Field Guide

How to Read a PURSUE Record Without Fooling Yourself

The files in this archive were written by and for intelligence professionals, not the public. They come with their own grammar, and learning to read it will keep you from drawing conclusions the documents do not actually support.

Start with the file ID

A code like DOW-UAP-PR071 is not decoration — it encodes the originating agency, the program, and the item's place in the release sequence. The prefix tells you who held the record: DOW for the Department of War, NASA for the space agency's own archives, CIA and ODNI for the intelligence side. Knowing the origin frames everything downstream, because a sensor video from a military platform and a first-person narrative from an intelligence official are very different kinds of evidence, even when they describe similar things.

Read the redactions as information

When a callsign, a location, or a weapon system is blacked out, that tells you the material was considered operationally sensitive — which is itself a signal about how seriously the originating command treated the incident. Redaction is not the same as cover-up. Much of it is routine protection of capabilities and personnel that would be classified regardless of subject matter.

Treat the imagery with the most caution of all

Many of these files note that footage was "digitally altered prior to upload" or that its chain of custody is incomplete. That language is doing honest work: it is the government telling you it cannot fully vouch for the provenance of its own evidence. A dramatic infrared frame is a starting point for analysis, not proof of anything by itself.

The strongest readers of this archive hold two thoughts at once — that the records are real government documents, and that being real does not make their contents conclusive. What any given file means is left, deliberately, to you.

Independent analysis. Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the United States Government.