What the catalog
doesn't tell you.
Independent analysis of the released PDFs, DVIDS JSON metadata, and the live HTML. Every claim links back to the underlying file in the mirror, with md5 hashes where relevant, so you can verify each one yourself. None of this is leaked — it's observable in the files the government published.
Between May 25 and May 27, 2026, the Department of War silently republished 69 PDFs without a public announcement
A byte-level diff between a snapshot of the war.gov/UFO/ archive captured on 2026-05-25 and the live state on 2026-05-27 shows 69 PDFs and 1 thumbnail with completely different MD5 hashes from the originals. The CSV manifest still lists exactly 222 records and only one of them (`ODNI-UAP-D001`) carries a public correction note explaining the change. The other 68 file replacements are undocumented anywhere on war.gov.
Why this one matters
This is a live, observable thing — anyone who downloaded the original May 8 / May 22 release ZIPs from war.gov now has different files than someone who downloads them today. The net delta is **1,162 MB removed** (2.31 GB → 1.09 GB across the affected files). 42 PDFs got smaller (re-compression), 22 got larger (re-OCR or added content), 3 changed by <1% (minor edits). Only the ODNI-UAP-D001 change is acknowledged in the public catalog. This is the kind of provenance question journalists and researchers should care about.
Substantive discrepancies
Facts about the released data — not speculation. Each is verifiable from a file in the mirror.
D-020 was relabeled from “Southern United States, 2020” to “Iraq, 2023”
Mission report D-020 is catalogued as Iraq 2023 — but the PDF's own embedded title still says Southern United States, 2020. Both files are byte-identical.
Cable 2 catalogued as Kazakhstan; PDF says Dushanbe, Tajikistan
State Department UAP Cable 002 is listed under Kazakhstan in the public catalog, but the PDF's embedded title points to Dushanbe — capital of Tajikistan.
PR-073: the one video that wasn’t scrubbed
Of all 85 declassified UAP videos, exactly one leaks city-level location, names a credited individual, uses a non-AARO unit code, and preserves the raw DIA report ID. The other 84 are scrubbed of all four.
“Spherical UAP over AFG” — country field says United States
PR-055 (“Spherical UAP over AFG in and out of clouds, 23 Nov 2020”) has its DVIDS country field set to United States, not Afghanistan.
The D → PR crosswalk
Several internal D-series Mission Reports were re-released as public PR-series Unresolved UAP Reports. The PDFs still carry their original D-series titles.
PDF titles contain raw NARA shelfmarks
Some PDFs' embedded titles aren't UAP descriptions — they're the literal NARA shelfmarks. That tells you which archive box each document came from.
Catalog: “Techincal” · PDF: “Technical”
The catalog row for NASA-UAP-D007 misspells “Technical”. The PDF's own /Title field has it right.
DoW silently re-published a 1963 NASA memo about alien-contact policy — with newly-added OCR
Between June 14 and June 15, 2026, one PDF in the May 8 release was silently replaced. The new version shrinks from 1,598,931 to 1,169,464 bytes (−27%) but gains 12,845 characters of OCR-extracted text — making the document fully searchable for the first time. The document is a 1963 NASA-to-State-Department memo whose subject line reads, verbatim: "Thoughts on the Space Alien Race Question." No correction note appears in the public catalog.
AARO's own caption on a NASA tape: at 32:41, a scientist says "Could be an alien starbase"
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's official description of NASA-UAP-D025 — released on June 12 as part of PURSUE — points to a specific timestamp where an Apollo 16 scientist on tape says, off-handedly, "Could be an alien starbase or something, I don't know." That line is literally the reason this audio file was declassified.
PURSUE includes a 1962 Walter Cronkite interview with astronaut Gordon Cooper about UFOs
NASA-UAP-D023 is a previously-unsurfaced excerpt from a November 1962 CBS interview, conducted by Walter Cronkite, in which Mercury 9 astronaut Gordon Cooper gives his views on unidentified flying objects. The catalog shows only the title; the DVIDS record tells you the topic.
AARO's verdict on the 2022 Colorado Springs UAP: "angular, non-symmetrical potato," probably sunlight on snow
The Intelligence Community Agency analysis of the 2022 Colorado Springs incident — released as ICA-UAP-D001 — characterises the witnessed object as "an angular, non-symmetrical potato" and resolves it, with low confidence, as sunlight backscattering off snow on the mountains, illuminating the underside of low-altitude clouds. This is one of the very few cases in any of the three PURSUE releases where AARO offers an actual explanation.
The "Western US Event" — release 3's largest single incident, 21 cross-linked records
Twenty-one of release 3's 72 records describe one incident. The catalog presents them as 21 separate entries; structurally they're one event — two consecutive days near a sensitive national security site, with first-hand narratives from federal witnesses, two FBI video reconstructions, and ten digital renderings split across two sub-incidents.
Release 3 includes a CIA-held paper on UFOs jointly authored by Kardashev and Sakharov
Buried in release 3's CIA Cold War file dump is CIA-UAP-008: a speculative paper on unidentified flying objects co-authored by Nikolai Kardashev — the Soviet astronomer who created the Kardashev Scale of civilizations — and Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet H-bomb physicist who won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for human-rights work.
The largest file in PURSUE is the CIA's own U-2 and OXCART history
CIA-UAP-003 — at roughly 720 MB the single biggest PDF in any PURSUE release — is the CIA's internal history of the U-2 and OXCART (A-12 / SR-71) reconnaissance programs from 1954 to 1974. This is the document that long established that many Cold War UFO sightings were classified overflights. Its inclusion under PURSUE is the official acknowledgement of that overlap.
