PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP\nEncounters — is the United States government's program for finding,\ndeclassifying, and publicly releasing unresolved records on unidentified\nanomalous phenomena (UAP). Ordered by a presidential directive in February\n2026 and administered by the Department of War with support from the Office of\nthe Director of National Intelligence, it publishes tranches of documents,\nimages, videos, and audio recordings at a single public portal, war.gov/UFO,\non a rolling cadence — six releases between May 8 and September 18, 2026,\nwith further releases announced as actively in work. The Department describes the\nundertaking as requiring \"coordination between dozens of agencies and the\nreview of tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper.\"
\nTwo things distinguish PURSUE from every prior U.S. government engagement with\nthe subject. It is public by default — records go to an open website with\nno security clearance and no Freedom of Information Act request required — and\nit is government-wide, drawing not only on military and intelligence\nholdings but, by its fifth release, on the files of the Department of Energy,\nthe State Department, and the Executive Office of the President itself — and,\nby its sixth, on a local police department's own footage. Every\nitem is catalogued as an unresolved case: the program publishes what the\ngovernment could not identify, and it publishes its negatives too.
\nThe Wheel of Heaven framework tracks PURSUE closely — the corpus files a\ndispatch on\neach release — but under a deliberate discipline: registration without\nenlistment. No file PURSUE releases is evidence for the framework, and no case\nit debunks is evidence against it. The framework's account of contact rests on\nthe canon's own reports, not on any craft in any sky.
\nThe program's full name styles it as presidential — an unsealing carried out\nunder the direct authority of the president rather than as an agency\ninitiative. Its published mandate is to \"expeditiously find, review, identify,\ndeclassify and publicly release unresolved UAP-related records and historical\ndocuments in the federal government's possession,\" with new material posted\n\"on a rolling basis as files are reviewed and declassified.\" Secretary of War\nPete Hegseth characterized the department as \"in lockstep with President Trump\nto bring unprecedented transparency regarding our government's understanding\nof Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.\"
\nThe mandate's key word is unresolved. PURSUE does not publish the\ngovernment's identified cases (the aircraft, balloons, and sensor artifacts\nthat make up the bulk of any UAP dataset), and it does not adjudicate the\ncases it publishes. It is an archive-opening program, not an analysis program\n— analysis remains with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the\nPentagon's standing UAP office, to which the PURSUE portal itself directs\nreaders for the wider historical record.
\nPURSUE's founding instrument on the public record is a presidential\ndirective of February 19, 2026, in which President Donald Trump ordered\nfederal agencies to identify, review, and declassify their UAP-related\nholdings. Early press coverage widely described the program as created by an\nexecutive order; no numbered executive order has been published, and the\nDepartment of War's own materials speak only of the president's directive.\nThe Department stood the program up within weeks — legal analysis dates the\ntask force to May 1, 2026 — and published the first tranche at war.gov/UFO on\nMay 8.
\nThe directive did not arrive on empty ground. Congress had already built the\nlegal machinery in the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act, enacted in\nDecember 2022, which created a statutory channel — codified at 50 U.S.C.\n§ 3373b — for current and former government personnel to make authorized\ndisclosures of UAP-related information notwithstanding any nondisclosure\nagreement, and prohibited reprisal against those who use it. PURSUE is, in\nstructural terms, an executive push through a door Congress had opened four\nyears earlier.
\nThe two layers joined on July 31, 2026, when the Office of the Director of\nNational Intelligence issued preliminary implementing guidance (ES\n2026-00818): agencies were directed to designate PURSUE representatives within\nthirty days, to establish processes for their workforces to disclose UAP\ninformation, and to inform employees that nondisclosure agreements purporting\nto prevent such disclosures are \"no longer in force.\" The guidance's\napplication to government contractors — the population at the center of the\n2023 congressional testimony about alleged retrieval programs — was left to\nfollow-on guidance. On September 14, 2026, the Department of War answered\nfor its own agreements with a \"targeted legal waiver\": current and former\nservice members, civilian personnel, and contractors holding UAP-related\nnational defense information may disclose it to designated PURSUE\nrepresentatives, and the waiver supersedes the civil and administrative\nenforcement provisions of the nondisclosure and special-access-program\nagreements they signed, strictly for those communications. It declassifies\nnothing and authorizes no public disclosure. The intelligence community's\ncontractor question remains with ODNI's follow-on guidance, and it stays the\nprogram's most closely watched open edge.
