What's changed, and when

Entries are left as they were published

This is a log, so each entry keeps the numbers that were correct on its own date and is not retrofitted. Two things changed after August 2026 and affect how the older entries should be read. First, cumulative totals move with every release; the current figure is always the official count at war.gov/ufo, which now stands at 375 files. Second, and more substantively, this site no longer breaks that figure down by type. Several records catalogued as audio ship as video, and several catalogued as images ship as PDF, so the document / image / video / audio splits quoted in the entries below do not survive contact with the files. They are kept for the record, not as current fact. The reasoning is set out on Reading the Artifacts.

Fifth tranche

The fifth PURSUE release, integrated

The Department of War's fifth release is folded in. It is the most historically consequential tranche so far, and it changes the shape of two things: where the institutional record begins, and how long the western U.S. case has been running.

The founding file. DOW-UAP-D100 is 245 pages of Project Sign correspondence. Headquarters tells Air Materiel Command in November 1948 that “the conclusion appears inescapable that some type of flying object has been observed,” and warns that “silence on our part will not long be acceptable.” AMC replies having studied roughly 180 incidents. It builds the first official morphology in the record — flat discs, cigars, spheres, and “balls of light with no apparent form attached” — consults Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir, arranges a psychological study to test hallucination and hoax, examines the extraterrestrial hypothesis by name and finds support “completely lacking,” and plots incident frequency against the approach curves of Mercury, Venus and Mars. It concludes the discs, cigars and balls of light are “not of domestic origin.” Then it advises telling the press nothing, and if pressed, leading with weather balloons and astral bodies. That instruction is now the earliest documented instance of the pattern The System describes, five years before the Robertson Panel.

And it is not only an American reflex. Released in the same tranche, a January 1947 War Department review of the Scandinavian “ghost rockets” records the Swedish Defence Staff privately blaming Soviet missile tests while its public statements shifted to “celestial origin” — a reversal the Americans attribute to fear of diplomatic repercussions. Two governments, eighteen months apart, converging on the same posture. Project Sign later requested that Swedish file by name, a link the government's own metadata does not make.

965 g, calculated in 1953. The Naval Photographic Interpretation Center measured the Great Falls and Tremonton films frame by frame and ruled out birds, aircraft and balloons on the computed figures, four months after the CIA's Robertson Panel attributed those same two films to birds and reflections. It also names every assumption its numbers rest on, which is why it now anchors The Physics.

The western case did not end in 2023. Four FBI interviews dated 2026 place federal personnel back in the same landscape, and the posture has changed: an agent is cued by a radio-frequency detection to observe on a specific bearing and finds two objects there on a thermal optic within minutes. The next night the same agent films a passing Black Hawk purely to establish a scale reference. Two other witnesses log five hours of red lights, one apparently six feet off the ground, none acquirable on thermal, after which one man's mechanical watch is found 25 minutes fast while every digital clock present agrees. The case file is now a multi-year one.

The triangle stops being a footnote. Five FBI interviews spanning 2002 to 2023, four with commissioned renderings, plus a 1964 Navy radar-and-visual case describing a delta-shaped object off Puerto Rico. Two unconnected Colorado Springs witnesses, interviewed nine months apart, independently report the same refractive haze and the same bank that changes no course. On The Atlas the triangle column goes from three records to thirteen.

A new hypothesis-level pattern. The Bureau commissioned two renderings of the same 2026 objects, one as the naked eye saw them and one through night optics, and published them together: dashes in the first, haloed circles in the second. The Hypotheses now carries a third explanandum for it, and the Survey gained on all four of its predictions while the Mirror gained mechanism evidence and lost distinctiveness.

And the release documents its own gaps. Three FBI records were prepared, given release identifiers, and then not published: the VIRIN sequence skips exactly three slots where exactly three record numbers are missing. Logged, with the other bookkeeping anomalies, on Behaviors.

Standout Cases moves from 28 to 38, Contested from 22 to 25, and the corpus from 216 analysed documents to 241. Counts on this site now follow the official figure published at war.gov/ufo and no longer break it down by type, because the government's own categories do not survive contact: several records catalogued as audio ship as video, and several catalogued as images ship as PDF.

Fourth tranche

The fourth PURSUE release, integrated

The Department of War's fourth release is folded in: 40 new files, bringing the corpus to 334, comprising 189 documents, 27 images, 103 videos, and 15 audio records. The headline additions reach back to the origins of the phenomenon and forward to its present. Tranche 4 supplies the verbatim transcript of the 16 February 1949 Los Alamos conference, with Teller, Bradbury, Reines, and LaPaz debating the green fireballs over the nuclear complex, and the full Pantex Plant incident report from 2015, the primary source behind the image already in the collection. It fills in the spine of official US study, Project Sign (1948), the Air Intelligence "Analysis of Flying Object Incidents" (1948 and 1949), Blue Book correspondence, and the 1966 committee that spawned the Condon report, and adds three Navy Range Fouler reports from the U.S. East Coast and Atlantic (2019 to 2020) plus three STS-80 shuttle photographs (1996). Three of the new documents, the Los Alamos transcript, the Pantex report, and the 2019 Range Fouler, are strong enough to join The Standout Cases, now 28. The full analysis is in the PURSUE Corpus and the Evidence Database.

Superseded. Figures as published on 11 July 2026; see the note at the head of this log. Current counts are in the 10 August entry.

Shareability

Every record gets a face: share pages, quote cards, and the five-minute version

Every one of the 199 corpus records now has its own share page with its own social-preview card, built from the document's most notable quote, so linking a single memo into a feed shows that memo, not a generic banner. The "copy link" button on every corpus card now hands out these share links. Records with quotable material also offer a Quote card download: the verbatim quote rendered as a shareable image, generated in your browser. The Verdict Engine's results can be downloaded as an image card too. And for whoever those shares bring in, The Five-Minute Version is a new front door: what was released, the three things that survive scrutiny, what doesn't, and the three documents to read first.

