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.
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.
By the numbers
Side by side
Evidence
Method: snapshot the public manifest and every asset URL on 2026-05-25; re-fetch each on 2026-05-27 via a Range request to recover the server-reported Content-Length, compare to the locally-stored byte size. Confirm any divergence with a full GET + md5.
The one publicly-acknowledged change (ODNI-UAP-D001 USPER Narrative): The CSV's Description Blurb on the live site now ends with: > *"May 26, 2026, correction: The document originally posted to the PURSUE collection of UAP-related records on May 22, 2026, under the name 'ODNI-UAP-D001, USPER Narrative, Senior USIC Official,' contained a typographic error in the second paragraph, describing a helicopter flight profile as 'map-of-the-earth.' The correct military aviation term for this profile is 'nap-of-the-earth.' This document has been updated to reflect this correction."*
The PDF went from 34,195 bytes → 58,516 bytes (the correction note is rendered into the document itself).
The 68 unannounced changes include — but are not limited to:
- Every
fbi-photo-b*.pdf(24 files). All shrank by roughly 80% (e.g.fbi-photo-b1.pdfwent from 613,116 → 126,599 bytes — same filename, different MD5). Embedded image quality was lowered. - Every
65_hs1-834228961_62-hq-83894_section_*.pdf(10 sections). Most shrank dramatically;section_6went from 370 MB → 60 MB.section_8went the *opposite* direction (120 MB → 255 MB — added content). 38_143685_box7_incident_summaries_173-233.pdfgrew 3.3× (49 MB → 161 MB). Whatever was added here is substantial.- The State Department UAP cables (
dos-uap-d1,dos-uap-d2) grew slightly — re-OCR pass. - NASA transcripts (
nasa-uap-d1Apollo 12,nasa-uap-d2Apollo 17) grew slightly. - A subtle CSV-only edit on DOW-UAP-PR072 (the Kazakhstan "ADMINISTRATIVE REVISION" video): the description was edited from "February 2022" to "March 2022" as the date the video was captured — no other change, no public note.
Also fixed without acknowledgement: the war.gov/UFO/ Open Graph description had mojibake on the apostrophe (government’s). The live version now serves proper UTF-8 (government's). Silent fix.
Sample of unannounced replacements (selected)
| File | Before (bytes) | After (bytes) | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| 65_hs1-834228961_62-hq-83894_section_6.pdf | 370,571,478 | 60,929,949 | −83% |
| 65_hs1-834228961_62-hq-83894_section_8.pdf | 120,391,107 | 255,526,310 | +112% |
| 38_143685_box7_incident_summaries_173-233.pdf | 49,382,924 | 161,362,330 | +227% |
| 38_143685_box7_incident_summaries_1-100.pdf | 247,087,612 | 32,675,506 | −87% |
| 18_6369445_general_1948_vol_1.pdf | 65,878,977 | 4,740,807 | −93% |
| fbi-photo-b1.pdf | 613,116 | 126,599 | −79% |
| fbi-photo-b13.pdf | 434,067 | 66,245 | −85% |
