The Truth Social post
On February 19, 2026, Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that he would direct federal agencies to declassify and publish records on UAP and "alien and extraterrestrial life." The post was characteristically brief and had the form of an order rather than a proposal — a presidential commitment, made public, before any internal staff process.
The interagency machinery
Within a week, the National Security Council convened working groups across the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Energy, NASA, the FBI, and the Department of War's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The PURSUE acronym — Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — appears in internal correspondence by mid-March.
The aliens.gov registration
In mid-March, the White House quietly registered the domain aliens.gov. As of May 8, the domain still has no public content; the operational launch was instead at war.gov/ufo, the Department of War's own portal. Search traffic for "aliens.gov" continues to climb, suggesting the registration was anticipatory rather than active.
Department of War, not Department of Defense
A key institutional shift: in early 2026, the Department of Defense was formally renamed to the Department of War. The UAP transparency portal therefore launched on war.gov, not defense.gov. The renaming was controversial in the Pentagon press corps and is unrelated to the substance of the UAP release, but it shapes every reader's first impression of the URL.
What survived contact with reality
Trump's February post implied imminent revelation of "extraterrestrial life." Release 01's actual content, 79 days later, contains no such revelation — which the Department of War's accompanying statement makes explicit. Whether this is a feature or a failure of the policy depends on whether you understood "disclose what we have" or "confirm what people hope" as the underlying commitment.
What is next
The Department of War has committed to rolling tranches every few weeks. Release 02 is expected before the end of May. The PURSUE machinery is now self-sustaining; it does not depend on further presidential attention to keep producing batches.