Hidden in a bureaucratically-titled CIA file: a 2008 UFO report at Harare International Airport
CIA-UAP-017 is catalogued under the title "Placement on High Alert Due to Perceived Aggressive Foreign Posturing" — innocuous bureaucratese. The live carousel caption, visible only on hover, says it's actually "a never before released July 2008 report on a UFO sighting at the Harare International Airport." The catalog title is what shows up in search engines; the carousel caption is what tells you what's in the file.
The CIA's 1950 file on a German flying-saucer article — published in a German-language magazine in Chile
CIA-UAP-005 is a Central Intelligence Agency Information Report dated 31 July 1950 covering a German-language article titled "The Mystery of the Flying Discs, a contribution to its possible explanation," submitted for publication in Condor — a German-language magazine published in Santiago, Chile. The CIA acquired it in Chile, classified its information as "prior to mid-1950," and marked the entire dossier UNEVALUATED INFORMATION.
Release 3 fixed every metadata leak that defined releases 1 and 2
Comparing the metadata profile of release 3 (June 12) against releases 1 and 2 (May 8 and May 22), every category of Tier-1 finding from the first two releases — PDF title mismatches, named individuals in video credits, placeholder VIRINs, city-level location leaks, scanner fingerprint variety — drops to zero in release 3. The Department of War's metadata-scrubbing process measurably tightened between releases.
Server-hygiene leftovers
Files and assets still publicly served but no longer referenced by the live page. The pattern itself is the finding.
One release-3 file URL has a literal space in it — and a regular fetch returns 404
CIA-UAP-005 "German scientists' article on flying discs" is referenced in the live PURSUE manifest at a URL with a literal space between two underscores. Standard fetch tools that don't URL-encode the space as %20 receive a 404 from war.gov. The file is public, the catalog row works in a browser, but anyone trying to mirror or programmatically download the file from a script has to know to URL-encode.
Orphan PDFs still served at predictable URLs
Four PDFs are present on the public server but no longer referenced by the live manifest. Earlier versions remain quietly accessible.
Old stylesheets and an earlier-schema manifest still served
Older stylesheets and the prior-schema CSV manifest are still publicly served, but no longer referenced by the live page.
17 orphaned slideshow images from the v1 carousel
The live page's carousel only loads from `Slideshow-2/`. All 17 images in the original `Slideshow/` folder are orphaned but still served.
Two literal “Place Holder” links shipped live in the war.gov homepage footer
Two `<a href="#">Place Holder</a>` links sit in the rendered war.gov homepage footer. Devs forgot to fill in two nav slots and the placeholder text shipped to production.
rel=“noopeneer noreferrer” — typo appears 14× on the war.gov homepage
Every external link on the war.gov homepage uses `rel="noopeneer noreferrer"`. The correct attribute is `noopener`. The typo got copy-pasted into the template and shows up 14 times.
The Department of Defense → Department of War rename is half-finished in markup
Despite the public rebrand to “Department of War,” the war.gov homepage HTML still contains 13 “DOD” references, hosts every image from `media.defense.gov`, and lists both `DoW` and `DOW` capitalizations in its meta keywords.
Old Google + Bing site-verification tokens still in the `<head>`
The war.gov homepage carries two `google-site-verification` meta tags and two `msvalidate.01` (Bing) tags. In each pair, one token is presumably stale; nobody removed the old ones during whatever migration left them behind.
Tradecraft & curios
Producer fingerprints, country distributions, and HTML curios — colour and context for the release.
PDF creator fingerprints — the scanning toolchain
PDF `/Creator` and `/Producer` fields expose the full scanning and redaction toolchain used to assemble the release.
22 of 85 videos expose a specific country in DVIDS metadata
The public catalog mostly says “Middle East” or “Undisclosed Location.” The per-video DVIDS JSON exposes specific countries on 22 of the 85 videos.
Curios in the live HTML
Small leftovers in the live page's HTML — dev console logs, hidden links, internal-host meta tags, the Pentagon's coordinates, a typo'd `noopeneer`.
Two different 404 pages — one reveals which paths Akamai blocks at the edge
Most 404s on war.gov return a 98 KB DotNetNuke-styled error page with the full site chrome. But `/Admin/`, `/Install/`, `/Login.aspx`, and `/Login` return the 1245-byte raw Microsoft IIS 7 stock 404 — gray header, Verdana, “Server Error”. That tells you the path is intercepted at Akamai / the edge before the DNN app ever sees the request.
robots.txt names the entire DotNetNuke internal file tree
war.gov's robots.txt lists every internal DotNetNuke path — `/App_Code/`, `/App_GlobalResources/`, `/Controls/`, `/Utility/`, `/Components/`, `/Providers/`, `/Documentation/`, `/Install/`, `/Admin/`, `/bin/`, plus extensions `*.axd`, `*.exe`, `*.bin`, `*.dll`, `*.ssi`.
Spotlights nav includes “Operation Epic Fury”
Alongside “Memorial Day” and “Freedom 250”, the war.gov homepage Spotlights nav surfaces “Operation Epic Fury” — the public codename for the Feb 28, 2026 strikes against the Iranian regime’s security apparatus.
The Pentagon publishes quizzes
war.gov hosts a `/Multimedia/Quizzes` page, linked from the homepage with a “Quizzes” CTA button. The Department of War runs trivia quizzes.