Here is what the UFO Papers archive does. It takes every declassified UAP file the U.S. government has put out, maps each one to the theater where it was documented, graphs the whole set, and lets you filter by agency, by reported shape, by location. The official source (war.gov) dumped these documents as a wall of links. Good luck finding a pattern in that. PURSUE is the name we gave the archive that pulls all of it into one place where you can actually explore it, compare files, and notice things. Want every disc-shaped sighting? Filter for it. Want to see how the FBI and an intelligence office each wrote up the same Colorado event? Open both. That is the point of this guide. It walks you through what these 294 declassified files are, how the releases break down, which agencies sent them, and what the documents say. Newcomers welcome, and everything below sticks to what the files themselves contain.
What Is the PURSUE Program?
PURSUE is the name we use for this archive of the government's declassified UAP records. The underlying material comes from the government's own disclosure effort, published at war.gov, which gathered files from across federal agencies and released them to the public. Instead of forcing people to file individual Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and wait months or years for redacted scraps, the releases bundle that material into structured batches. We mirror it here and make it readable, searchable, and downloadable.
A point worth getting right. This is a disclosure effort. It is not a confirmation of any explanation for the phenomena described. The files include intelligence reports, interview transcripts, evaluation studies, photographs, audio, and video. Some describe ordinary objects that were later identified. Others stay unexplained in the records. Across the UFO Papers archive the rule holds: report what the documents state, nothing more.
The public interest tracks how rare this is. Primary-source material rarely surfaces at this volume all at once. These aren't summaries written by journalists or theorists. They're the actual government documents.
The Three Releases at a Glance
The government has put these files out in three waves so far, each one adding to the archive. Together they cover 294 declassified files.
Release 01 (May 8)
The first batch was the biggest by item count, 158 items. It set the foundation and carried some of the most historically significant material, including NASA documentation from the Apollo era. Take NASA-UAP-D001, which is Apollo 12 lunar mission documentation from 1969 referencing anomalous observations. NASA-UAP-D002 covers the Apollo 17 mission of 1972.
Release 02 (May 22)
The second wave added 64 items. One of them is DOW-UAP-D017, a 116-page set of records from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program (AFSWP) tied to New Mexico in the 1948 to 1950 period. Researchers value this kind of dense military file precisely because nobody has filtered it.
Release 03 (June 12)
The most recent wave added 72 items, and it brought in several of the archive's most-discussed files. One is CIA-UAP-017, a never-before-released report on a 2008 UFO sighting at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe. The documentation itself leaves the question open (a foreign reconnaissance device, or something unexplained). Release 03 also added modern FBI records, among them FBI-UAP-D009, an FBI FD-302 interview documenting a February 2026 orb sighting in the northeastern United States.
Which Agencies Are Involved?
The breadth here is striking. Nine distinct agencies and bodies contributed records, which tells you UAP documentation isn't tucked away in one corner of the government:
- Department of War, 143 documents. The single largest contributor, reflecting decades of military evaluation. A representative example is DOW-UAP-D084, the U.S. Army "Flying Saucer" Evaluation Study prepared for Plans & Operations, GSUSA, dated 1949.
- FBI, 86 documents. Heavy on first-hand witness records, such as FBI-UAP-D002, an FD-1057 narrative of a 2022 UAP sighting near Colorado Springs, Colorado (partially redacted).
- NASA, 33 documents. Including the Apollo-era lunar mission files noted above.
- CIA, 19 documents. Intelligence reporting like CIA-UAP-D001, a 1973 intelligence information report based on human-source reporting in the USSR.
- Department of State, 7 documents.
- Department of Energy, 3 documents.
- IC Agency, 1 document. This includes ICA-UAP-D001, an analysis from AARO, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, concerning Colorado Springs.
- ODNI, 1 document.
- U.S. Government (general), 1 document.