\nThe portal at war.gov/UFO presents a searchable database — filterable by\nagency, release, incident date, incident location, and file type — that stood\nat 447 files across the six releases as of September 18, 2026. Files carry\nstructured identifiers by contributing agency and type (DOW-UAP-D101,\nFBI-UAP-D024, EOP-UAP-D001), and tranches have arrived on an\napproximately monthly rhythm: two, three, and four-week intervals settling at\nfour weeks, then stretching to six between the fifth and sixth releases. Public interest has been considerable; the Pentagon's chief\nspokesman put portal traffic at over 1.7 billion hits within the program's\nfirst five weeks.
The releases mix sensor material (gun-camera and infrared footage, radar-scope\nrecordings), witness reporting (FBI interview records, with digital renderings\nthe Bureau produces to illustrate testimony — illustrations, the corpus's\ndispatches note, not photographs), and archival holdings reaching back to a\n1947 intelligence review of the Scandinavian \"ghost rockets\" and, from the\nsixth release, the contract record and reference library of the Defense\nIntelligence Agency's 2008–2012 Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications\nProgram, published with the Department's own annotations declining to endorse\nits more exotic papers. Notably, the\nprogram releases negative findings alongside its unknowns: its fifth\ntranche included a 1963 case — a Brazilian radio report of a crashed sphere,\ninquired after at the White House's space council — that the released State\nDepartment cables themselves resolve as a press fabrication. An archive that\npublishes its own debunkings is behaving like an archive rather than a press\noffice, and the corpus registers that in the program's favor.
\nOne practical asymmetry is worth recording: the portal is open to human\nreaders but closed to machines — its content-delivery configuration blocks\nautomated retrieval outright, so mirrors, archives, and researchers work from\nsecondary captures rather than the live site.
\nRelease-by-release detail — file counts, headline cases, and the corpus's\nreading of each tranche — lives in the Newsroom dispatch series. The stable\nspine:
\n| Release | Date (2026) | Contributing agencies, as announced | Dispatch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | May 8 | Department of War holdings | PURSUE Release 01 |
| 02 | May 22 | Department of War holdings | PURSUE Release 02 |
| 03 | June 12 | + CIA, FBI, NASA — the first named civilian-agency contributors | PURSUE Release 03 |
| 04 | July 10 | + Department of Energy | PURSUE Release 04 |
| 05 | August 7 | + Department of State, Executive Office of the President | PURSUE Release 05 |
| 06 | September 18 | + a local law-enforcement agency (Colorado) — the first non-federal contributor | PURSUE Release 06 |
The portal's database assigns some individual files across these boundaries\ndifferently than the announcements did (NASA-attributed documents appear under\nRelease 01, for instance), so the table records the roster as announced\nrather than as later indexed.
\nPURSUE is the latest instrument in a documented seventy-year sequence, and is\nbest understood against it.
\nThe U.S. Air Force ran three successive investigations — Project Sign\n(1948), Project Grudge (1949), and Project Blue Book (1952–1969) —\nthat together examined 12,618 sightings and left 701 formally unidentified.\nBlue Book was closed on the recommendation of the University of Colorado's\nCondon Report (1968), whose conclusion that further study offered no\nscientific payoff set the government's public posture for nearly five\ndecades. What followed was the FOIA era: declassification by adversarial\nrequest, piecemeal and slow.
\nThe modern sequence began when the New York Times revealed the Advanced\nAerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP, 2007–2012) in December\n2017. The Navy's UAP Task Force followed in 2020, ODNI's preliminary\nassessment (144 military reports, most unresolved) in 2021, and the\nestablishment of AARO in 2022. In July 2023, congressional testimony —\nmost prominently from former intelligence officer David Grusch — alleged\nundisclosed craft-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs; AARO's 2024\nHistorical Record Report answered that it had found \"no verifiable\nevidence\" any U.S. government program has ever possessed extraterrestrial\ntechnology. That report is the government's own skeptical instrument, and the\ncorpus carries it at documentary strength.
