THE PENTAGON OPENS THE VAULT: INSIDE THE 2026 "PURSUE" UAP FILES CLASSIFIED ARCHIVES
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Published on Monday 08. June 2026
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For decades the official answer was silence. In the spring of 2026 that silence cracked. On two separate Fridays — May 8 and May 22 — the U.S. government walked up to the vault, turned the key, and started handing the contents to the public: hundreds of pages of reports, photographs, witness statements, astronaut transcripts, and roughly two dozen videos of objects the government openly admits it cannot explain.
No clearance required. No FOIA queue. Just a .gov website and a download button.
This is the story of what was released, who released it, and where you can watch the footage for yourself.
# THE PENTAGON OPENS THE VAULT: INSIDE THE 2026 "PURSUE" UAP FILES
*CLASSIFIED ARCHIVES — Intelligence Dossier*
**By: UFO Hunters Research Team**
**Filed: June 2026**
---
For decades the official answer was silence. In the spring of 2026 that silence cracked. On two separate Fridays — May 8 and May 22 — the U.S. government walked up to the vault, turned the key, and started handing the contents to the public: hundreds of pages of reports, photographs, witness statements, astronaut transcripts, and roughly two dozen videos of objects the government openly admits it cannot explain.
No clearance required. No FOIA queue. Just a `.gov` website and a download button.
This is the story of what was released, who released it, and where you can watch the footage for yourself.
---
## THE DIRECTIVE
The trail starts on **February 19, 2026**, when President Donald J. Trump posted on Truth Social that he would direct the Secretary of War and other agencies to begin identifying and releasing government records tied to UAP, UFOs, and "alien and extraterrestrial life."
The machinery that followed was given a deliberately bureaucratic name: the **Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters** — **PURSUE**. The Department of War (the rebranded Department of Defense), with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), was put in charge of a government-wide effort to find, review, declassify, and publish UAP-related material.
The official home of all of this is a single Pentagon page:
> **🛰️ PRIMARY SOURCE — PURSUE Archive:** https://www.war.gov/UFO/
The Pentagon has been explicit about one thing: every case in the archive is an **unresolved** case. As the directive puts it, these are incidents where the government "is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena." Translation — they don't know what these are, and they're inviting outside analysts to take a look. That's an unusually honest admission, and it's exactly the kind of door this community has been trying to pry open for years.
---
## RELEASE 01 — MAY 8, 2026
The first tranche dropped on a Friday morning: approximately **162 files** pulled from the **FBI, the Department of Defense, NASA, and the State Department**, spanning incidents from the 1940s to 2025.
Highlights from the first batch:
- **The INDOPACOM "football" (2024)** — An unresolved UAP report from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command showing what the Pentagon described as a football-shaped body recorded near Japan.
- **FBI Photo B2 (December 2025)** — A black-hot infrared still of an unidentified object over the western United States.
- **NASA / Apollo material** — Including a long-circulating account of Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt reporting a flash on the lunar surface, plus other astronaut debrief records.
- **The FBI historical file** — Hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony and public reports dating back to the 1940s, this time with fewer redactions than earlier versions.
Most of the video footage in this batch is what you'd expect from military sensors: monochrome infrared, a crosshair, and a small white object — a speck — drifting or holding position against a dark sky. The two dozen clips run roughly **41 minutes** in total and cover encounters between **2020 and 2026**.
> **📥 Release 01 — Videos (1.3 GB):** https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/uapvideos.zip
> **📄 Release 01 — Documents (1.2 GB):** https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/bundle/Release_1.zip
> **📰 Official press release:** https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4480582/
---
## RELEASE 02 — MAY 22, 2026
The second tranche is where things got loud. The document bundle was small (70 MB), but the **video bundle ballooned to 5.6 GB** — and it contained the clips that lit up every feed on the internet.
### ⭐ THE LAKE HURON SHOOTDOWN — `DOW-UAP-PR071`
The headline case. A **46-second redacted infrared clip** labeled *"USAF ANG F-16C [CALLSIGN] Shoots Down UAP over Lake Huron with [Weapon System], 12 Feb 2023."* It is, finally, the footage of the object an Air National Guard F-16 destroyed over Lake Huron in February 2023 — one of several objects downed over North America that month and never previously shown.
Per the Pentagon's own description: around the 11-second mark the sensor locks onto an area of thermal contrast in the center of the frame; at roughly the 20-second mark the footage appears to show a **kinetic interaction** between two objects, with the original target **fragmenting in a radial pattern** consistent with a high-energy impact. The release pointedly does **not** speculate on what the object was — though much of the analysis since suggests a balloon. The chain-of-custody, the government notes, is itself incomplete.
