The question
I was eight years old when my uncle told me about Roswell in a kitchen in northern Maine. He said the words like he believed them and he said them like he didn't. I remember the linoleum, the smell of cigarette smoke in the curtain over the sink, the sound of a Ford F-150 idling in the dooryard. I remember asking what flying saucers were and getting back an answer that was half a story and half a shrug.
I am thirty-eight now. The question never closed. It sat in the background of every other thing I did. Then on May 8, 2026, the Department of War unsealed the file and the question had a place to live.
Why this archive exists
The PURSUE release dumped 162 records into the public domain. The same day, war.gov published a full OCR copy of FBI 62-HQ-83894, the flying discs case file from 1944 to 1973. Both went up in pieces, across separate file trees, under separate URLs, with separate metadata schemas. The cable news cycle wrote four headlines and moved on. The interesting cases were not the headlines.
This site exists to be a single place where every page is reachable from every other page, every claim links back to the document that grounds it, and the four cases that survived AARO's evidentiary filter sit next to the institutional correspondence that frames them. No opinions in the metadata. No verdicts on top of the files. The files do the work. The archive just gets out of the way.
Methodology
Source rules are simple. Every case page cites the page it came from.
The original PDF at war.gov is one click from any dossier. The OCR'd
transcripts under content/archive/ are the same
transcripts war.gov is serving. Frontmatter on every file carries a
source.officialUrl, a source.releaseDate,
a build-injected archiveCommit, and a
retrievedDate.
Redactions are rendered as crisp solid bars inline, the way the file was released. Classification stamps are reproduced as the file reproduces them, not interpreted. Confidence labels on cross-references are conservative: a relationship is marked high only when both files name each other or when a third-party document ties them together by date and location.
The verification chain runs in one direction. From any case dossier you can reach the source paragraph in the underlying file. From any claim you can reach the file. From the file you can reach the original war.gov PDF. The site does not cite the site. It cites backwards to the file every time.
The PURSUE Release 01 inventory mirrors AARO's metadata exactly. Where AARO and the news cycle disagreed about which cases mattered, this archive sides with the metadata. The FBI file was mined in passes between May 8 and May 10, 2026. The cases that survived the filter survived because the evidentiary structure warranted a second look, not because anyone was hiding aliens.
What the site does not do
- It does not edit the source files.
- It does not redact further than the government redacted.
- It does not assign verdicts.
- It does not place memo correspondence on the map. Only cases with coordinates land there.
- It does not graceful-degrade when a field is missing. A missing required field fails the build.
Sourcing
US government records, including FBI files, AARO documents, State Department cables, and war.gov-hosted PDFs, are in the public domain in the United States. Case writeups and analysis on this site are released under CC BY 4.0. Quote freely. Link back when you do.
The source archive is at github.com/wretcher207/the-ufo-files. Original PDFs and videos live at war.gov/UFO.