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Independent researchers using automated monitoring tools say the government's landmark UAP document portal was silently revised multiple times after launch — with hundreds of megabytes of content replaced and at least five files removed — all without public announcement or official explanation. ''

When the United States Department of War (DoW) launched what it called the PURSUE portal on May 8, 2026 — a publicly accessible repository at war.gov/UFO housing 161 declassified UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) incident files — it was billed as a landmark act of government transparency. Officials described it as the first of several rolling releases under what they called the "Presidential Unsealings and Reporting System."

But within days of that announcement, independent researchers say the files began quietly changing.

According to a detailed report shared on a major online forum and verified by multiple independent sources operating publicly available tracking tools, the official PURSUE file list was revised on approximately May 11 — with no public notice, no errata log, and no acknowledgment from the Department of War. The canonical file count dropped from 161 to 158. Dozens of files were renamed. Five entries disappeared entirely.

Then, two days later, something potentially more significant occurred: according to a second independent tracker using byte-level verification, the contents of at least 70 files were silently replaced at the same URLs — while the filenames and file IDs remained unchanged. The total size of the corpus, according to that tracker's records, shrank from approximately 2.34 gigabytes to 1.10 gigabytes — a reduction of 53 percent.

The USA Herald was not able to independently verify these claims in real time. What follows is a reconstruction of events based on publicly available statements from two independent researchers, whose tools and methodologies are open to public scrutiny.

"The honest thing to say is: I don't know if this is a cover-up or a cleanup. What I do know is that a transparency program silently editing its own files — without a changelog — is not what transparency looks like."

— Independent researcher, operating as "Aclosmurf" on public forum, identity unverified.

What Is PURSUE — And Why Does It Matter?

The PURSUE portal was announced with considerable fanfare. In the aftermath of years of congressional pressure, high-profile whistleblower testimony, and a series of official Pentagon UAP reports, the release was framed by officials as unprecedented: actual incident files, sensor footage, and intelligence summaries related to encounters that remained unexplained even after conventional analysis.

The portal at war.gov/UFO provided public access to what was described as 161 files — a mixture of PDFs, image files, and video footage. The material spanned multiple U.S. military theaters globally and included incidents dating back decades, including materials from NASA missions in the 1960s and 1970s.

However, observers quickly noted that the official interface provided no search functionality, no transcripts for video files, no metadata filtering, and no changelog. It was, in the words of one researcher, "a flat list of 161 thumbnails" — functional in the most minimal sense, but offering little analytical utility to the public or to journalists.

Into that gap stepped independent developers. Within days, at least two separate, unaffiliated research projects had built monitoring and analysis tools on top of the public portal — tools that would ultimately catch changes that the government itself did not announce.

The First Tracker: A Scoring Rubric and an Automated Poller

The first of these efforts came from an individual posting under the pseudonym "Aclosmurf" on a major online discussion platform. Publishing under a pseudonymous identity — which the researcher acknowledged openly, stating a preference not to link the project to their professional identity — they built and publicly released a site called pursueufotracker.com.

The tracker, they explained, ran a GitHub Action every 30 minutes during U.S. weekday business hours — a script that fetched the canonical CSV index file from war.gov, computed a cryptographic hash of its contents, and automatically opened a public alert if that hash changed. The system required no human monitoring to detect a revision; it would flag one automatically within half an hour of any change occurring during business hours.

Beyond surveillance, the researcher also built an analysis layer. They applied what they described as a six-factor scoring rubric to every file in the archive, producing what they called an "Anomalousness Index" — a numerical score representing what they defined not as probability of extraterrestrial origin, but as evidentiary weight that an encounter remained unexplained after conventional analysis.

Scoring Rubric — Six Components (weights sum to 1.00)

Sensor quality0.25

Witness credibility0.20

Multi-source corroboration0.20

Kinematic anomaly severity0.15

Mundane explanation availability0.10

Official disposition (open vs. resolved)0.10

The rubric was published as open JSON at a public URL, allowing any researcher to recompute or challenge any score. The researcher was emphatic about what the index did not represent — repeatedly and explicitly stating that it made no claim about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

"Anyone publishing a 'probability of aliens' number is selling you something," the researcher wrote in their public methodology documentation.

The Five Highest-Scoring Files

Based on the rubric, the researcher's top-ranked file in the entire PURSUE archive was a 1965 NASA mission recording. According to the tracker's published analysis:

NASA-UAP-D3A — Gemini 7 Audio, 1965 — Score: 72

Audio from astronaut Frank Borman reporting an unidentified object to mission control while in low Earth orbit, preserved on the official NASA voice loop. The researcher noted that an astronaut-witness on official government record is "essentially unique" in the archive.

