What does PURSUE stand for?
Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. It is the framework established under Presidential Order 14188 for the systematic declassification of U.S. government records relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
Why was the first release on May 8, 2026?
May 8 is the anniversary of the 1948 release of the Project Sign "Estimate of the Situation," the first formal U.S. military UAP assessment. The Department of War selected the date to mark the historical continuity from Sign through Grudge, Blue Book, AATIP, the UAP Task Force, and AARO.
What did the May 22, 2026 second tranche add?
The second tranche added 64 records: 51 sensor videos and 7 mission-audio excerpts curated by AARO in response to a March 6, 2026 request from eight U.S. House members for potentially UAP-related material (AARO notes many of these lack a substantiated chain of custody), plus 6 PDFs — the 116-page Sandia Base 1948–50 general correspondence, a CIA 1973 Intelligence Information Report on Soviet systems referencing an unidentified aerial phenomenon, NASA Mercury and Apollo crew audio, two Department of Energy letters (James Tuck's 1970 correspondence and the 1986 Pajarito Astronomers invitation), and the redacted Pantex Plant Unidentified Object Incident Report.
What did the October 23, 2026 seventh tranche add?
The seventh tranche added 28 documents and no video. Nine are reports from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies to the Defense Intelligence Agency under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program: a December 2008 project management plan, a Project Capella data warehouse proposal, a set of Mutual UFO Network papers, monthly progress reports from 2009, an April 2010 field report on a Utah ranch, and a November 2010 self-assessment. Fourteen are sighting files from 1949 to 1957, including four from Catalina Island, California, a 1952 report from Sassari, Italy, and a 1953 radar return off Morocco. The tranche also includes an AARO memorandum and an FBI interview form about a triangular object reported by federal agents in June 2026, the 1954 service record of Colonel Howard M. McCoy, and two files on recovering space debris from 1962 to 1964.
What did the September 18, 2026 sixth tranche add?
The sixth tranche added 28 records. Forty-four of them are from the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), the Defense Intelligence Agency contract run by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies from 2008: its Statement of Objectives, solicitation and five contract modifications, and 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents on topics from metamaterials and high-energy lasers to warp drives and negative-mass propulsion, which the government describes as literature reviews rather than original research. The historical material is the Air Force's Project Blue Book file on the 1952 Tremonton film, including a December 1952 pillow-balloon review and the later assessment that the objects were probably seabirds, the digitised film itself, the photographer Delbert Newhouse's Navy service record, a Director of Intelligence flying-discs file from late 1952, and Captain Edward Ruppelt's March 1952 presentation on the reorganised Air Force investigation as audio and transcript. At the modern end it adds the archive's first local-law-enforcement records (four Colorado officers' phone videos and their transcripts, 2023–2024), four mission reports with infrared stills and video from Iraq and the Middle East, and six Indo-Pacific sensor clips from 2023.
What did the August 7, 2026 fifth tranche add?
The fifth tranche added 41 records and widened the archive past the Pentagon for the first time, adding Department of State and Executive Office of the President files. Its centrepiece is the reported fall of a large metal sphere at Conde, in Bahia, Brazil, in November 1963: a Rio de Janeiro radio broadcast picked up by the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a National Aeronautics and Space Council file, and two U.S. Embassy cables that ended with the scientific attaché in Salvador calling the story a fabrication and Brazil's Ministry of Aeronautics denying it outright. The historical material also includes the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center's 1953 analysis of the Montana (1950) and Utah (1952) films, a January 1947 Department of War review of the Scandinavian "ghost rockets", Air Materiel Command correspondence on Project Sign, and two CIA files on a November 1964 radar contact near Puerto Rico. At the modern end it adds a September 2021 AC-130 gunship encounter over the Gulf of Oman — six clips and a written intelligence report, recorded on a phone because the aircraft's own video recorder had failed — nine further sensor videos, and seventeen FBI records pairing agents' interview write-ups with digital renderings the Bureau drew from those interviews in 2026.
What did the July 10, 2026 fourth tranche add?
The fourth tranche added 40 records, and it is the most historical of the four. The centrepiece is the founding-era paperwork: the 1948 Project Sign progress report with its catalogue of 100 sightings, two Air Materiel Command analyses of flying object incidents from 1948 and 1949, the Department of the Air Force committee convened in 1966–67 to review Project Blue Book, 220 pages of Blue Book correspondence, and a 1949 conference at Los Alamos where Manhattan Project physicists — Edward Teller and the meteor specialist Lincoln LaPaz among them — debated the green fireballs without agreeing on a cause. It also adds nineteen unresolved sensor videos from CENTCOM, INDOPACOM and NORTHCOM, three Navy Range Fouler debriefs published alongside the videos they describe, three STS-80 shuttle photographs from 1996, the Apollo 14 and Apollo 17 crew debriefing tapes, a 2015 Pantex Plant incident report, and CIA and FBI correspondence.
Are these all new disclosures?
No — some of the documents (notably the FBI 62-HQ-83894 sections) had been partially released through earlier FOIA productions over the decades. PURSUE is the first time the complete file series has been released together with internal cross-references intact, alongside previously withheld AARO and Department of War material.
How can I verify a specific case?
Every case file on Spooky Valley links to the source document at aaro.mil or the relevant agency archive. Case pages cite the document number and page reference (e.g., D196/P40) so you can locate the original record.
What's still classified?
The PURSUE release covers documents the agencies have determined no longer require classification. Material relating to active intelligence sources, ongoing operations, and certain Special Access Programs remains withheld. AARO continues to receive new reports under the standing UAP reporting framework.