Declassified UAP pages: how to read, search, and cite the raw documents
A plain-English guide to the declassified UAP document record: what VLM markdown and OCR mean, where the original PDFs live, how to cite them, and what to make of the parts that are damaged or secondhand.
Most of what the U.S. government has released about unidentified anomalous phenomena comes in the form of scanned PDFs — memoranda, cables, reports, photographs, and newspaper clippings, often decades old, often photocopied many times before reaching public release. The pages are evidence; reading them well is a skill.
Disclosure Archives doesn't host the original documents — we link to the agency that issued each one. What we do is build the narrative, citation, and cross-reference layer around them. This page exists so a reader who has never opened a FOIA-released PDF can come in cold, understand the format, and know where to go next.
Three layers of a declassified page
The agency-issued scan. Stamps, redactions, hole-punches and all. Hosted on a .gov / .mil URL with a known chain of custody. Always the authoritative source.
A vision-language-model extraction — text + image captions interleaved. Lets a machine (and a human skim-reader) follow what's actually on the page including the visual elements.
What Disclosure Archives adds: dating, sourcing, cross-referencing to witnesses and prior incidents, plain-English context. Turns one page into one citable, comparable record.
Where the originals live
Each U.S. government source maintains its own reading room. The links below go to the canonical agency URL; our internal hubs aggregate every entry on this site from that source.
The principal U.S. government source. Combines AARO releases, Navy and Air Force records, and the PURSUE Release 01 tranche.
The Bureau's UFO file, including 62-HQ-83894 and the Hottel memo. Hosted in the FBI Vault reading room.
Apollo program transcripts, the 2023 Independent Study Team final report, and NASA-attributed imagery.
Diplomatic cables and embassy memoranda on UAP. Foreign-government activity reported through U.S. embassies.
Annual reports to Congress, the 2021 preliminary assessment, quarterly summaries from the Intelligence Community.
Sworn testimony, hearing transcripts, floor statements. The single most citable layer of the modern UAP record.
Complementary raw-document viewers
Other community-built tools handle the raw-document side well. When you want to keyword-search across every page of a release at once — including the noisy citizen-letter and clipping pages we don't surface in our own archive — these are the right places to look.
PURSUE Open Atlas
ufo.gpt2077.comA community open-source viewer (CC0 1.0) over the PURSUE Release 01 corpus, with VLM markdown and a fully client-side keyword + AI hybrid search. 4,153 pages indexed in the browser. Useful when you want raw page-level retrieval; see our PURSUE Release 01 hub for the curated event-level view of the same release.
Frequently asked
- What is VLM markdown?
- VLM markdown is text extracted from a scanned page by a vision-language model — a neural network that reads images and writes natural-language descriptions. Unlike traditional OCR, which only reads typed characters, a VLM also captions photographs, sketches, rubber stamps, and handwritten margin notes. The result is a single interleaved text stream that includes both the original text and 'Image: ...' blocks describing every visual element on the page.
- Is VLM markdown the same as OCR?
- No. OCR (optical character recognition) is older and only attempts to transcribe printed or handwritten text into characters. A vision-language model does that AND describes images. For redacted government documents — which are full of stamps, photographs, handwritten signatures, and torn newspaper clippings — VLM markdown is substantially richer than OCR alone.
- Where do the original PDFs live?
- On the issuing agency's website. For the U.S. Department of War tranche of PURSUE Release 01, the canonical source is war.gov/UAP. For FBI Vault material, vault.fbi.gov. For NASA records, nasa.gov. For State Department cables, history.state.gov or foia.state.gov. Disclosure Archives never hosts the PDFs itself — every event page links to the original primary source.
- How should I cite a declassified page?
- Use the issuing agency, the document identifier, and the page number. Example: 'FBI 62-HQ-83894, Section 10, page 86, declassified March 22, 2011.' For PURSUE Release 01 material, include the release identifier and the PURSUE record ID. Where possible, include both the agency URL and an archive.org snapshot URL to defend against link rot.
- Why are some pages low-quality?
- Because the originals are. Many declassified UAP documents are photocopies of photocopies of typed memoranda from the 1950s through 1970s, often handled and re-handled across multiple FOIA requests. Stamps, hole-punches, water damage, faded ink, and torn edges are common. The VLM markdown describes these artifacts explicitly so the page renders honestly rather than pretending the original is cleaner than it is.
- Can I trust what a declassified document says?
- You can trust that the document is authentic — it's what the agency actually wrote, at the time, in its own files. Whether its factual claims are true is a separate question. Many declassified UAP documents are themselves secondhand: an FBI field office summarizing a letter from a citizen, or a State cable summarizing a foreign newspaper. Disclosure Archives presents documents in their original form so you can evaluate them on their own terms.
- What is the PURSUE Open Atlas?
- An open-source community project (CC0 1.0) that re-extracted the PURSUE Release 01 corpus into clean Markdown with inline image captions, plus a fully client-side keyword + AI hybrid search demo. We use the same primary sources; the PURSUE Open Atlas is a useful complementary raw-document viewer when you want to search across all 4,153 pages of the release at once. We link to it directly where appropriate.
Looking for the documents themselves? Start with the evidence index (unified view of every photo, video, and document), or go to a topical hub: AARO, ODNI, Congress, FBI, NASA, or State.