PURSUE

Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — the U.S. Department of War framework, launched May 2026, under which the executive branch publishes unclassified UAP records at war.gov/UFO.

PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — is the U.S. Department of War framework established in spring 2026 to coordinate and publish UAP-relevant records held across the executive branch. The public portal lives at war.gov/UFO. It is the operational rate at which unclassified UAP declassification has actually occurred under the second Trump administration, and the running institutional benchmark against which the Council measures other disclosure architecture.

Origin

The system was announced 8 May 2026 concurrent with the first release of files. The name and rollout were reported by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal in The Debrief, “Trump Releases UFO Files With Rollout of New Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE),” 8 May 2026. PURSUE is an executive-branch declassification and publication mechanism; it is distinct from the legislative UAP Disclosure Act track (see UAPDA) and from the analytical mission of AARO.

Contributing agencies

The named contributors across the first three tranches include the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, NASA, and the Department of Defense, with additional unspecified executive-branch contributors. Records span a date range from 1947 through 2025.

Tranche cadence

PURSUE has published in discrete numbered releases. The cadence through 2026-07-03 is on the record:

Release 1 — 8 May 2026. 162 files (120 documents, 28 videos totaling approximately 41 minutes of footage, 14 still images). Case #00489.
Release 2 — 22 May 2026. 222 files. 14 days after Release 1. Case #00491.
Release 3 — 12 June 2026. 72 files (6 videos, 53 documents, 10 images, 3 audio recordings). 21 days after Release 2. Includes the 5 June 2026 signed statement from AARO Director Dr. Jon Kosloski reporting that 40% of recent UAP cases remain unresolved. Case #00499.

Total across R1–R3: 456 files across 35 institutional days. The 21-day R2→R3 interval is the running soft ceiling the Council uses to score subsequent tranches; a subsequent tranche exceeding 21 days from R3 constitutes cadence drift on the record.

What PURSUE does not do

PURSUE publishes primary material without institutional analysis. The system has not, through Release 3, provided case-level analytical assessments, individual resolution statuses, or per-file provenance chains. Many images in Release 3 are explicitly artistic recreations rather than photographs. The Kosloski 5 June 2026 statement is the closest the program has come to an analytical product; it addresses AARO’s aggregate posture rather than any specific case.

PURSUE is also not the same as the 46-video congressional subpoena effort led by Representative Anna Paulina Luna (Case #00488). The Luna list is a parallel legislative accountability track; PURSUE releases have not been publicly cross-mapped to the Luna named-video list.

How the Council uses PURSUE

The Council treats PURSUE as the running operational baseline for what “disclosure” concretely means under the current administration. Individual tranche contents are worked as case files (marquee items, contributing-agency detail, credibility caveats). Tranche cadence is worked as a separate signal: an accelerating or on-cadence PURSUE is evidence the program is a functioning declassification pipeline; a stalling PURSUE is a bounded, on-record finding that the pipeline has slipped, distinct from any claim that the underlying phenomena are or are not extraterrestrial.

Related entries

AARO

All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — the U.S. Department of Defense entity established in 2022 to detect, identify, and attribute unidentified anomalous phenomena across air, sea, space, and transmedium domains.

UAP

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (formerly Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) — the U.S. government's preferred term for what was historically called UFOs, deliberately broader to include maritime, space, and transmedium objects.

UAP Disclosure Act

UAP Disclosure Act (UAPDA) — the recurring legislative package, originally drafted in the 118th Congress by Senators Schumer, Rounds, and Gillibrand, that would establish federal eminent domain over UAP-related materials, create a nine-member presidentially appointed Review Board, and impose a presumption of disclosure on classified U.S. government UAP records.

ODNI

Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the U.S. cabinet-level office overseeing the 18 components of the Intelligence Community, and the publisher of the 2021 Preliminary Assessment that catalyzed the modern UAP disclosure cycle.

AATIP

Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — the secretive U.S. Department of Defense unit that ran from 2007 to 2012, studying anomalous aerospace events for potential threat implications.

UFO

Unidentified Flying Object — the older, original term for anomalous aerial phenomena, in U.S. government usage from approximately 1952 until replacement by 'UAP' in 2021.