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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.