Method

What this is

The UAP Reading Room is an independent archive of the U.S. government's UAP file releases. The Department of War, with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publishes declassified records in tranches under the PURSUE program. We keep every file from every release, link each one to its official copy, read it, tag it, and log every change to the official list.

It is written for people who already follow the UAP conversation. It assumes you know the names and the programs, and it does not stop to explain them. It is not a news site, not a place to identify what you saw, and not affiliated with the government.

Stance

The site does not try to convince anyone. It takes the phenomenon as real as a baseline and lays out the data as clearly and objectively as it can, surfaces the parts worth your time, and keeps track of everything.

Explanations that appear inside a file, such as an officer's note that a sighting was possibly astronomical, are recorded as data about that file. We flag them, quote the exact words, and give the page. They are not verdicts, and we do not add a verdict of our own.

Nothing on the page is invented. A source, link, document number or quotation that we could not trace to something we opened does not appear. Official text (titles, descriptions, summaries) is shown exactly as published and is always labelled as the government's. Our own words are kept apart from it.

How we read a file

Each file we have read carries a stamp, three levels, a short summary in our own words, and any flags. Files we have not read yet show the official summary and the words Reading in progress.

Stamps

READ FIRST

Among the files most worth opening before the rest of its release. Each release gets a short list, in the order we would read it.

PROGRAM RECORD

A record of how a government UAP study, contract or office worked: proposals, monthly reports, briefings.

CLOSE READ

A file with enough detail to repay a slow read, such as an investigation report built on interviews.

PERSONNEL FILE

The service or personnel record of a named officer, kept because of the part that person played.

HISTORICAL SIGHTINGS

Reports of individual sightings from earlier decades.

Evidence, Novelty and Linkage

Each file gets three separate levels from 0 to 3, each with a one-line reason. They are never added together and there is no total score, because they measure different things.

E · Evidence

What the record itself holds: sensor data, imagery, and the number and kind of witnesses.

N · Novelty

How much of it is new to the public record, as against already published or leaked.

L · Linkage

How firmly it ties to the people, programs and events on the Legacy Program board.

Flags

A reading can carry four flags. Paired means the file belongs with another official file. Explanation in file means the file itself offers an explanation, quoted with its page. Previously public means an earlier publication exists, with a link to it. Redacted means parts of the official copy are blacked out.

Release pages

Each release page also lists what the release adds to the record, in three groups: NEW for material not seen before, NOW OFFICIAL for material that was already out and has been confirmed in an official file, and STILL WITHHELD for records that are known to exist and have not been released. A withheld item that rests on something outside the files, such as testimony or a request, says so and cites its source.

Provenance tags

Every video, image and audio file carries a tag for what it actually is, taken from the official description where it says. An illustration is never presented as imagery. When the description does not say, the file carries no tag rather than a guess.

INFRARED SENSOR

The official description says the footage comes from an infrared sensor.

ELECTRO-OPTICAL SENSOR

The official description says it comes from an electro-optical sensor.

PHONE CAPTURE OF A SCREEN

Someone filmed a display with a phone. What we see is a copy of a copy.

FILM

Motion picture film.

PHOTO

A photograph.

ILLUSTRATION (NOT IMAGERY)

A drawing or rendering. It is never presented as imagery of the event.

AUDIO

A sound recording.

How it is made

The site is automated. When the government publishes a new tranche, it reads the official list, saves every file, extracts the text, finds the names in it, and writes a short reading of each file worth opening first. It is a repository of what the government releases in each UAP tranche, kept as published.

The levels and stamps are there to help you decide what to open. They are not official findings and they are not a measure of whether anything is true.

Sources

• The official PURSUE manifest and the files themselves, published at war.gov/UFO. Counts on this site are worked out from the manifest, never typed by hand.
• DVIDS, the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, for the video the government hosts there. Where DVIDS offers a player, the file page loads it on request.
• The Legacy Program board, our research map of people, programs and events, for the entity links on readings and for the names on each file page. Each link opens that entity's dossier on the board.
• The names under "Named in this file" come from a hand-checked list of exact spellings for each board entity, matched against the file's title, official summary and our extracted text, with page numbers. A match is a fact about the text, not a judgment: it says the name appears, not what part the person or program plays. Scans with no text layer are searched by title and summary only, so a name on a scanned page can be missed.
• Other official channels, cited where they appear: AARO, the National Archives, Congress and Department of War notices.

The archive promise

This site is meant to be a permanent repository of everything the government has released, even if the government later edits or deletes it.

• Every file, image, audio recording and video is saved when we first see it, with its SHA-256 checksum, size and the time we first saw it.
• If a file changes under the same official identifier, we keep both versions and show the history.
• If the government removes a file, its page keeps working, carries a WITHDRAWN stamp with the date it disappeared, and the change log records the removal. Our saved copy stays public.
• Each file page shows the checksum, size and first-seen time of every version we hold, so you can check a copy against ours.

The only exception is a manual hold on a single file, used for a stated legal or safety reason. The hold itself is logged in the change log. Nothing is held automatically.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, we fix it in the open. A correction to a reading, a count or a link is made on the page and recorded as a new entry in the change log, with the date and what changed. We do not quietly rewrite the record.

Corrections, tips and questions: contact@uapreadingroom.com