Overview
19 February 2026 — President Donald Trump announced that defence and intelligence agencies would identify and release government records concerning UAP, UFOs, alien life, and related subjects. The initiative broadened the records review beyond AARO’s normal case-resolution work.
Key developments
- Participation across defence and intelligence agencies
- A formal process for identifying releasable records
- No claim in the directive itself that extraterrestrial evidence had been established
PURSUE release programme
The Department of War and ODNI subsequently established PURSUE as a rolling, multi-agency declassification programme spanning modern and historical records. The published packages were: Tranche 1, 8 May 2026 (1.2 GB documents; 1.3 GB video); Tranche 2, 22 May (70.1 MB documents; 5.6 GB video); Tranche 3, 12 June (826 MB documents; 4.6 GB video); and Tranche 4, 10 July (227 MB documents; 1.4 GB video).
The programme is important as an archival and transparency mechanism. Inclusion in a release records what agencies collected; it is not an official finding that every depicted or reported object was genuinely anomalous.
Assessment
The directive was the year’s major policy turning point, converting a public promise into an organised government-wide records-review process.
Research context
This page distinguishes the fact of an official action or public release from claims about what the underlying material proves. Unresolved observations require original files, metadata, provenance, and reproducible analysis before firm conclusions can be drawn.