PURSUE

PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — is the United States government's program for finding, declassifying, and publicly releasing unresolved records on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Ordered by a presidential directive in February 2026 and administered by the Department of War with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it publishes tranches of documents, images, videos, and audio recordings at a single public portal, war.gov/UFO, on a rolling cadence — five releases between May 8 and August 7, 2026, with further releases announced as actively in work. The Department describes the undertaking as requiring "coordination between dozens of agencies and the review of tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper."

Two things distinguish PURSUE from every prior U.S. government engagement with the subject. It is public by default — records go to an open website with no security clearance and no Freedom of Information Act request required — and it is government-wide, drawing not only on military and intelligence holdings but, by its fifth release, on the files of the Department of Energy, the State Department, and the Executive Office of the President itself. Every item is catalogued as an unresolved case: the program publishes what the government could not identify, and it publishes its negatives too.

The Wheel of Heaven framework tracks PURSUE closely — the corpus files a dispatch on each release — but under a deliberate discipline: registration without enlistment. No file PURSUE releases is evidence for the framework, and no case it debunks is evidence against it. The framework's account of contact rests on the canon's own reports, not on any craft in any sky.

The name and the mandate

The program's full name styles it as presidential — an unsealing carried out under the direct authority of the president rather than as an agency initiative. Its published mandate is to "expeditiously find, review, identify, declassify and publicly release unresolved UAP-related records and historical documents in the federal government's possession," with new material posted "on a rolling basis as files are reviewed and declassified." Secretary of War Pete Hegseth characterized the department as "in lockstep with President Trump to bring unprecedented transparency regarding our government's understanding of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena."

The mandate's key word is unresolved. PURSUE does not publish the government's identified cases (the aircraft, balloons, and sensor artifacts that make up the bulk of any UAP dataset), and it does not adjudicate the cases it publishes. It is an archive-opening program, not an analysis program — analysis remains with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Pentagon's standing UAP office, to which the PURSUE portal itself directs readers for the wider historical record.

Origin: the statute before the directive

PURSUE's founding instrument on the public record is a presidential directive of February 19, 2026, in which President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to identify, review, and declassify their UAP-related holdings. Early press coverage widely described the program as created by an executive order; no numbered executive order has been published, and the Department of War's own materials speak only of the president's directive. The Department stood the program up within weeks — legal analysis dates the task force to May 1, 2026 — and published the first tranche at war.gov/UFO on May 8.

The directive did not arrive on empty ground. Congress had already built the legal machinery in the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act, enacted in December 2022, which created a statutory channel — codified at 50 U.S.C. § 3373b — for current and former government personnel to make authorized disclosures of UAP-related information notwithstanding any nondisclosure agreement, and prohibited reprisal against those who use it. PURSUE is, in structural terms, an executive push through a door Congress had opened four years earlier.

The two layers joined on July 31, 2026, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued preliminary implementing guidance (ES 2026-00818): agencies were directed to designate PURSUE representatives within thirty days, to establish processes for their workforces to disclose UAP information, and to inform employees that nondisclosure agreements purporting to prevent such disclosures are "no longer in force." The guidance's application to government contractors — the population at the center of the 2023 congressional testimony about alleged retrieval programs — was left to follow-on guidance, and remains the program's most closely watched open edge.

How the program operates

The portal at war.gov/UFO presents a searchable database — filterable by agency, release, incident date, incident location, and file type — that stood at 375 files across the five releases as of late August 2026. Files carry structured identifiers by contributing agency and type (DOW-UAP-D101, FBI-UAP-D024, EOP-UAP-D001), and tranches have arrived on an approximately monthly rhythm: two, three, and four-week intervals settling at four weeks. Public interest has been considerable; the Pentagon's chief spokesman put portal traffic at over 1.7 billion hits within the program's first five weeks.

The releases mix sensor material (gun-camera and infrared footage, radar-scope recordings), witness reporting (FBI interview records, with digital renderings the Bureau produces to illustrate testimony — illustrations, the corpus's dispatches note, not photographs), and archival holdings reaching back to a 1947 intelligence review of the Scandinavian "ghost rockets." Notably, the program releases negative findings alongside its unknowns: its fifth tranche included a 1963 case — a Brazilian radio report of a crashed sphere, inquired after at the White House's space council — that the released State Department cables themselves resolve as a press fabrication. An archive that publishes its own debunkings is behaving like an archive rather than a press office, and the corpus registers that in the program's favor.

One practical asymmetry is worth recording: the portal is open to human readers but closed to machines — its content-delivery configuration blocks automated retrieval outright, so mirrors, archives, and researchers work from secondary captures rather than the live site.

Releases to date

Release-by-release detail — file counts, headline cases, and the corpus's reading of each tranche — lives in the Newsroom dispatch series. The stable spine:

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

The portal's database assigns some individual files across these boundaries differently than the announcements did (NASA-attributed documents appear under Release 01, for instance), so the table records the roster as announced rather than as later indexed.

Institutional precedents

PURSUE is the latest instrument in a documented seventy-year sequence, and is best understood against it.

