The UFO Papers archive holds the 294 declassified UAP files the US government has published through war.gov so far, each paired with its official case description and indexed by agency, reported shape, and region. The official source posted the documents as long lists of links. PURSUE is the name we gave the archive that pulls them into one place. This guide covers what the files are, how the three releases break down, which agencies contributed, and what the records contain. Everything below comes from the files and their descriptions.
What Is the PURSUE Program?
PURSUE is the name we use for this archive of the government's declassified UAP records. The source releases on war.gov carry plainer labels: Release 01, Release 02, Release 03. The underlying disclosure effort gathered files from across federal agencies and put them out in structured batches, which spares a reader the usual route of guessing which agency holds a record, filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and waiting on the response. We mirror the material here, with each file linked to its source PDF, video, image, or audio.
The releases put documents in public view and settle nothing about what those documents describe. The files include intelligence reports, interview transcripts, evaluation studies, photographs, audio, and video. Some describe objects that were later identified. Some record debates the paperwork leaves open. The archive's rule is to report what the documents state and stop there.
The Three Releases at a Glance
Three waves so far, 294 files total.
Release 01 (May 8)
The first batch was the largest at 158 items. It included the NASA material from the Apollo era. NASA-UAP-D001 is an excerpt from the Apollo 12 air-to-ground voice transcription of November 1969, covering two periods in which the crew reported unidentified phenomena. NASA-UAP-D002 does the same for Apollo 17 in December 1972.
Release 02 (May 22)
The second wave added 64 items. One is DOW-UAP-D017, 116 pages from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program, the direct post-war successor to the Manhattan Project, and from the US Air Force, covering 209 sightings of green orbs, discs, and fireballs reported near Sandia Base, New Mexico, from 1948-1950. The file includes contemporary investigations into residual copper powder found where some sightings were reported, and a few of those investigations became the basis for Project Grudge.
Release 03 (June 12)
The most recent wave added 72 items. CIA-UAP-017 is a never before released July 2008 report on a UFO sighting at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe; per the case description, individuals debated whether the sighting was an advanced reconnaissance device of a foreign government or of extraterrestrial origins. The release also added recent FBI records. FBI-UAP-D009 is an FD-302, the form the bureau uses to record interviews. This one records a February 2026 interview with a US person describing an orb sighting in the northeastern United States; the sighting itself carries only a 2026 date in the archive. The case description notes that the subject matter in FBI-UAP-D009, FBI-UAP-D010, and the video footage FBI-UAP-PR004 corresponds to reports originating from the same general area.
Which Agencies Are Involved?
Nine agencies and bodies appear in the archive's agency index:
- Department of War, 143 documents. The largest contributor. One example is DOW-UAP-D084, an Evaluation Study of the Phenomenon (Flying Saucers) prepared in 1949 at the request of the Plans & Operations Divisions of the US Army General Staff, to determine whether the origin could be traced to natural phenomena or the activities of a foreign power.
- FBI, 86 documents. These include first-hand witness records such as FBI-UAP-D002, an FD-1057 containing a first-hand narrative of a 2022 UAP sighting near Colorado Springs, Colorado, partially redacted.
- NASA, 33 documents. The Apollo transcripts above sit here, along with the rest of the NASA Apollo UAP files.
- CIA, 19 documents. Among them CIA-UAP-D001, a 1973 intelligence information report in which a human source describes observing an airborne, luminous, bright green object in the USSR, with concentric circles forming around it before it dissipated.
- Department of State, 7 documents.
- Department of Energy, 3 documents.
- IC Agency, 1 document. The single file is ICA-UAP-D001, analysis written by an Intelligence Community partner of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) concerning a 2022 incident near Colorado Springs.
- ODNI, 1 document.
- US Government (general), 1 document.
Colorado Springs turns up under two agencies in the same year. The FBI file is a witness narrative taken by special agents, collected to help produce a digital artistic interpretation of the incident; the rendering itself is archived as FBI-UAP-D003. The IC file is the AARO partner's analysis: US military service members reported the incident to AARO in 2023, and the partner assessed, with low confidence, that the object, which observers described as resembling an "angular, non-symmetrical potato," was attributable to sunlight backscattering, sunlight reflecting off mountain snow cover and lighting the underside of low clouds. Per the document description, the incident remains unresolved as of June 2026. Nothing in either file's description ties the two records to a single event, so the honest reading is same city, same year. Side by side they still show how differently a witness form and an intelligence assessment handle a report.
What Do the 294 Files Actually Contain?
The 294 files span four media types: 175 PDFs (reports, studies, interviews, and memos), 84 videos, 24 images, and 11 audio recordings.
Reported Shapes
The archive tags each file with the shape language its documents use. Disc or disk is the most common label at 27 files, then sphere (12), luminous object (8), orb (6), triangle (5), metallic object (4), cylinder (2), balloon (2), and Tic-Tac (2). The other 226 files carry no shape label and sit as Unclassified. The two Tic-Tac entries are 2024 infrared videos archived as UFOP-160 and UFOP-161, with war.gov reference numbers DOW-UAP-PR065 and DOW-UAP-PR066. AARO assesses both as likely derived from an infrared sensor aboard a US Coast Guard platform operating in the southeastern United States, and notes they came from a classified network where many of the responsive materials lack a substantiated chain of custody.
Where Sightings Were Documented
The named regions cover 174 of the 294 files: United States (82), CENTCOM and the Middle East (69), space and orbit (17), Europe (5), and Africa (1). The remaining 120 are indexed as Unknown (69) or Other (51), for records with no stated location or with locations outside the named regions. DOW-UAP-D084, the 1949 Army study, is one of the Unknowns; its record lists no location at all. CIA-UAP-D001's USSR report files under Other. The single Africa entry is the Harare report, CIA-UAP-017.
The space and orbit grouping is where the Apollo material lives; the space and orbit cases topic collects those. The Middle East count reflects recent military operating environments where US forces documented unidentified objects.
Shape and region labels come from how each document describes its case. A file tagged disc reflects the language a 1949 observer or analyst put on paper. The labels organize the material and claim nothing about what the objects were.
Why the PURSUE Program Matters
Three practical things follow from having all of this in one place.
Finding a specific government UAP record used to mean guessing which agency held it and filing a FOIA request. Material from the Department of War, the FBI, the CIA, NASA, and five other bodies now sits in one searchable index, and a case can be followed across agencies without separate request processes.
Secondhand versions of these cases circulate widely and drift in the retelling. Each case page here carries the government's own description and a link to the source file, so a claim about the Harare sighting can be checked against CIA-UAP-017 directly rather than against someone's summary of it.
The files also cover a long span: a 1949 Army evaluation study, Apollo transcripts from 1969 and 1972, FBI paperwork from 2022, an interview record from 2026. Some describe events later attributed to ordinary causes. Some record debates the documents leave open. The archive keeps whatever label the paperwork uses.
How to Start Exploring
A workable path is to pick one document, read it whole, then follow the topic pages sideways.
- For the early military material, DOW-UAP-D084 (1949) and DOW-UAP-D017 (1948-1950) pair well, and the disc and saucer sightings topic collects related files.
- For modern witness paperwork, FBI-UAP-D002 (2022) and FBI-UAP-D009 (2026) show how first-hand reports get recorded on FD-1057 and FD-302 forms. More sit under the FBI UAP files topic.
- For the space material, the two Apollo transcripts are the obvious starting point.
- For whatever arrived most recently, the latest PURSUE release topic covers the newest batch.
Each document page carries the official description and a link to the source file, which is where everything in this guide came from. As of Release 03 on June 12, the count is 294.