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.
Practically, it means: (1) the catalog isn't validated against the actual file URLs before publication; (2) automated archivers (Internet Archive, FOIA-tracker bots) may silently fail to mirror this specific record; (3) it's the same hygiene pattern that broke release 1's `18_100754_ general 1946-7_vol_2.pdf` and `serial 5 redacted_redacted.pdf`. Three releases in, the manifest still ships filenames with literal spaces.
Evidence
The manifest references the URL:
medialink/ufo/061226/release_03/documents/CIA-UAP-005-German_scientists_ article_on_flying_discs.pdf
Note the space character between scientists_ and article — that's not a rendering artifact, it's a literal byte in the path on the server.
Direct fetch tests:
GET .../CIA-UAP-005-German_scientists_%20article_on_flying_discs.pdf → 200 OK (1,107,431 bytes)
GET .../CIA-UAP-005-German_scientists_article_on_flying_discs.pdf → 404
GET .../CIA-UAP-005-German_scientists_+article_on_flying_discs.pdf → 404
GET .../CIA-UAP-005-German_Scientists_Article_on_Flying_Discs.pdf → 404
Only the URL-encoded space resolves. Browsers handle this automatically because they URL-encode spaces in href attributes before issuing the request. Raw curl or wget against the catalog-listed URL does *not*. Quietly, this means anyone scripting against the manifest gets exactly one missing file.
The pattern across all three releases:
| Release | File with literal-space filename |
|---|---|
| Release 1 | 18_100754_ general 1946-7_vol_2.pdf (leading space inside the filename) |
| Release 1 | serial 5 redacted_redacted.pdf (filename uses spaces, not hyphens) |
| Release 3 | CIA-UAP-005-German_scientists_ article_on_flying_discs.pdf (embedded space) |
Three releases, three different filename-hygiene failures. The CIA-UAP-005 case is the worst of the three because it's the only one where the catalog actively references the broken URL.
The companion thumbnail at thumbnails/CIA-UAP-005-German_scientists_ article_on_flying_discs.jpg has the same problem — fetches only with %20.
The file itself. Once you get past the URL: it's a 1.1 MB scan of a German-language article on "flying discs," held in CIA archives. It's catalogued under release 3's broader CIA Cold War file dump (alongside CIA-UAP-002 through CIA-UAP-019). Worth opening; not the point of this finding.