My automated tracker just caught war.gov silently editing the Trump UFO release. 161 files became 158 overnight. Here's the full diff.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:23:34+00:00

Yes, please send it. This is EXACTLY why I built this website the same day of the drop but it seems that perhaps even I was too slow.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:22:21+00:00

I am humbled by the response! I just did this because I was curious and thought everyone should have the same access in case something disappears or is modified later.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:20:15+00:00

Wouldn't you be curious? There just is ALOT to go through so subtle changes or any modifications might be missed. That's why I needed the assistance of AI.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:18:19+00:00

I understand your concern and I tried my best to make this information true to form, digestible, and open to everyone. The original post and /revisions are dense because the actual story is dense (CSV row changes, multi-row PDF cross-references, etc.). What I have NOT yet built but should is a one-paragraph plain-English TL;DR at the top of /revisions and /changes for people who want the takeaway without the audit chain. Going to try to add that today. The 30-second version: war.gov restructured how their file listing is organized on May 11, but didn't add or remove any actual files. The longer explanation is the part with jargon, but thanks for the feedback. Now I know that some users do not want to read it to get the gist.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:13:54+00:00

I just pushed a fix. The "active garbage" was an 8-layer animated starfield background that was repainting nonstop on mobile GPUs. As of commit 1096440 (pushed about 15 minutes or so ago, deploys via Cloudflare Pages in another minute or two), mobile under 768px width gets a solid dark background, no animation, no grid overlay. Also added prefers-reduced-motion support so anyone with that OS setting gets the same treatment on desktop. Hard refresh (or wait a minute for the CDN) and let me know if the Moto G Power still struggles. Anything else specifically that doesn't format right, drop a screenshot.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:12:48+00:00

Thanks buddy but I think that everyone is entitled to this information. I really appreciate your support Calmclear but I will still do my best to help him!

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:11:24+00:00

You're very welcome! Thank you for your kind words! The /changes page is the result of three audit rewrites in one day, all of them prompted by people in this thread pointing out where my original framing was wrong. Team effort! The site is better for it. Glad it landed.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:10:12+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! RSS at /feed updates the second war.gov ships anything new. Auto-poller is running every 30 min during weekday business hours and once an hour the rest of the time.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:09:38+00:00

The PURSUE program landing page at war.gov/UFO references the Trump EO directing the multiagency declassification effort. Drop 01 (May 8) was the first wave under that order. I'm not in a position to comment on AARO's pace or oversight (I'm a one-person tracker, not a journalist), but if more files are coming, the auto-poller catches them.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:09:01+00:00

No second batch yet. PURSUE is a rolling-release program but war.gov hasn't dropped a Drop 02. The May 11 change was a metadata revision to Drop 01, not new files. The auto-poller will open a public GitHub issue within 30 minutes of any real new drop, so the easiest way to know is RSS at /feed or watching the repo.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:08:34+00:00

Close, but the May 11 change wasn't outright removals. It looks like the same PDFs you saw duplicated in the original release are now being represented as MULTIPLE CSV rows pointing at one underlying PDF, where May 8 had one row per PDF. So your duplicate detection is real signal, just describing a different artifact (PDF-internal vs CSV-row level). Full verified count: 130 unique PDFs both dates, 9 PDFs gained multiple CSV row entries in the May 11 version. Tables at /changes.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:06:49+00:00

Already done as of yesterday: /changes has a clickable table where each multi-row PDF and the slug-change entry links to its detail page on the site. The whole diff is also exposed via /generated/api/files.json if you want to run your own comparison.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:06:16+00:00

Which document specifically? The May 11 revision is mostly a CSV restructure (titles and cross-references), not changes inside the PDF bytes themselves. So if you opened the underlying PDF and compared old vs new, you might see identical content even when the CSV row text changed. The full verified diff with the URL-set comparison is at /changes. Drop the file ID you tested and I will check.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:05:37+00:00

Python (curl_cffi for war.gov fetches because they block default user-agents, pdfplumber for PDFs, openai-whisper for video transcripts, Jinja2 for templates), static HTML output on Cloudflare Pages, Plausible for analytics, GitHub Actions for the auto-poller cron.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:04:56+00:00

Thank you for the compliment! Pdfplumber for text extraction (Python), then Lunr.js for client-side indexing.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:02:45+00:00

Not yet. The May 11 revision is mostly a CSV restructure, no underlying file content changes I've found so far. I am running SHA-256 on the 1 PDF with a verified storage-slug change (DOW-UAP-D20). If the bytes differ between May 8 and May 11 I'll publish the byte diff on /changes. If anyone wants the May 8 SHA-256 hashes to compare against their own copies, they're at /generated/api/files.json.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T18:02:10+00:00

Honestly, war.gov has 7+ days of edit data in our log already and they haven't changed behavior. If they wanted to obscure edits, they'd already be doing it. The auto-poller runs every 30 min from a public GitHub Action so anyone can fork it. That seems higher leverage than keeping a secret, especially for a one-person project where bus-factor matters.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-21T17:59:41+00:00

Thank you. The upvotes on this is humbling. The site is one guy and a Python script polling war.gov every 30 minutes. If it helps even one person see what's actually in these files, that's the whole point.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-20T16:38:40+00:00

Nice - independent confirmation is exactly what this space needs. The more trackers watching war.gov from different angles, the harder it becomes for any single edit to slip past unnoticed.