\nAgainst that lineage, PURSUE's novelty is structural rather than substantive:\npublication by default instead of by request; a rolling cadence instead of\nepisodic releases; a single consolidated portal instead of scattered reading\nrooms; and a contributing roster that reaches beyond the defense and\nintelligence establishment into the diplomatic service and the presidency's\nown records. What it has not done, six tranches in, is release anything\ntouching the deeper claims of the 2023 testimony.
\nThe Age of Aquarius chapter's ninth section\nanticipates, for the present decades, an acceleration in how officially the\nUAP question is handled — the corpus's dispatches read the six releases as\nsix datable points on that curve, and PURSUE itself as the curve's clearest\ninstitutional expression to date.
\nThe framework's interest is specific. On the canon's account, contact — when\nand if it comes — will be official, governmental, and conditional: a\ndiplomatic event, for which the source material's standing request is the\nconstruction of an embassy. A disclosure infrastructure whose\ncontributing roster now includes the State Department and the Executive\nOffice of the President is therefore legible to the framework in a way a\nsensor-video release alone would not be: the institutions through which any\nofficial contact would run are, at minimum, now on the record as handling\nthe question.
\nThe registration stops there. Under the corpus's reception posture, PURSUE's\nunresolved cases confirm nothing for the framework, and its debunked cases\nrefute nothing in it — the framework's provenance rests on the canon's\nreports, not on the archive. The posture names a single exception it does not\nfirewall: an official, verified disclosure event. PURSUE is not that\nevent. It is an archive opening on a schedule, and the corpus tracks it as\nexactly that.
\nUnresolved is not non-human. The archive selects for the cases the\ngovernment failed to identify — a category that grows with sensor coverage\nand observation density. Nothing in the unresolved framing implies a\nnon-conventional explanation, and the Department itself characterizes no\nreleased case as confirmed non-conventional.
\nThe deeper claims remain untouched. Six tranches contain no material on\nthe craft-retrieval and reverse-engineering allegations of the 2023\ntestimony. Two readings are available — that such material does not exist to\nbe released (AARO's stated finding), or that it exists outside this program's\nreach (the whistleblower position, resting significantly on the still-open\ncontractor question in the ODNI guidance). The corpus holds both open and\nenlists neither.
\nMuch of the material is not new. Substantial portions of the releases\nwere previously known through FOIA productions, Blue Book files, and the\nhistorical literature, and most of the sixth release's DIA reference papers\nhad reached the public through FOIA productions; what PURSUE adds is official\nconsolidation, indexing, and provenance. Critics read the program as transparency theater — recycled\nmaterial under presidential branding; supporters answer that indexed,\ncitable, official publication is precisely what the FOIA era never produced.
\nThe record-keeping is loose at the edges. The Department published no\nfile-count breakdown for its fifth release, press tallies and the portal's\nown index disagree on dates, and announcement-versus-index attribution of\nfiles differs across tranches. The corpus's dispatches attribute counts\nrather than assert them.
\nDurability is the real test. A program five months old, carrying one\npresident's name, proves little by cadence alone. The framework's own\nload-bearing question — argued across the dispatch series — is whether the\ndisclosure curve survives on a multi-year horizon, across administrations and\nnews cycles. That question is open.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers. Nova Distribution, 2005.
\nU.S. Department of War. Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) — release portal and database. war.gov/UFO, May–September 2026.
\nU.S. Department of War. \"Department of War Releases Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files in Historic Transparency Effort.\" Press release, May 8, 2026.
\nU.S. Department of War. \"Department of War Publishes Fifth Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files on WAR.GOV/UFO.\" Press release, August 7, 2026.
\nU.S. Department of War. \"Department of War Issues Legal Waiver to Authorize Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosures to PURSUE.\" Press release, September 14, 2026.
\nU.S. Department of War. \"Department of War Publishes Sixth Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files on WAR.GOV/UFO.\" Press release, September 18, 2026.
\n50 U.S.C. § 3373b — authorized UAP disclosures and prohibition on reprisals, enacted in the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, December 2022.
