Between May 8 and September 18, 2026, the Department of War published six tranches of records under PURSUE, its program for declassifying material on unidentified anomalous phenomena. The total now stands at 450. Each release has had its own briefing on this site, and each has been covered as news: a clip here, a memo there. This is a first attempt to add the whole thing up.
The source is the government’s own. War.gov publishes a manifest, a spreadsheet called uap-data.csv, that drives its UFO page. It has one row per record, with columns for release date, agency, file type, incident date, location, a redaction flag, a “Featured” flag, and a paragraph-length summary the government wrote for each item. Everything below was counted from that file as it stood on September 27. The structural counts (agency, type, release, redaction) are exact, because they come from fixed columns. The counts about content are text matches run against the government’s summaries, so they are approximate. A summary that mentions radar without using the word would be missed, and a summary that uses the word in passing would be caught. Where a figure comes from that kind of search, it is said so.
Six releases, uneven in size
The first tranche was by far the largest, and the program has not kept a steady rhythm since.
| Release | Date | Records |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | May 8 | 158 |
| 02 | May 22 | 64 |
| 03 | June 12 | 72 |
| 04 | July 10 | 40 |
| 05 | August 7 | 41 |
| 06 | September 18 | 75 |
Of the 450 records, 270 are PDFs (six of them tagged with a stray trailing space in the type column, a small sign of a spreadsheet filled in by hand), 134 are videos, 30 are still images and 16 are audio files. The Department of War itself supplied 257 records. The FBI supplied 104, NASA 40 and the CIA 23. The State Department has 9, local police 8, the Department of Energy 5, and four other offices one each. War.gov gathers every item at war.gov/UFO; this site indexes them in the disclosure archive and on the PURSUE page.
Mostly recent
The public image of a UFO file is yellowed paper from 1952. The archive does not look like that.
| Decade of incident or document | Records |
|---|---|
| 1940s | 14 |
| 1950s | 30 |
| 1960s | 32 |
| 1970s | 17 |
| 1980s | 2 |
| 1990s | 7 |
| 2000s | 12 |
| 2010s | 58 |
| 2020s | 243 |
| No usable date | 35 |
Two hundred and forty-three records, 54 percent, date from the 2020s. Add the 2010s and the share rises to two-thirds. The whole period from 1970 to 2009 accounts for 38 records, and the 1980s for two. The dates here come from the manifest’s incident-date column, or from the year in the record’s title where that column is blank or reads “N/A”. A date range counts under its first year, and a 2010 reference paper counts as 2010 even if it discusses older events. The 35 rows left over have no year in either place; 18 of them are parts of the FBI’s flying-disc file from the first release.
The skew is easy to explain. Most modern records are sensor clips and mission reports that AARO, the Pentagon’s UAP office, has been collecting since 2022. The historical records had to be found, reviewed and cleared one file at a time. What it means for a reader is that PURSUE is mainly a window onto recent military reporting, with a smaller, older archive attached.
134 videos, most of them short
The videos are what most people come for, and the manifest allows them to be measured. One hundred and thirteen of the 134 have a running time stated in their summaries, either in the opening sentence (“consisting of 43 seconds of video footage”) or on a “Video Duration” line above the shot list AARO attaches (110 summaries carry that “Video Description” heading). Among those 113, the median is 94 seconds, about a minute and a half. Forty-six run under a minute and 26 under 30 seconds. The shortest is an eight-second clip from the Gulf of America in 2019; the longest, at 17 minutes 36 seconds, is a clip uploaded to a classified network as “UFOs in formation over Persian Gulf?” Laid end to end, the 113 run a little under five hours. The FBI’s “Orbs Over the Pond” video from 2024 is not among them. Its summary mentions 45 minutes, but that is how long the witness says the light hovered over the pond, not the length of the footage, which the summary does not give.
A minute and a half is not much to work with. A typical military infrared clip of that length shows a small contrast blob that the sensor operator keeps roughly centred while the camera zooms and slews. To estimate distance, size or speed, an analyst needs the platform’s own position and motion, the sensor’s pointing angles, and ideally a second sensor looking from somewhere else. In a short clip, an object’s apparent motion is dominated by the motion of the aircraft carrying the camera, a problem AARO illustrated in its own paper on forced perspective and parallax. Seventeen summaries, by text match, warn about compression, autofocus, image processing or sensor artifacts. A short clip without its metadata can show that something was in view. It can rarely show what the thing was doing.