### ⭐ THE SYRIAN ACCELERATION — `DOW-UAP-PR051`
A **CENTCOM MQ-9 Reaper** drone obtains a weapons-quality lock on an object near the Jordan–Syria border (dated 2021). On camera the object reportedly performs an **instantaneous acceleration and abrupt direction change** — the kind of non-ballistic movement that keeps this subject alive. This is arguably the most provocative clip in the entire release.
### ⭐ THE IRAN FORMATION — `DOW-UAP-PR050`
*"4 UAP Formation – Iran, 26 Aug 2022."* Multiple objects flying in coordinated formation, captured with crosshairs and partial redactions. One of the specific files Congress had formally demanded earlier in the year.
### ⭐ THE EAST COAST OBJECT — `DOW-UAP-PR086`
A UAP recorded over the U.S. East Coast in December 2019, sensor-tracked over water.
Release 02 also folded in a **CIA report on a 1973 UAP sighting in the USSR**, a collection of **Sandia / New Mexico documents (1948–1950)**, an **Apollo 12 medical debriefing** from NASA, and a Department of Energy **PANTEX radar-tower image**.
> **📥 Release 02 — Videos (5.6 GB):** https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/uap052226.zip
> **📄 Release 02 — Documents (70 MB):** https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/052226/release_02/release_02_document_bundle.zip
> **📰 Official press release:** https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4499305/
---
## VIDEO EVIDENCE FEED
Where to actually watch the footage:
- **🛰️ PURSUE — official searchable archive (all releases):** https://www.war.gov/UFO/
*Filter by agency, release, date, and type, then view each file directly.*
- **▶️ Department of War — official YouTube channel:** https://www.youtube.com/@deptofwar
- **▶️ Full compilation of the released videos (news roundup):** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bepozDGheY
- **▶️ The Lake Huron F-16 shootdown clip (coverage):** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zksjaAVZqlY
---
## THE SOBER FOOTNOTE
A caution worth printing, because credibility is the whole game in this field: the U.S. military maintained in a 2024 report that **no government investigation has confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial life**, and the PURSUE files are framed as *unresolved* — not as proof of anything. Several of the new clips already have mundane candidate explanations (the Lake Huron object reads, to many analysts, like a balloon).
But "unresolved" is not "explained." For the first time, the raw sensor footage, the witness narratives, and the original-source documents are sitting in one public place, with the government effectively asking civilian researchers to help work the cases. That invitation — more than any single clip — is the real story here.
The vault is open. Now the analysis begins.
---
*Sources: U.S. Department of War (PURSUE / war.gov/UFO), CBS News, CNN, TIME, The War Zone, Fox 2 Detroit. All footage and documents referenced are U.S. government releases in the public domain via PURSUE.*
*CLASSIFIED ARCHIVES — Intelligence Dossier*
**By: UFO Hunters Research Team**
**Filed: June 2026**
---
For decades the official answer was silence. In the spring of 2026 that silence cracked. On two separate Fridays — May 8 and May 22 — the U.S. government walked up to the vault, turned the key, and started handing the contents to the public: hundreds of pages of reports, photographs, witness statements, astronaut transcripts, and roughly two dozen videos of objects the government openly admits it cannot explain.
No clearance required. No FOIA queue. Just a `.gov` website and a download button.
This is the story of what was released, who released it, and where you can watch the footage for yourself.
---
## THE DIRECTIVE
The trail starts on **February 19, 2026**, when President Donald J. Trump posted on Truth Social that he would direct the Secretary of War and other agencies to begin identifying and releasing government records tied to UAP, UFOs, and "alien and extraterrestrial life."
The machinery that followed was given a deliberately bureaucratic name: the **Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters** — **PURSUE**. The Department of War (the rebranded Department of Defense), with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), was put in charge of a government-wide effort to find, review, declassify, and publish UAP-related material.
The official home of all of this is a single Pentagon page:
> **🛰️ PRIMARY SOURCE — PURSUE Archive:** https://www.war.gov/UFO/
The Pentagon has been explicit about one thing: every case in the archive is an **unresolved** case. As the directive puts it, these are incidents where the government "is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena." Translation — they don't know what these are, and they're inviting outside analysts to take a look. That's an unusually honest admission, and it's exactly the kind of door this community has been trying to pry open for years.
---
## RELEASE 01 — MAY 8, 2026
The first tranche dropped on a Friday morning: approximately **162 files** pulled from the **FBI, the Department of Defense, NASA, and the State Department**, spanning incidents from the 1940s to 2025.
Highlights from the first batch:
- **The INDOPACOM "football" (2024)** — An unresolved UAP report from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command showing what the Pentagon described as a football-shaped body recorded near Japan.