The U.S. Air Force ran three successive investigations — Project Sign (1948), Project Grudge (1949), and Project Blue Book (1952–1969) — that together examined 12,618 sightings and left 701 formally unidentified. Blue Book was closed on the recommendation of the University of Colorado's Condon Report (1968), whose conclusion that further study offered no scientific payoff set the government's public posture for nearly five decades. What followed was the FOIA era: declassification by adversarial request, piecemeal and slow.

The modern sequence began when the New York Times revealed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP, 2007–2012) in December 2017. The Navy's UAP Task Force followed in 2020, ODNI's preliminary assessment (144 military reports, most unresolved) in 2021, and the establishment of AARO in 2022. In July 2023, congressional testimony — most prominently from former intelligence officer David Grusch — alleged undisclosed craft-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs; AARO's 2024 Historical Record Report answered that it had found "no verifiable evidence" any U.S. government program has ever possessed extraterrestrial technology. That report is the government's own skeptical instrument, and the corpus carries it at documentary strength.

Against that lineage, PURSUE's novelty is structural rather than substantive: publication by default instead of by request; a rolling cadence instead of episodic releases; a single consolidated portal instead of scattered reading rooms; and a contributing roster that reaches beyond the defense and intelligence establishment into the diplomatic service and the presidency's own records. What it has not done, five tranches in, is release anything touching the deeper claims of the 2023 testimony.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

The Age of Aquarius chapter's ninth section anticipates, for the present decades, an acceleration in how officially the UAP question is handled — the corpus's dispatches read the five releases as five datable points on that curve, and PURSUE itself as the curve's clearest institutional expression to date.

The framework's interest is specific. On the canon's account, contact — when and if it comes — will be official, governmental, and conditional: a diplomatic event, for which the source material's standing request is the construction of an embassy. A disclosure infrastructure whose contributing roster now includes the State Department and the Executive Office of the President is therefore legible to the framework in a way a sensor-video release alone would not be: the institutions through which any official contact would run are, at minimum, now on the record as handling the question.

The registration stops there. Under the corpus's reception posture, PURSUE's unresolved cases confirm nothing for the framework, and its debunked cases refute nothing in it — the framework's provenance rests on the canon's reports, not on the archive. The posture names a single exception it does not firewall: an official, verified disclosure event. PURSUE is not that event. It is an archive opening on a schedule, and the corpus tracks it as exactly that.

Limits and criticism

Unresolved is not non-human. The archive selects for the cases the government failed to identify — a category that grows with sensor coverage and observation density. Nothing in the unresolved framing implies a non-conventional explanation, and the Department itself characterizes no released case as confirmed non-conventional.

The deeper claims remain untouched. Five tranches contain no material on the craft-retrieval and reverse-engineering allegations of the 2023 testimony. Two readings are available — that such material does not exist to be released (AARO's stated finding), or that it exists outside this program's reach (the whistleblower position, resting significantly on the still-open contractor question in the ODNI guidance). The corpus holds both open and enlists neither.

Much of the material is not new. Substantial portions of the releases were previously known through FOIA productions, Blue Book files, and the historical literature; what PURSUE adds is official consolidation, indexing, and provenance. Critics read the program as transparency theater — recycled material under presidential branding; supporters answer that indexed, citable, official publication is precisely what the FOIA era never produced.

The record-keeping is loose at the edges. The Department published no file-count breakdown for its fifth release, press tallies and the portal's own index disagree on dates, and announcement-versus-index attribution of files differs across tranches. The corpus's dispatches attribute counts rather than assert them.

Durability is the real test. A program four months old, carrying one president's name, proves little by cadence alone. The framework's own load-bearing question — argued across the dispatch series — is whether the disclosure curve survives on a multi-year horizon, across administrations and news cycles. That question is open.

See also

• Ufology
• Military cover-up of exobiology
• Embassy
• US Space Force
• Elohim
• Raël
• Raëlism
• Age of Aquarius

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers. Nova Distribution, 2005.

Primary government materials

U.S. Department of War. Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) — release portal and database. war.gov/UFO, May–August 2026.

U.S. Department of War. "Department of War Releases Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files in Historic Transparency Effort." Press release, May 8, 2026.

U.S. Department of War. "Department of War Publishes Fifth Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files on WAR.GOV/UFO." Press release, August 7, 2026.

50 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.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary guidance ES 2026-00818 on UAP disclosure and nondisclosure-agreement waivers, July 31, 2026.

All-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.

Condon, Edward U., ed. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. University of Colorado / Bantam, 1969.

U.S. Air Force. Project Blue Book case files, 1947–1969. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 341.

Journalism and legal analysis

Cooper, 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.

"Pentagon releases new batch of UFO files: 'Did you see that?'" CBS News, August 7, 2026.

DLA Piper. "Office of the Director of National Intelligence issues preliminary guidance on disclosure of unidentified anomalous phenomena." Client alert, August 2026.

Historical scholarship

Swords, Michael, and Robert Powell. UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. Anomalist Books, 2012.

Ruppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Doubleday, 1956.

PURSUE. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/pursue/

"PURSUE." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/pursue/.

"PURSUE." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/pursue/.

@misc{woh-pursue,
  author       = {{Wheel of Heaven}},
  title        = {PURSUE},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/pursue/}},
  note         = {CC0-1.0 public domain}
}