Greece, January 2024 — Diamond-Shaped UAP, SWIR Only — Score: 66

A U.S. military operator allegedly tracked an object traveling at approximately 499 mph that was visible only on the Short-Wave Infrared sensor and invisible in both electro-optical and standard infrared bands. The researcher stated the kinematic profile did not match any known aircraft.

UAE, October 2023 — 4 Min 57 Sec IR Sequence — Score: 66

Described as the longest single unresolved infrared tracking sequence in the release, captured from a multi-sensor platform.

Syria, July 2022 — Dual-Sensor IR + EO — Score: 66

Fourteen seconds of footage allegedly captured simultaneously in both infrared and electro-optical formats — a configuration that, the researcher argued, makes single-sensor artifact explanations harder to sustain.

Apollo 17, December 1972 — Triangular Formation on Lunar Surface — Score: 65

Three dots in triangular formation photographed on the lunar surface, reportedly still under open Department of War investigation under the PURSUE program.

Anomalousness Index — Top 5 Files (max theoretical score: 100)

Gemini 7, 196572

Greece 2024 (SWIR)66

UAE Oct 202366

Syria Jul 202266

Apollo 17, 197265

The First Edit: 161 Files Become 158

On approximately May 11, 2026 — three days after the initial public release — the automated monitor fired an alert. The hash of the canonical file index at war.gov had changed.

When the researcher reconstructed the diff, the changes were substantial. The total file count had dropped from 161 to 158. Twenty-eight files had been renamed with new bureaucratic prefixes following a "DOW-UAP-PR##" format. Six entries previously listed under "Arabian Gulf 2020" had been consolidated under a new geographic label reading "Middle East 2020." And five files — distinct incidents — appeared to have been removed entirely.

The allegedly removed files were:

Removed: Unresolved UAP Report — Djibouti, 2025

AFRICOM theater incident, year of alleged occurrence: 2025.

Removed: Unresolved UAP Report — Southern United States, 2020

Domestic incident, geographic region: Southern U.S.

Removed: Unresolved UAP Report — East China Sea, 2024

Pacific theater, INDOPACOM region.

Removed: Unresolved UAP Report — Japan, 2023

Pacific theater, INDOPACOM region.

Removed: Unresolved UAP Report — Indo-PACOM, 2024

Pacific theater, INDOPACOM region.

The researcher noted a pattern worth flagging, while explicitly declining to draw firm conclusions: three of the five apparently removed files were from the Pacific theater — Japan, the East China Sea, and the Indo-Pacific Command region. Whether that geographical clustering was meaningful or coincidental was not asserted. The government provided no explanation.

Three new files also appeared in the same revision, the researcher said, partially offsetting the removals:

New files added — May 11 revision

DOW-UAP-PR20 — Kuwait, May 2022 (PDF)+Added

DOW-UAP-PR43 — Africa, 2025 (Video)+Added

DOW-UAP-PR47 — INDOPACOM, 2023 (Video)+Added

No official statement from the Department of War acknowledged these changes. The PURSUE portal itself, as of the researcher's reporting, carried no changelog, no errata notice, and no version history.

A Second Tracker — And a Far Larger Discrepancy

The file-count change might have gone unremarked by a broader audience, were it not for an independent confirmation. On the same forum thread, a second researcher — operating under the username "Narrow_Market45" and associated with a project at pursueindex.com — stepped forward to corroborate the file-list change while reporting something considerably more alarming.

This second project, which the researcher described as running a daily cryptographic byte-verification process rather than a hash of the index file alone, had caught something the first tracker's methodology could not: at some point between the evening of May 13 and the morning of May 14, 2026, the content of at least 70 files had been replaced at their existing URLs.

The filenames had not changed. The file IDs had not changed. The official manifest count had not changed. Only the bytes underneath had changed — and according to the tracker's records, the corpus had shrunk from approximately 2.34 gigabytes to 1.10 gigabytes, a reduction of roughly 53 percent. The tracker's automated system had flagged the change at 07:16 UTC on May 14.

Of the 70 affected files, 41 were allegedly from the FBI.

Largest alleged file-size reductions — May 13–14 revision

FBI 62-HQ-83894 Section 6371 MB → 61 MB (−310 MB)

DoW Box 7 Incident Summaries 1–100247 MB → 33 MB (−214 MB)

DoW Box 7 Incident Summaries 101–172243 MB → 29 MB (−214 MB)

All FBI 62-HQ-83894 sectionsMultiple reductions

The second tracker claimed to have preserved both the pre- and post-change versions of all 70 files using content-addressed storage — meaning the original bytes, as distributed by the government on May 8, were allegedly still accessible in the researcher's archive even after war.gov's URLs began serving the smaller replacements.

