EverySingleIndicator/dow-ufo-release-01

Department of War — UFO/UAP "Release 01" (May 8, 2026)

Mirror of the files published at https://www.war.gov/UFO/ as part of the U.S. Department of War's "Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters" (PURSUE) initiative — the first batch of records released under President Trump's directive for transparency on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).

The original site is gated by Akamai bot protection, which makes scripted bulk downloads inconvenient. This dataset is a complete, unmodified mirror of every file referenced by the page's master CSV, organized for easy browsing and analysis.

Contents

Folder	Files	Description
pdfs/	116	FBI case file 62-HQ-83894 sections, NASA reports, DoS, DoW reports
videos/	28	DOW UAP encounter videos + NASA Gemini 7 audio (mp4, sourced via DVIDS)
images/	26	FBI evidence photos and other imagery (full-resolution)
thumbnails/	130	Modal/carousel thumbnails for each record
csv/uap-csv.csv	1	Original master CSV from the war.gov page
metadata/manifest.json	1	Cleaned, structured manifest for all 161 records
metadata/dvids_videos.json	1	Resolved DVIDS video IDs → CloudFront mp4 URLs

Total: 161 records, ~3.6 GB.

Agencies represented

• Department of War — 82 records
• Federal Bureau of Investigation — 57 records
• NASA — 15 records
• Department of State — 7 records

How it was collected

1. Fetched the master CSV referenced by the page: https://www.war.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-csv.csv
2. Downloaded each PDF | Image Link and Modal Image URL.
3. For records with Type == VID, scraped the public DVIDS video page (https://www.dvidshub.net/video/{ID}) for the direct CloudFront .mp4 URL and downloaded it.
4. Used curl_cffi with Chrome TLS impersonation to bypass Akamai bot protection on war.gov.

The full scraping script is included alongside this dataset in the companion GitHub repo (link in the dataset card if available) or can be reproduced from the description above.

File naming

Files are named after the Title field in the source CSV with characters sanitized (e.g. 65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_10.pdf, DOW-UAP-PR42_Unresolved_UAP_Report_Middle_East_2020.mp4).

License / Source

These are U.S. government records released to the public by the Department of War. U.S. government works are generally not subject to copyright in the United States. See https://www.usa.gov/government-copyright.

Original source: https://www.war.gov/UFO/ (PURSUE — Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters), released 2026-05-08.

Caveats

• One CSV row had a corrupted PDF URL (65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Serial_153); the correct file path was inferred from the naming pattern and downloaded successfully.
• Per the source page: "The materials archived here are unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena."