos.
The remaining thirteen files: six Range Fouler debriefs and reporting forms, most dated 2020; three email correspondence files; a Kuwait still-image report (UFOP-117); a 1996 study on modeling unlikely space-booster failures (DOW-UAP-D048); a launch summary for Vandenberg Air Force Base covering 1958 to 2000; and UFOP-293, a summary of statements by seven federal employees who separately reported phenomena over two days in the western United States in 2023, including "orbs launching other orbs" and something likened to a "translucent kite."
FBI: 57 files
The Bureau's block splits along the same line.
The historical half is twenty files, eighteen of them consecutive sections of one case file. 62-HQ-83894 (UFOP-24 through UFOP-41) collects investigative records, eyewitness testimony, and public reports on flying discs documented between June 1947 and July 1968, with photographic evidence from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and technical proposals about propulsion mixed in. Two memos round it out: UFOP-22, from 1958, a Detroit man's sighting of a "circular object with a crystal-type dome," recommended for forwarding to "proper air force authorities," and UFOP-23, a 1957 interview with Wladyslaw Krasuski, who recounted watching a large, circular, vertically rising vehicle near a German military compound in 1944.
The modern half is thirty-seven files, nearly all of it the Bureau feeding AARO. Eight images (UFOP-195 through UFOP-202) are stills submitted from a U.S. government system; per the records, the date and location of the events have not been provided. Twenty-four PDFs (UFOP-203 through UFOP-226) are a second still-image series, derived from a U.S. military system in 2025 and redacted before submission. Four files document one September 2023 sighting, including UFOP-227, an FBI Lab graphic overlaid on a site photo, depicting corroborating eyewitness reports of an ellipsoid bronze metallic object, 130 to 195 feet long, that appeared out of a bright light and vanished. The last is UFOP-292, an FBI 302 interview with a senior U.S. intelligence official who described a helicopter search near a military facility, a "super-hot" orb hovering over the ground, and a 20-mile pursuit the helicopter lost. The Bureau's full run is indexed under FBI UAP files.
NASA: 15 files
NASA's block is the most self-contained: the crewed-spaceflight package, 1965 to 1973.
Eight are flight documents. NASA-UAP-D003 is the Gemini 7 transcript from December 1965, with Frank Borman reporting a "bogey," the period's term for an unknown aircraft, along with a debris field. NASA-UAP-D003A is the matching audio excerpt, and the only audio file in the release. NASA-UAP-D004 excerpts the Apollo 11 technical crew debriefing: an object observed on the way out to the Moon, light flashes inside the cabin, a bright light on the return trip. NASA-UAP-D001 excerpts the Apollo 12 air-to-ground transcript around two reporting periods, one roughly an hour long on the mission's fifth day. NASA-UAP-D002 does the same for Apollo 17 across three periods, the longest about three hours on the second day. Two 1973 Apollo 17 debriefings (NASA-UAP-D005 and NASA-UAP-D006) and the Skylab technical debriefing, with excerpts from all three station crews, complete the paper.
Six are photographs from the lunar surface: five from Apollo 12 (UFOP-279 through UFOP-283) and one from Apollo 17, UFOP-284, which under magnification shows three dots in a triangular formation in the lunar sky. An earlier version of this guide claimed the two Apollo transcripts were the only pins off Earth on the archive map. The case data says otherwise. Release 01 alone holds eight files located on the Moon, the two transcripts plus all six photographs, and ten files in the space and orbit region once the Gemini 7 pair is counted. Archive-wide that region runs to 17 cases.
The fifteenth file is the odd one out. UFOP-12 contains an independent French COMETA report on UFOs and defense, previously published in 1999, plus a letter from Carol Rosin. A contextual record, filed under NASA.
Department of State: 7 files
Release 01 contains every State Department file in the archive; the later releases add none. Five span 1985 to 2004. UFOP-286 is a January 1985 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Port Moresby to USCINCPAC in Honolulu, sent after Papua New Guinea's intelligence services asked the embassy about reports of high-altitude, high-speed aircraft. The others cover Kazakhstan in 1994, Georgia in 2001, Mexico in 2003, and Turkmenistan in 2004 (UFOP-287 through UFOP-290). The remaining two are older Washington paper: UFOP-21, a two-page July 1952 memorandum on that summer's increase in UFO reports, with candidate explanations and Air Force opinions, and UFOP-20, a July 1963 memorandum from the National Aeronautics and Space Council on the "space alien race question," including details on plans if alien intelligence is discovered.
What the shape tags say
The archive derives a sighting descriptor from each document's own language, and for Release 01 the loudest number is the blank one. 121 of the 158 files carry no descriptor at all; most of this material is procedural paper rather than sighting narrative. The 37 that do break down as disc or disk 22, metallic object 4, luminous 4, balloon 2, triangle 2, orb 2, cylinder 1. Every disc tag belongs to the historical layer, four Department of War files and all eighteen FBI case-file sections. Both orb tags are modern, UFOP-292 and UFOP-293. A descriptor records what a document says. What the object was is a separate matter the records mostly decline to settle.
A workable reading order
Six files, four stops, in rough historical order:
- UFOP-16 for the 1949 institutional framing and the original flying-disc vocabulary.
- UFOP-24 to open the FBI's two-decade case file, where the civilian reports live.
- NASA-UAP-D003 and NASA-UAP-D003A together, the same Gemini 7 "bogey" report on paper and on tape.
- DOW-UAP-D003 for the modern MISREP format, then UFOP-116 for the video half of the same pipeline.
That sequence runs policy paper, case file, flight record, sensor report: a fair cross-section of how the government has processed these reports since 1947.
Where the two layers meet
Occasionally they meet inside a single file. UFOP-284 is a NASA photograph taken in December 1972, previously released and discussed by keen observers without any consensus about the anomaly. Under the PURSUE review of historical materials, the Department of War opened a case on it. New preliminary U.S. government analysis suggests the image feature is potentially the result of a physical object in the scene, and as part of the investigation the government has obtained the original film.