What the summaries say, and what they leave out
The most common sentence in the archive is a disclaimer. By text match, 208 of the 450 summaries, 46 percent, carry some version of it: “All descriptive and estimative language contained in this report reflects the reporter’s subjective interpretation at the time of the event. Such characterizations should not be interpreted as a conclusive indication of the presence or absence of any intrinsic object features or performance characteristics.” In plain words, when a pilot writes that an object “accelerated instantly” or looked “metallic,” the government is repeating what the pilot said, and is not vouching for it.
Against those 208 disclaimers, only about a dozen summaries, on a reading of them, offer something like an identification of what was seen, and most of those are historical. The Air Force’s later judgment that the Tremonton film probably showed seabirds is the best known. The Air Materiel Command’s 1947–48 report, which put “a great many” rounded objects down to weather balloons, is the same kind of answer. Eighteen summaries carry an “AARO Comment.” The word radar appears in 8. Three mention satellites, two of them in AAWSAP technical papers, and none mentions Starlink. Twenty-nine use “orb,” “orbs,” “sphere” or “spherical.”
Eighty-five records are titled “Unresolved UAP Report,” 75 of them videos, and the word is easy to misread. “Unresolved” is a filing status. It means AARO has not closed the case, usually because the data are too thin to test any explanation, conventional or otherwise. “Unexplained” would imply that explanations were tested and failed, and the summaries almost never say that. A clip can be unresolved because it is strange, or because it is 90 seconds of a pale dot with no range data, and the manifest does not distinguish the two.
Paperwork, redactions and geography
Forty-four records, 9.8 percent of the archive, belong to one program: the Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2008 contract with Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, known as AAWSAP. Seven are contract documents and 37 are reference papers on topics from metallic glass to wormholes. All arrived in Release 06. They matter to the history of the modern UAP story, but none is a sighting.
The FBI’s 104 records are similarly mixed. They include eleven FD-302 interview reports and nineteen digital renderings, drawings the Bureau made recently from witness testimony. The renderings are illustrations of what people said, and carry no more evidential weight than the statements behind them. NASA’s 40 records are mostly astronaut audio, mission transcripts and crew debriefings, with a handful of Apollo photographs and frames from the STS-80 shuttle mission.
Two hundred and seventy-one records, 60 percent, are flagged as redacted. The flag does not say how much is blacked out.
Geographically, 82 records are placed in the Middle East or Central Command’s area: Iraq, Syria, the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. That reflects where American aircraft with good sensors have been flying for the past decade. Another 56 are located only as “Western United States” (seven of them misspelled “Westen”), a label that tells a reader almost nothing and keeps the sites involved out of the record.
What war.gov chose to highlight
The manifest has a “Featured” column, and war.gov set it for exactly 10 records, all in Release 06. Two are the Tremonton film and its Blue Book file, two are Captain Edward Ruppelt’s 1952 briefing and its transcript, four are AAWSAP documents, and two are Colorado police footage from 2023. The first five releases, including every modern military clip, carry no Featured flag at all. The flag may simply be a new feature of the website. Even so, the government’s chosen showcase leans heavily on history and paperwork, and includes none of its own recent military sensor video.
What the archive is good for
As evidence that some object is exotic, the 450 records are weak. There is little instrument data: eight summaries mention radar, few clips come with range or platform data, and the median clip runs about a minute and a half. A great deal of the archive is administrative, and much of what is not is a pilot’s description followed by the government’s reminder that it is only a description.
As a record of how the United States has handled the subject, it is much better, and the substance sits in the older material. The Project Sign progress report of 1948 shows the first official program trying to sort 100 sightings. The Navy’s 1953 analysis of the Montana and Utah films is real measurement work on real footage. Ruppelt’s 1952 briefing sets out the case for instrumented observation that AARO is still making. The FBI’s 1947 flying-disc files from the first release, and the Oak Ridge reports among them, show how a national security agency processed a public wave of sightings in real time. Those documents are long, dated, signed and in context, which is more than most of the 2020s clips offer.
Sources
- U.S. Department of War, UFO and UAP records portal: https://www.war.gov/UFO
- U.S. Department of War, PURSUE records manifest (uap-data.csv), retrieved September 27, 2026: https://www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-data.csv
- Spooky Valley briefings on Releases 01 through 06, linked in the table above