Someone sent you a strange document, or a strange claim, and you want to know what's actually real. This page is the whole case, compressed: what was released, what survives scrutiny, what doesn't, and the four documents worth your next five minutes.
Between May and August 2026, the U.S. government declassified 375 files under a program called PURSUE, published in five batches on the Department of War's own website. They span 1944 to 2026 and eight agencies. This site read all of it, every document end-to-end, rated every record, and published the analysis with the primary sources one click away. Nothing here relies on testimony about testimony; if a page can't cite a released file, it says so.
First, the flagship case. In October 2023, six federal law enforcement agents in three independent teams watched orange orbs appear near a sensitive national security site, launch clusters of red orbs, and vanish, at least five times. The government investigated for two and a half years, ruled out aircraft exhaust, drones, foreign systems, and weather, attributed sixty percent to military flares, and then wrote this about the rest:
The whole case, witness narratives and skeptic's reading included, is on the case file.
Second, the paper trail of the machine. Whatever the phenomena are, the release proves the government has taken them seriously, and managed public knowledge of them, for nearly eighty years. The earliest instruction is from November 1948: Air Materiel Command's own study found a residue of sightings it could not explain and said in the same file that it was “not considered advisable to present to the press information on those objects which we cannot yet identify.” After that come a TOP SECRET 1949 nuclear-lab file with Edward Teller's name in it, a 1953 CIA panel recommending public debunking, and a documented 1980s disinformation campaign against an American citizen. That same reach shows in the phenomena themselves over the nuclear complex, from the 1949 green fireballs to the 2015 Pantex incident, where the weapons plant's own radar tracked an unidentified object and its security force gave chase, to triangular objects over the Colorado Springs command complex in 2022 and 2023. The institutional story is the best-evidenced thing in the entire record, and it's told in The System and The Official Studies.
Third, the constant orb. Reported shapes come and go by era, discs in the forties, tic-tacs in the teens, but one form appears in every decade of the record, from the WWII night-phenomena file to 1949's green fireballs to the modern infrared sensor clips: the luminous orb. That continuity is measurable in the government's own files, and it's charted on Morphology.
No bodies, no craft, no physical evidence, and no document that claims otherwise. Most of these records are mundane; 25 were rated contested by this site's own analysis and are kept on display precisely so you can check the reasoning. The flagship case still rests on trained eyes rather than instruments, and where instruments do exist the best of them is seventy years old. The honest verdict of the whole investigation is one sentence: the machine is real, the cargo is undetermined. The full before-and-after — every claim moved from suspicion to documented fact, with its primary source — is laid out on Before & After PURSUE.