nts-ufos — UAP/UFO Release 01 reproducible mirror

A reproducible local mirror of U.S. Department of War — UAP/UFO Release 01 (public release dated 2026-05-08, the first tranche of the PURSUE program).

This repository ships the recipe, not the bytes:

• manifest.txt — every asset URL (161 entries: 119 PDFs, 14 images, 28 DVIDS video pages).
• download.py — bulk downloader using curl_cffi to bypass war.gov's Akamai TLS-fingerprint bot wall.
• SHA256SUMS-20260509.txt — 128 hashes captured from a verified pull on 2026-05-09; use to confirm your local copy matches.
• docs/2026-05-09-pull-report.md — full reconnaissance + execution report.

The PDFs and images themselves (~2.3 GB) live on war.gov; running download.py materializes them under ./files/ (gitignored).

Quick start

# 1. install the one Python dep
uv sync                # if you use uv (preferred)
# OR
pip install --user curl-cffi

# 2. pull the data (~2.3 GB, ~1 min on a fast connection, resumable)
python3 download.py

# 3. verify integrity against the captured baseline
cd files && shasum -a 256 -c ../SHA256SUMS-20260509.txt

After step 2, files mirror the war.gov URL paths under ./files/. The script is idempotent — re-running skips files that already exist.

What's in the release

Category	Count	Approx size
PDFs (FBI, Air Force, NSA, NARA records)	119	~2.3 GB
Images (NASA Apollo UAP, FBI photos)	14	~30 MB
Video pages (DVIDS — HTML viewers, browser-only)	28	—
Total URLs	161	~2.3 GB on disk

Two manifest URLs return HTTP 404 from origin (upstream issue, not a downloader problem) and three are duplicates that overwrite to the same path. After a clean run you'll have 128 unique files.

Why this exists

Plain wget / curl get HTTP 403 from war.gov: the origin sits behind Akamai bot protection that fingerprints TLS handshakes (JA3), not just headers. curl_cffi impersonates Chrome's full TLS fingerprint, which gets through. Once the origin no longer requires this, download.py can revert to plain requests.

Sources

• Origin: https://www.war.gov/ufo/
• DoW press release: https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4480582/
• Upstream mirror this fork is based on: https://war-gov-ufo-release-1.vercel.app/

License

Code/manifest/docs: MIT (see LICENSE). Underlying records: U.S. federal government works — public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105).