- **FBI Photo B2 (December 2025)** — A black-hot infrared still of an unidentified object over the western United States.
- **NASA / Apollo material** — Including a long-circulating account of Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt reporting a flash on the lunar surface, plus other astronaut debrief records.
- **The FBI historical file** — Hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony and public reports dating back to the 1940s, this time with fewer redactions than earlier versions.
Most of the video footage in this batch is what you'd expect from military sensors: monochrome infrared, a crosshair, and a small white object — a speck — drifting or holding position against a dark sky. The two dozen clips run roughly **41 minutes** in total and cover encounters between **2020 and 2026**.
> **📥 Release 01 — Videos (1.3 GB):** https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/uapvideos.zip
> **📄 Release 01 — Documents (1.2 GB):** https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/bundle/Release_1.zip
> **📰 Official press release:** https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4480582/
---
## RELEASE 02 — MAY 22, 2026
The second tranche is where things got loud. The document bundle was small (70 MB), but the **video bundle ballooned to 5.6 GB** — and it contained the clips that lit up every feed on the internet.
### ⭐ THE LAKE HURON SHOOTDOWN — `DOW-UAP-PR071`
The headline case. A **46-second redacted infrared clip** labeled *"USAF ANG F-16C [CALLSIGN] Shoots Down UAP over Lake Huron with [Weapon System], 12 Feb 2023."* It is, finally, the footage of the object an Air National Guard F-16 destroyed over Lake Huron in February 2023 — one of several objects downed over North America that month and never previously shown.
Per the Pentagon's own description: around the 11-second mark the sensor locks onto an area of thermal contrast in the center of the frame; at roughly the 20-second mark the footage appears to show a **kinetic interaction** between two objects, with the original target **fragmenting in a radial pattern** consistent with a high-energy impact. The release pointedly does **not** speculate on what the object was — though much of the analysis since suggests a balloon. The chain-of-custody, the government notes, is itself incomplete.
### ⭐ THE SYRIAN ACCELERATION — `DOW-UAP-PR051`
A **CENTCOM MQ-9 Reaper** drone obtains a weapons-quality lock on an object near the Jordan–Syria border (dated 2021). On camera the object reportedly performs an **instantaneous acceleration and abrupt direction change** — the kind of non-ballistic movement that keeps this subject alive. This is arguably the most provocative clip in the entire release.
### ⭐ THE IRAN FORMATION — `DOW-UAP-PR050`
*"4 UAP Formation – Iran, 26 Aug 2022."* Multiple objects flying in coordinated formation, captured with crosshairs and partial redactions. One of the specific files Congress had formally demanded earlier in the year.
### ⭐ THE EAST COAST OBJECT — `DOW-UAP-PR086`
A UAP recorded over the U.S. East Coast in December 2019, sensor-tracked over water.
Release 02 also folded in a **CIA report on a 1973 UAP sighting in the USSR**, a collection of **Sandia / New Mexico documents (1948–1950)**, an **Apollo 12 medical debriefing** from NASA, and a Department of Energy **PANTEX radar-tower image**.
> **📥 Release 02 — Videos (5.6 GB):** https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/uap052226.zip
> **📄 Release 02 — Documents (70 MB):** https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/052226/release_02/release_02_document_bundle.zip
> **📰 Official press release:** https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4499305/
---
## VIDEO EVIDENCE FEED
Where to actually watch the footage:
- **🛰️ PURSUE — official searchable archive (all releases):** https://www.war.gov/UFO/
*Filter by agency, release, date, and type, then view each file directly.*
- **▶️ Department of War — official YouTube channel:** https://www.youtube.com/@deptofwar
- **▶️ Full compilation of the released videos (news roundup):** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bepozDGheY
- **▶️ The Lake Huron F-16 shootdown clip (coverage):** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zksjaAVZqlY
---
## THE SOBER FOOTNOTE
A caution worth printing, because credibility is the whole game in this field: the U.S. military maintained in a 2024 report that **no government investigation has confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial life**, and the PURSUE files are framed as *unresolved* — not as proof of anything. Several of the new clips already have mundane candidate explanations (the Lake Huron object reads, to many analysts, like a balloon).
But "unresolved" is not "explained." For the first time, the raw sensor footage, the witness narratives, and the original-source documents are sitting in one public place, with the government effectively asking civilian researchers to help work the cases. That invitation — more than any single clip — is the real story here.
The vault is open. Now the analysis begins.
---
*Sources: U.S. Department of War (PURSUE / war.gov/UFO), CBS News, CNN, TIME, The War Zone, Fox 2 Detroit. All footage and documents referenced are U.S. government releases in the public domain via PURSUE.*