\nOffice of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary guidance ES 2026-00818 on UAP disclosure and nondisclosure-agreement waivers, July 31, 2026.
\nAll-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I. Department of Defense, March 2024.
\nCondon, Edward U., ed. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. University of Colorado / Bantam, 1969.
\nU.S. Air Force. Project Blue Book case files, 1947–1969. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 341.
\nCooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. \"Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program.\" The New York Times, December 16, 2017.
\n\"Pentagon releases new batch of UFO files: 'Did you see that?'\" CBS News, August 7, 2026.
\nBecket, Stefan. \"Pentagon releases more UFO files, including documents on secretive military program.\" CBS News, September 18, 2026.
\nVincent, Brandi. \"Pentagon offers new 'targeted legal relief' for UAP whistleblowers supporting Trump's PURSUE work.\" DefenseScoop, September 14, 2026.
\nDLA Piper. \"Office of the Director of National Intelligence issues preliminary guidance on disclosure of unidentified anomalous phenomena.\" Client alert, August 2026.
\nSwords, Michael, and Robert Powell. UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. Anomalist Books, 2012.
\nRuppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Doubleday, 1956.
\n", "extra": {"alternative_names":["Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters","PURSUE Task Force","war.gov/UFO (the release portal)","the UAP files releases"],"category":"Ufology","claim_type":"direct","core_claim_ids":["woh-claim-0057"],"core_versions":{"woh-claim-0057":"0.1.0"},"editorial_pass":"2026-08","entry_type":"concept","infobox":{"administering_body":"U.S. Department of War, with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)","contributing_agencies":"Department of War, NASA, CIA, FBI, Department of Energy, Department of State, Executive Office of the President, and — from the sixth release — a local law-enforcement agency in Colorado; ODNI in a coordinating role","corpus_position":"Tracked as the Age of Aquarius §IX disclosure curve's institutional acceleration; registered without enlistment — no released file counts for the framework, no debunking counts against it","database":"Searchable portal database of 447 files across the six releases (as captured September 18, 2026), filterable by agency, release, incident date, location, and file type","distinguished_from":"AARO (the Pentagon's standing analysis office, which adjudicates cases; PURSUE releases records), FOIA-era piecemeal declassification, and the congressional-hearing track of 2023–2024","launched":"First tranche published May 8, 2026 at war.gov/UFO; legal analysis dates the task force's stand-up to May 1, 2026","official_name":"Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE)","ordered_by":"Presidential directive of February 19, 2026 (no numbered executive order has been published)","releases_to_date":"Six (May 8, May 22, June 12, July 10, August 7, September 18, 2026); further releases announced as in work","status_in_framework":"Documented government program, carried at documentary strength; explicitly not the official, verified disclosure event the framework's reception posture names as its single exception","statutory_context":"50 U.S.C. § 3373b — the authorized-disclosure channel and anti-reprisal protections enacted in the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act (December 2022)","type":"United States government declassification and public-release program for unresolved records on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","see_also":[{"description":"The field within which the UAP-records question sits; PURSUE is its 2026 institutional development.","path":"wiki/ufology","title":"Ufology"},{"description":"The contested secrecy claim PURSUE's public-by-default archive bears on from the official side.","path":"wiki/military-cover-up-of-exobiology","title":"Military cover-up of exobiology"},{"description":"The canon's model of what official contact would actually look like — the standard against which PURSUE is not that event.","path":"wiki/embassy","title":"Embassy"},{"description":"The other recent U.S. institutional development the corpus reads under the same reception posture.","path":"wiki/us-space-force","title":"US Space Force"},{"description":"The framework's identification of who was historically here — resting on the canon's reports, not on any PURSUE file.","path":"wiki/elohim","title":"Elohim"}],"timeline":["age-of-aquarius"]} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/pursue/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/pursue/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "ufology", "title": "Ufology", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/ufology/" },{"slug": "military-cover-up-of-exobiology", "title": "Military cover-up of exobiology", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/military-cover-up-of-exobiology/" },{"slug": "embassy", "title": "Embassy", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/embassy/" },{"slug": "us-space-force", "title": "US Space Force", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/us-space-force/" },{"slug": "elohim", "title": "Elohim", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/elohim/" }] } }