The cross-agency spread is a big part of why the archive earns its keep. A single sighting can show up in records from more than one body, which lets you compare how, say, the FBI and an intelligence office each wrote up the same location. Colorado Springs is the clear case. It appears in both an FBI first-hand narrative (FBI-UAP-D002) and an intelligence analysis from AARO (ICA-UAP-D001). Read those two side by side and you can see how different parts of government approach the same event with different methods, different vocabularies, different levels of detail. That comparison is hard to pull off when the records live in separate archives behind separate request processes. Bringing everything together is the quiet advantage of the archive.
What Do the 294 Files Actually Contain?
The archive isn't only paperwork. The 294 files span four media types:
- 175 PDFs. The core documentary record: reports, studies, interviews, and memos.
- 84 videos. Visual recordings tied to specific files.
- 24 images. Photographs and stills.
- 11 audio. Recordings, such as communications and interviews.
Reported Shapes
Across the files, the shapes described in the records have been catalogued. These come heuristically from the documents' own language, not from any independent identification. The most common is the classic disc or disk, noted in 27 files. Others include the sphere (12), luminous object (8), orb (6), triangle (5), metallic object (4), cylinder (2), balloon (2), and Tic-Tac (2). The two Tic-Tac files are 2024 U.S. Coast Guard C-144 infrared recordings near Tyndall (DOW-UAP-PR065 and DOW-UAP-PR066).
Where Sightings Were Documented
Geographically, the records cluster in a few regions. The largest share is the United States (82 files), followed by CENTCOM / the Middle East (69), space and orbit (17), Europe (5), and Africa (1). The space-and-orbit grouping is where the NASA Apollo material lives. The heavy Middle East presence reflects recent military operating environments where U.S. forces routinely document unidentified objects.
One caution on reading these tallies. The shape and region counts come from how each document describes its case, not from any verified classification of what the objects were. A file labeled "disc" in 1949 reflects the language a 1949 observer or analyst used, full stop. Keep that in mind and you're reading the archive responsibly. The categories organize the material. They're descriptions on the page, not conclusions about reality. The single African file (CIA-UAP-017, the Harare report) is a good reminder, since the document itself lays out competing explanations instead of settling on one.
Why the PURSUE Program Matters
Past the headline file count, the archive matters for a few concrete reasons.
It centralizes scattered records. Before efforts like this, a curious reader had to guess which agency might hold a file, send a FOIA request, and wait. Now material from the Department of War, FBI, CIA, NASA, and others sits in one searchable place.
It preserves primary sources. Secondhand accounts of UAP cases are all over the internet, often warped in the retelling. An archive built on the actual documents lets you check claims against the record. Read CIA-UAP-017 and you're reading the agency's own framing of the Harare case, not somebody's interpretation of it.
It spans eras. The files run from 1949 military studies through the 1969 to 1972 Apollo missions to 2022 and 2026 FBI records. That long timeline lets you trace how government documentation of these phenomena has changed, in vocabulary, in rigor, in what gets written down at all.
It models restraint. The records include cases later pinned on mundane causes, cases still argued over within the documents, and cases that stay open. Handling them honestly, without jumping to conclusions the paperwork won't support, is the whole job.
How to Start Exploring
A practical way in is to pick a thread that grabs you and follow it through the archive. Drawn to historic military assessments? Start with the 1949 Army evaluation study (DOW-UAP-D084) and the AFSWP file (DOW-UAP-D017). More into modern witness accounts? The FBI records, FBI-UAP-D002 from 2022 and FBI-UAP-D009 from 2026, show how first-hand reports get formally documented today. For the space angle, the NASA Apollo files are the obvious starting point. And for an international case the documents themselves call genuinely unresolved, CIA-UAP-017 is hard to beat.
As future releases add to the current 294 files, the archive keeps growing. That's the most useful thing about reading the source material directly. You can form your own view.
Explore the Archive
The best way to understand any of this is to read the documents yourself. Browse all 294 declassified files, filter by agency, shape, or region, and dig into whatever pulls you in at UFO Papers. To get a heads-up when new releases drop, subscribe to the free UFO Papers newsletter. It's the simplest way to stay current as more records go public.