PURSUE UAP Files: Complete Release Tracker

What Is PURSUE?

PURSUE is a Pentagon-administered UAP document declassification program created under congressional mandate. The legal basis traces to a sequence of UAP transparency provisions embedded in the National Defense Authorization Act and subsequent intelligence community reform legislation passed between 2022 and 2025. The relevant statutes required the Department of Defense, in coordination with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to conduct a systematic review of existing UAP records and release non-sensitive materials to the public on a rolling schedule.

The program's name stands for Permanent UAP Records Systematic Update and Evaluation. Its scope covers records held by any federal agency that documented, investigated, or analyzed UAP encounters -- not just the Department of Defense. That is why the first release drew from four separate agencies: the Pentagon, the FBI, NASA, and the State Department.

PURSUE is distinct from the existing UAP reporting infrastructure operated by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Where AARO handles active investigations and new incident reporting, PURSUE works backward through the historical record -- identifying, reviewing, redacting where necessary, and releasing materials that were previously classified or simply never indexed for public access.

The May 8 Release: What 162 Files Actually Contained

The first PURSUE tranche, released on May 8, 2026, comprised 162 individual documents spanning four source agencies. The files were posted to a public-facing portal and have since been mirrored by multiple research organizations. Here is what each agency contributed and what the documents contained.

Department of Defense files made up the largest share of the release. They included radar data from military installations covering encounters that were flagged but never formally investigated, internal correspondence between base commanders and the Pentagon's predecessor UAP tracking bodies, and several pilot encounter reports from Navy aviators -- reports that in a number of cases corroborate incidents already documented through the AARO public reporting process, but with more operational detail than the sanitized summaries previously available.

FBI files consisted primarily of domestic investigation records from the 1940s through the 1990s. Most of the material concerns public UAP sightings that prompted local law enforcement calls and federal referrals, along with a smaller number of documents related to site visits to locations where physical trace evidence was reported. The FBI's involvement in UAP investigation was more extensive than widely understood, and these files provide a clearer picture of how that investigative role was structured -- and why it was largely discontinued after interagency conflicts in the early 1980s.

NASA files from the first release are analyzed in detail in our NASA PURSUE Files: Apollo Anomalies review. The short summary: NASA's contribution includes anomaly reports from crewed and uncrewed missions, internal communications about detection events during orbital operations, and a small number of documents related to the agency's periodic reviews of UAP instrumentation policy. None of these documents were classified at high levels; most had been technically accessible under FOIA for years but were never aggregated or indexed in a usable way.

State Department cables are among the more significant documents in the first release from a provenance standpoint. They establish that U.S. diplomatic posts in multiple countries were, at various points, tasked with collecting and forwarding local reports of UAP incidents to Washington. The cables also document instances where foreign governments shared UAP information through diplomatic channels -- sharing that was apparently not reflected in any contemporaneous public record. Our FBI and State pattern analysis covers the evidentiary value of these inter-agency communication chains in detail.

Release Tracker

This table will be updated as each new batch is released. Check back after each announced drop.

Batch	Release Date	Files	Source Agencies	Status
Batch 1	May 8, 2026	162	Pentagon, FBI, NASA, State Dept	Analyzed
Batch 2	TBD	TBD	TBD	Pending
Batch 3	TBD	TBD	TBD	Pending

Analysis Index: Batch 1

Each major thread from the first release has been examined in a dedicated analysis article. Links are below. The analysis pieces are meant to be read independently -- they do not require familiarity with each other, only with the documents themselves.

• What the Pentagon Declassified: A Document-by-Document Review -- The full scope of the DoD contribution to Batch 1: radar records, pilot reports, and internal correspondence. What these files add to the existing public record and where the gaps remain.
• NASA PURSUE Files: Apollo Anomalies and Orbital Detections -- A review of NASA's contribution, including mission anomaly reports and the agency's internal policy debates about UAP detection instrumentation.
• FBI and State Department Files: Pattern Analysis -- What the FBI's decades of domestic investigation records reveal, and why the State Department cables may be the most underreported element of the first release.