Major update

The flagship case gets its page, the record becomes addressable, and you can render your own verdict

Three new pages. Case File: The Western U.S. Event assembles the release's strongest story end-to-end: the four sightings, the five agent narratives, AARO's hypothesis ladder with its 60/40 split, the skeptic's reading, and all 18 documents. Render Your Verdict puts ten exhibits in front of you, sensor reports, sworn witnesses, Cold War files, official assessments, and scores your reading against the site's analysis and the classic UAP frameworks, entirely in your browser. Reading the Artifacts teaches document forensics: the 24 FBI photo files stamped Dec 31 1999 by unset camera clocks, scanner generations, analyst annotations, and what each artifact certifies. The infrastructure grew too: every one of the 199 corpus records now has a permanent link and a copy-link button, a sitewide search box lives in the navigation, flagship pages carry their own social-preview cards, and a full consistency pass corrected stale counts and naming across the site.

Reconciliation & new features

Official counts locked, the audio record surfaced, and the corpus becomes a case-file browser

Every count on the site is now reconciled against the official war.gov/ufo database: 294 records, comprising 175 documents, 24 images, 84 videos, and 11 audio recordings. The Video Record now carries the complete audiovisual release, including the Tranche 3 NASA audio: a 1962 Walter Cronkite interview in which astronaut Gordon Cooper discusses UFOs on the record, and two Apollo 16 scientific debriefings (an unreported "flash," and an investigator's off-hand "could be an alien starbase" remark). The Corpus gained a Case / Cluster facet, 19 case-file groupings covering all 199 documents, with a chip on every card that pulls up the rest of its cluster. And the morphology timeline now opens where the record opens, 1944, with a corrected 2020s bar and a new through-line strip: the dominant shape changed era to era, but the luminous orb never left the record.

New tools

The Strong 25 and the full PURSUE Corpus, now explorable

Two new pages built from the PURSUE Master Document Analysis. The Strong 25 presents the steelman case: the twenty-five highest-rated documents, grouped by pattern, with every field of the analysis visible in expandable cards. The PURSUE Corpus opens the full 199-document archive, filterable by agency, evidence quality rating, and tranche, searchable across all nineteen analysis fields, with a second tab that embeds the complete working spreadsheet in a sortable, paginated grid. The nav Evidence menu was updated to surface both pages sitewide.

Full re-analysis

The whole corpus re-read, and the findings folded back in

Every document across all three tranches was read end-to-end against the source files, and several refinements followed. The Anomaly Record gained a new rigid-appendage signature, a fixed probe, pole, or spindle that recurs on otherwise simple bodies across four independent reports, and its modern Department of War file numbers (D7, D23, D25, D27, D28, D33) were reconciled to match the released filenames, correcting several mislabeled incidents and their locations. The System's "machinery of explanation" is now anchored in primary text: the 1953 CIA Robertson Panel's debunking-and-surveillance recommendation, the Agency's subsequent monitoring posture, and the FBI's filing of civilian UFO groups under Internal Security. The Nuclear Proximity Map notes the Cold War symmetry, the same weapons-range association turns up at the Soviet Union's own Sary Shagan range in CIA reporting, where US reporting bias cannot account for it. And the Continuity Timeline now scrolls vertically, so the Places and Media lanes are finally reachable, with its banner collapsed so the timeline itself leads.

Third tranche

The third PURSUE release, integrated

The Department of War's third release is folded in: 72 new files, bringing the corpus to 294. The headline additions deepen the flagship Western U.S. “orbs launching orbs” case, AARO's own case analysis (which leaves roughly 40 percent of the reported phenomena unresolved), five first-person narratives from the federal agents who witnessed it, and ten FBI reconstructions of the event now in the Archive. The release also adds a large historical corpus: the 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, the CIA's U-2 and OXCART reconnaissance history, NASA's Gemini astronaut debriefings, and Cold War sighting reports from inside the USSR. The Archive gained twelve official reconstructions; the video catalogue update follows.

Accuracy

Every claim checked against the PURSUE record

A full fact-check against the source documents. The Syria / PR051 entry was recalibrated to reflect only what the released record supports, a video the submitting command titled "Syrian UAP — Instant Acceleration", with the speculative "weapons-quality lock" framing and unverifiable attributions removed and its rating moved to Contested. Record counts, date ranges, and document tallies were reconciled and explicitly sourced to war.gov. The principle holds: no conclusions are asserted; the documents speak.

New tools

Sharper filtering on the Database and Anomaly Record

The Database "By Signal Strength" view gained Strong / Circumstantial / Contested filters and a short primer on what those ratings mean. Behaviour filters are now combinable, select two and the list narrows to findings that match both. The Anomaly Record gained colour-coded type icons beside each heading, and the Archive lightbox now opens imagery at full scale.

Second tranche

The second PURSUE release, integrated

The Department of War's second release is folded in — roughly 64 new records, bringing the corpus to 224. Three new agencies appear: the CIA, the Department of Energy, and ODNI. Among the additions are the TOP SECRET Sandia correspondence and a senior intelligence officer's first-person helicopter account. New videos were catalogued, and the timeline and physics pages updated.

Launch

The investigation goes live

The Perimeter of the Secret launches alongside the first PURSUE tranche: 160 declassified records read, cross-referenced, and stress-tested across five independent analyses. The premise is verified — PURSUE, war.gov/ufo, and the tranche releases are real — and the editorial posture is set: present the documents, assert nothing.