The researcher was careful with language. They described the phenomenon as a potential "cover-up-vs-cleanup signal" and explicitly noted that size reduction alone could have benign explanations — re-compression, removal of duplicate pages, conversion to lower-resolution scans. But, they argued, the combination of silence and scale warranted scrutiny.

"File-list integrity is the easy half of the problem," the researcher wrote in the public thread. "Byte-level integrity is where the cover-up-vs-cleanup signal actually lives."

A Dispute Over Methodology — And What It Reveals

The two researchers — whose projects were entirely independent and had not coordinated prior to the public thread — quickly engaged each other on a technical point that illuminates the complexity of tracking government document changes: what, exactly, counts as a "removal"?

The first tracker reported five genuine file removals. The second tracker, using a different reconciliation algorithm, classified most of those same files not as removals but as renames — arguing that the underlying numeric IDs matched entries that reappeared under new labels. Under that reading, the geographic changes (e.g., "Japan, 2023" becoming "INDOPACOM 2023") were bureaucratic relabeling rather than deletion.

The second tracker offered this reconstruction in the public forum:

Disputed classification — rename vs. removal

Djibouti 2025 (PR43)→ Africa 2025 (PR043)

Southern US 2020 (PR40)→ Middle East 2020 (PR040)

East China Sea 2024 (PR46)→ INDOPACOM 2024 (PR046)

Japan 2023 (PR47)→ INDOPACOM 2023 (PR047)

Indo-PACOM 2024 (PR48)→ INDOPACOM 2024 (PR048)

Under this reading, only one file — a duplicate entry for FBI 62-HQ-83894 Section 6 with no rename candidate — represented a genuine deletion. The two researchers agreed to compare methodologies further, with both acknowledging that the absence of an official changelog made ground truth impossible to establish with certainty.

This methodological dispute is, in a sense, the story within the story: that independent researchers cannot agree on what happened because the government has provided no authoritative record of what it changed, why, or when.

The "RELEASE 01" Change — A Signal About the Program's Future?

A third change was flagged by a different commenter in the same thread: sometime after May 8, the header on the official PURSUE landing page was quietly altered. The original page had labeled the release as "RELEASE 01" — implying a numbered-tranche model in which a "RELEASE 02," "RELEASE 03," and subsequent drops would follow.

By the time the change was noticed, the label had been shortened to simply "RELEASE."

The first researcher offered two possible interpretations: either the government had shifted to a continuous-update model for the archive, abandoning the discrete numbered-release framework described in the original May 8 press materials — or officials were "hedging on whether there will even be a Release 02." Neither interpretation could be confirmed from publicly available information.

The original May 8 press release, according to the researcher, had described "rolling releases" of "additional materials" in subsequent tranches. The removal of the "01" designation is not, by itself, evidence of any particular decision — but in the absence of official communication, it generated immediate speculation.

A Timeline of the Alleged Changes

Reconstruction based on independent tracker reports

May 8, 2026

PURSUE portal launches at war.gov/UFO with 161 files. Official press materials describe it as "RELEASE 01" with "rolling releases" to follow.

May 11, 2026

First tracker's automated monitor detects hash change in canonical file index. File count drops from 161 to 158. Five files allegedly removed, three added, 28+ renamed. No official announcement. Landing page heading changes from "RELEASE 01" to "RELEASE."

May 13–14, 2026

Second tracker's byte-verification cron detects content replacement at 07:16 UTC on May 14. Seventy files allegedly replaced at existing URLs. Corpus size falls from ~2.34 GB to ~1.10 GB. No official announcement.

May 20, 2026

Tracker reports surface publicly. Department of War has not, as of publication, acknowledged any revisions to the PURSUE archive.

What Could Explain the Changes?

There are several plausible, non-conspiratorial explanations for the changes described — and it is important to state them clearly.

Bureaucratic standardization is the most straightforward. The renaming of files to follow a consistent "DOW-UAP-PR0##" prefix format is consistent with standard document management practices. Large government document releases often go through post-publication cleanup to enforce consistent naming conventions.

Classification review is another possibility. It is possible that files were released on May 8 before a final classification review was completed — a process sometimes described as inadvertent release followed by re-review. If materials were subsequently found to contain information that had not been appropriately cleared for public release, re-replacing them with redacted versions would be standard procedure. It would not typically be done silently, but procedural lapses are not unheard of.

Technical correction could explain the file-size reductions. High-resolution government scans are frequently produced at resolutions far exceeding what is necessary for public review. A subsequent pass to reduce file sizes for bandwidth and storage purposes could explain a significant portion of the observed size reduction, particularly for the large FBI files.

Duplicate removal is consistent with the one confirmed deletion the second tracker identified — a duplicate version of a file that already existed under another identifier.