What These Files Do Not Contain

Credibility requires stating this plainly. The first PURSUE release does not contain a smoking gun. There is no document in Batch 1 that confirms extraterrestrial origin, establishes recovered craft, or describes contact with non-human intelligence. Anyone reading that conclusion into the record is doing so without evidentiary support from the documents themselves.

What the files do contain is a more complete paper trail for encounters that were previously documented only in summary form, or not documented publicly at all. The value is corroborative and archival: they thicken the existing record and in several cases establish that government awareness of specific incidents was broader and earlier than previously acknowledged. That is a meaningful contribution to the historical record. It is not confirmation of any specific hypothesis.

Radar data in the release confirms anomalous flight characteristics in several documented cases -- objects performing maneuvers inconsistent with known aircraft -- but radar data alone cannot determine origin, and the files include no physical analysis that would permit a determination of origin. The photo and video analysis materials are similarly bounded: they establish that the imagery is genuine and that the objects depicted are not easily matched to known platforms, without going further than the underlying data permits.

Future batches may contain more consequential material. The Pentagon review process is ongoing, and the criteria for what qualifies for release -- and what remains redacted -- have not been made fully public. What is certain is that the first release establishes a baseline: the government had more documentation than it publicly acknowledged, across more agencies than most researchers assumed, covering a longer time period than the post-2004 Tic Tac framing suggested.

Why This Matters for Remote Viewing Research

The PURSUE files and the history of Project STARGATE are not separate topics. They are two threads of the same institutional record.

From 1972 to 1995, the U.S. government funded research into anomalous human cognition -- the capacity of trained individuals to perceive distant locations and events without conventional sensory access -- at a total cost of more than $20 million. That program, which became known as Project STARGATE, ran concurrently with the early period of government UAP investigation. The same intelligence community that was tracking anomalous objects in restricted airspace was simultaneously training human beings to perceive anomalous information across distance and time.

This is not a rhetorical point. It is an institutional one. The PURSUE files help establish the full scope of what the government was studying during this period, and that scope includes both external anomalies -- objects -- and internal ones -- cognition. Any serious research program attempting to understand either phenomenon benefits from having a complete record of the other.

The STARGATE researchers, particularly those working under the controlled remote viewing protocol developed by Ingo Swann, were aware of this overlap. Several operational STARGATE sessions targeted locations that were also of interest to UAP investigators. The convergence was noted internally. Whether it was ever systematically analyzed is not yet clear from the available record -- but as PURSUE continues releasing files from the relevant period, that question may become answerable.

What to Expect from Future Releases

The PURSUE schedule specifies rolling releases approximately every few weeks, though the Pentagon has not committed to a fixed cadence. Based on the scope described in the program's enabling legislation, subsequent batches are expected to draw from additional agencies -- the CIA's historical UAP files have been discussed in congressional testimony as a potential source for later releases -- and may include materials from the period of active AARO investigation that are now old enough to be reviewed for declassification.

Researchers tracking the releases should pay particular attention to three categories of material that have not yet appeared in quantity: physical trace analysis reports, which were compiled at various points by both military and civilian investigators and represent some of the most detailed primary documentation of close-encounter events; inter-agency communication chains from the 1980s and 1990s, when the UAP investigation function was distributed across multiple offices with poor coordination; and any materials related to the UAP instrumentation and detection programs that several agencies ran quietly during the Cold War period.

None of these categories are guaranteed to appear, and some may remain redacted under national security or operational security classifications that survive the PURSUE review process. But they represent the areas where the historical record has the largest gaps, and where new documentation would have the most analytical value.

This page will be updated after each batch drops. Analysis articles will be linked here as they are published. Subscribe below to receive notification when new PURSUE material is analyzed.