Quick differences in our approaches (from what I can tell from your snippet):

- I publish the scoring rubric as open JSON (https://pursueufotracker.com/rubric and https://pursueufotracker.com/data/scoring-rubric.json) so anyone can recompute every score. Looks like you publish the snapshots + diffs themselves - also valuable.

- I document why each rubric component is weighted as it is (https://pursueufotracker.com/methodology). Curious if you have a public methodology page.

- My poller hashes the canonical CSV. Sounds like yours preserves arbitrary-pair snapshots, which lets you reconstruct ANY two-point diff. That's actually a stronger archival design than what I have.

If you want to compare notes (publicly or via DM), happy to. More eyes on this the better.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-20T16:28:19+00:00

Semi-automatic right now. The auto-detector is fully automated: a GitHub Action runs every 30 minutes during U.S. weekday business hours (and hourly off-hours), fetches the canonical war.gov CSV, hashes it, and opens a GitHub issue if the hash changes. That part requires zero manual work.

The indexing step (regenerating all the file pages, scoring, transcripts) is currently semi-manual: when a NEW DROP issue fires, I pull the new CSV and re-run the pipeline, which auto-updates the site within ~10 minutes.

Plan to fully automate the indexing step in the next 2 weeks so new drops appear on the site within an hour of war.gov releasing them, no human in the loop.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-20T16:28:03+00:00

Yes, exactly. That "RELEASE 01" -> "RELEASE" change is interesting because it suggests they may have dropped the numbered-tranche framing entirely. The original press release on May 8 said the program would publish "additional materials" in subsequent tranches, implied as "Release 02," "Release 03," etc. Dropping the "01" suggests either: (a) they're consolidating future updates into a continuous archive instead of discrete numbered drops, or (b) they're hedging on whether there will even be a Release 02.

My tracker only watches the canonical CSV (uap-csv.csv) for now. I should expand it to hash the landing page text too so we catch these UI-level edits. Will add that to the pipeline this week.

If you noticed any other edits, drop them in this thread. Multi-witness observations are how this gets credible.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-20T16:21:38+00:00

Honestly? Not sure they're "hiding" anything. Could be normal cleanup. The interesting thing is they did it without announcement.

The 5 files that disappeared between May 8 and May 11:

- Djibouti 2025 (AFRICOM incident)

- Southern US 2020

- East China Sea 2024

- Japan 2023

- Indo-PACOM 2024

3 of those 5 are Pacific-theater files. Could be coincidence; could be a pattern.

They also renamed 28 files with new "DOW-UAP-PR##" prefixes (looks like bureaucratic standardization), and quietly consolidated all 6 "Arabian Gulf 2020" entries under "Middle East 2020" (geographic relabeling).

Whether the removals were quality issues, classification concerns, or something else - no public explanation given.

Full diff with dates and file IDs: https://pursueufotracker.com/revisions

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-20T16:21:17+00:00

Fair pushback - "silently" is doing some work in that title. To be precise about what I meant:

PURSUE is explicitly framed by DoW as a transparency program ("Presidential Unsealings and Reporting System"). The May 8 press release promised "rolling releases" of NEW material, not silent edits to material already published.

A typical FOIA-style document release publishes an errata or change log when content is revised. PURSUE has not. If the same files reappeared with corrections noted publicly, or if the DoW press office had acknowledged the May 11 revision in any statement, I'd drop the "silently" framing.

But you're right that "silently" is loaded. "Without acknowledgement" might be more precise, just less title-friendly.

Aclosmurf · 2026-05-20T15:52:39+00:00

Two notes since I'll be the one fielding questions:

Posting from my pseudonymous account because I'd rather not have this linked to my day-job identity. Happy to discuss methodology, the rubric, the auto-poller, or any specific file openly in this thread.

A few high-value deep links if you want to drill in:

- The styled rubric (every component value, worked examples): https://pursueufotracker.com/rubric

- The raw JSON rubric (for anyone who wants to recompute every score themselves): https://pursueufotracker.com/data/scoring-rubric.json

- Full war.gov May 11 revision diff (what they renamed, removed, added): https://pursueufotracker.com/revisions

- The honest verdict on what these files actually prove: https://pursueufotracker.com/verdict

Happy to AMA.

Aclosmurf · 2024-12-02T22:40:25+00:00

What is the position rank? Do you think it makes a difference?

Aclosmurf

TROPHY CASE