What none of these explanations accounts for is the silence. A transparency program that silently edits its own published archive — particularly one that was announced with explicit promises of openness — creates the conditions for exactly the kind of speculation now circulating. If the changes were routine, a single public statement would have eliminated the question.

The Broader Question: Who Watches the Watchers?

The story of the PURSUE tracking project raises a question that extends well beyond UFO disclosure: as government document releases increasingly happen online, in real time, who is responsible for ensuring that what was published on day one is still what is being served on day thirty?

Traditional journalism has archiving and document management infrastructure. Official Freedom of Information Act releases come with administrative records. Congressional testimony and federal register publications carry legal weight and version histories. But a web portal, updated silently and without a changelog, exists in a legal and archival gray zone — one where a government agency can, technically, alter what it has "released" without any formal acknowledgment.

The two researchers behind pursueindex.com and pursueufotracker.com are operating outside any formal institutional framework. Their tools are publicly accessible, their methodologies are published openly, and their code is available for scrutiny. But they are also pseudonymous private individuals with no legal standing to compel disclosure, no resources to sustain long-term archival operations, and no guarantee that their own stored copies will remain accessible.

The Internet Archive, which has historically served as a de facto public record for web content, was not mentioned in either researcher's methodology as a primary preservation strategy — a gap that raises questions about the long-term integrity of any independent archival effort.

What the two trackers have demonstrated, at minimum, is that automated monitoring of government document portals is both technically feasible and, apparently, necessary. Whether the changes they detected represent something concerning or something routine, the fact that only independent researchers — not journalists, not congressional oversight staff, not the government itself — caught and reported the changes is worth noting in its own right.

What the Files Actually Contain — And What They Don't Prove

It would be easy, in the context of government silence and unexplained revisions, to allow speculation to outrun the evidence. It is worth returning, then, to what the files themselves contain — and what the researchers themselves said about them.

Both trackers were careful, in their public statements, to avoid overclaiming. The first researcher's scoring rubric explicitly excluded "probability of aliens" as a dimension — not because the question is uninteresting, but because the available evidence does not permit a meaningful probability estimate. The second researcher framed their work as an archival and retrieval project, not an interpretive one.

The highest-scoring file in the first tracker's analysis is a 1965 audio recording. The second-highest involves an object visible only in one specific sensor band. These are genuinely anomalous data points — unexplained after conventional analysis, according to the official classification that placed them in the PURSUE program in the first place. They are not proof of anything beyond their own anomalousness.

The same applies to the Apollo 17 file — three dots in a triangular formation on the lunar surface, still under open DoW investigation, according to the archive's own metadata. What that open investigation has found, or whether it is ongoing in any active sense, is not disclosed.

The files do not prove extraterrestrial intelligence exists. They do not prove it does not exist. They are, at present, a collection of documented anomalies that the United States government has acknowledged cannot be explained by conventional means — and a set of revisions to that collection that the government has not explained at all.

"More eyes on this the better. Independent confirmation is exactly what this space needs. The harder it becomes for any single edit to slip past unnoticed, the better."

— "Aclosmurf," public forum thread, May 2026

What Comes Next

The first researcher said they planned to expand their monitoring tool to hash not just the canonical CSV file but also the text content of the PURSUE landing page — ensuring that changes like the "RELEASE 01" → "RELEASE" edit would be caught automatically in the future. They also stated plans to fully automate the indexing pipeline so that new file drops would appear on their tracking site within an hour of publication, without human involvement.

The second researcher indicated they were continuing to run daily byte-verification checks across the full corpus, with both pre- and post-revision bytes preserved in content-addressed cloud storage. They invited comparison of methodologies and suggested that the two projects' different approaches — one focused on index-level changes, one on byte-level content — were complementary rather than competing.

Whether a "RELEASE 02" of PURSUE materials will materialize, and whether it will include any explanation for the changes already observed, remains unknown. The Department of War's public affairs office had not responded to this publication's inquiry as of press time.

What is clear is that a small number of private individuals, using freely available tools and public-domain data, have built an infrastructure capable of detecting government document revisions that official channels did not disclose. Whether that represents a gap in accountability, a gap in government communications, or simply the normal friction of a large bureaucracy operating a new program — only an official response could resolve. None has been offered.

 

Editor's note: This report is based on publicly available statements made by two independent researchers in a publicly accessible online forum thread, and on information published on their respective public websites. The USA Herald has not independently verified the underlying technical claims, including file-size measurements, byte-level comparisons, or the content of preserved archive copies. The Department of War has not responded to a request for comment. No claim of wrongdoing, classification violation, or intentional concealment is made or implied in this report. All assertions about government actions are attributed to the named independent sources and are presented as their claims, not as established fact.