After a February 19 directive by the President to the Department of War to release "government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects," the Department of War launched war.gov/UFO on May 8th. There are 162 files, 28 videos, 14 images, 120 PDFs. These were published simultaneously, from the FBI, NASA, the State Department, and U.S. military commands across multiple theaters.

The Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) is a joint effort between the White House, Pentagon, ODNI, NASA, FBI, and the Department of Energy. The Pentagon says more tranches will be released every few weeks, on a rolling basis.

What makes this drop different from prior disclosure efforts is the scope of the material. The videos alone run 41 minutes of infrared footage from active operational theaters: Iraq, Syria, Greece, the Arabian Gulf, the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and North America, spanning from 2013 to 2026. The images include NASA archival photographs from the Apollo 12 and 17 missions, and actual commentary from astronauts who saw "bogeys" in space, and three observations made by astronaut Buzz Aldrin from his lunar mission. The PDFs include hundreds of pages of records from 1947 through 1968, with Cold War reports of mysterious rotating saucers and even alien beings. One 1948 report from the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence is marked Top Secret, and it notes recurring instances of unidentified objects spotted in the skies over Europe. The State Department's files even feature cables from diplomats in Papua New Guinea, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Georgia and Mexico to Washington, detailing UAP incidents in those countries. Some witness reports are from highly esteemed senior officials. In a 1955 case, a group led by then-Sen. Richard Russell, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, reported that they saw two strange objects and a "flying disc aircraft" from the window of a train in the Soviet Union. The group included U.S. Army Lt. Col. E. U. Hathaway.

Out of the 162 files, 108 contain redactions. The Pentagon said information was withheld to "protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP."

We’ve taken the most exciting videos and cataloged them below.

Glossary

PURSUE: Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. The program name.

AARO: All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The Pentagon body that reviewed every file in this release.

DoW-UAP-D + number: The mission report identifier for each case.

PR + number: Pentagon Report. The sequential identifier on the war.gov slideshow.

DVIDS: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. The platform hosting all 28 videos publicly

SWIR: Short-Wave Infrared.

FMV: Full Motion Video. The camera type used in the Syria triple-camera event.

Black hot / White hot: Infrared polarity settings. In "black hot," heat appears dark.