Wanting to believe

• The math of secrecy. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the last time it released figures, withheld around 90 percent of its records; the Pentagon, around 75. Roughly six million Americans hold some form of security clearance. About 2,000 federal employees go through classified records for release. Material classified today should declassify automatically after 25 years; in practice, that takes 30, 40, or 50. The 162 files at war.gov/UFO open one corner of a regime that, as Matthew Connelly says here in The Signal, “is so vast that no one can keep track of it.”
• The office at the end of the hall. In 2022, the U.S. Congress created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, to give American legislators a statutory window into UAP material. AARO has not yet released the second volume of its congressionally mandated report, nor its required 2025 annual report. PURSUE runs on a different track—a presidential portal the administration operates out of the Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense), modeled on the Justice Department’s release of the Epstein files in December. As Connelly puts it, the U.S. president “decides which U.S. officials can classify national-security information.” What the executive can classify, the executive can choose to release.
• What stays in the vault. The 162 files are case-level reports, redacted to protect “the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites.” What they’re not: They’re not any of the underlying intelligence assessments; they’re not the classification guides that determine what officials withhold; and they’re not records of programs that are public only because witnesses named them in congressional testimony—including the alleged “Immaculate Constellation” program, which in November 2024 the American journalist Michael Shellenberger described to Congress as a secret Pentagon initiative to collect classified UAP images and footage. The administration has not committed to delivering the AARO reports it owes Congress.

To understand PURSUE, we have to understand the system it belongs to. Connelly has been documenting that system for years, and his account of it is bracing: American secrecy began in earnest after World War II and has been expanding ever since: 18 intelligence agencies, including one inside the Space Force, and a classification apparatus so sprawling that even presidents who set out to map it can’t. “Nobody’s in charge,” Connelly says.

The Carter administration tried to rein it in and “couldn’t even figure out how many different programs there were.” Officials face career risk for letting classified material out and, in Connelly’s experience, none for classifying too much. The Joint Chiefs of Staff stopped keeping minutes of their meetings after Watergate, on the theory that records can leak; the most senior people in the Pentagon now run a US$800 billion department, Connelly notes, “as if it were some kind of numbers racket.” The basic mechanics of accountability—knowing what the government does in your name—rest on a declassification system that, as he puts it, has “no easy way out.”

PURSUE operates inside this system, not outside it. The administration has chosen which records to release, on what timeline, through which channels, with what redactions. It’s chosen to route the release through the Department of War rather than through AARO, the office Congress created for the purpose. Together, the choices show what disclosure looks like when the White House runs it on its own terms. Whether the rolling tranches inform the public or perform for it is a separate question.

The deeper question is Connelly’s: Can anyone outside a system this big, this old, and this opaque hold it accountable? It can offer a portal, a press release, and a steady flow of redacted documents; and it can call the result transparency. Which might be true, as far as the information goes. But the system yielding that information is still opaque—and can still produce its own appearance of transparency, as easily as it can withhold information. And the only people in a position to tell the difference are the people running it. … See “Need to know.”