On February 19, 2026, President Donald J. Trump issued a public directive ordering federal agencies to identify and release government files related to UAP, UFOs, alien life, extraterrestrial life, and adjacent records. The Department of War cites this directive as the origin of its PURSUE publication system, run with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to locate, review, declassify, and release unresolved UAP-related records from across federal holdings.1
What the directive ordered
The directive called on federal agencies to search their holdings for UAP-related material and to publish what could be released. The Department of War describes PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — as the system created to carry out that order, combining older historical holdings with newer military reporting into a rolling, cross-agency release.12
How it was carried out
The first tranche under the directive, PURSUE Release 01, was cleared on May 8, 2026 and hosted at WAR.GOV/UFO, followed by additional tranches in the weeks after. Each release links directly to source PDFs, DVIDS-hosted videos, and images at their original locations, and names the contributing agencies for the records in that tranche.12
The directive itself is the originating order rather than a release of records; the indexed material in this archive comes from the resulting PURSUE tranches. See PURSUE Release 01, Release 02, and Release 03.