Seven steps. Each one is carried by stories.
This is our reading of the whole trail. Each step is told in full by one or more stories, with their own sources. A step without a story yet says so.
The neighbourhood is kept.
The presence near Earth may be the local end of something that tends the whole solar system.
Someone was here first.
A presence was settled on and around the Moon before we left the planet.
The atomic bomb woke it up.
The interest follows our nuclear weapons, from the green fireballs over Los Alamos to the bait runs of 2020-26.
We caught some of it and hid it.
Retrieval and reverse-engineering moved into contractors, inside waived programs that only a handful of members of Congress are told about.
It isn’t just hardware.
Insiders seem to have treated consciousness, and the body, as part of the technology.
It lives in the oceans too.
The Tic Tac, the Gulf of Oman and the USO reports suggest bases under the sea.
Disclosure is being managed.
The releases from 2017 to PURSUE's drops in 2026 look like a slow, controlled release.
Read all seven in full, with the cases behind every sentence →
Read it as a story
13 narratives that run through many cases. The bar shows what each one rests on.
The legacy program
UAP Gerb's central story: from 1947 one national effort, modelled on the Manhattan Project and run by a control group hidden inside the NSC's covert-action chain, recovered and studied non-human craft. At his turning points (Carter's 1978 order, the 1993…
Read the story →The squeeze
The technology slipped out of government hands, the companies kept it, rivals caught up, and disclosure is the squeeze to get it back.
The nuclear connection
Craft drawn to the bomb: from Trinity and the green fireballs to missiles going offline and the bait runs of 2020-26.
The price of contact
What contact costs people: burns, illness, disappearances and threats, from records to anonymous claims.
Ordered to fire
Sixty years of air forces chasing these objects and trying to shoot them down, with no effect until 2023.
Split by service
There is no single legacy program: the Air Force, the Army, the Navy and the labs each keep their own, and barely talk.
The cover layer
Deception as a branch of its own, growing after every wave: Robertson, Kirtland, MJ-12, Wilson-Davis, Kona Blue.
The undersea program
Craft seen going in and out of the sea, the Navy offices that watch them, and Gerb's "tic-tac factory" in a trench off the Bahamas.
The mirror
Every state that tracks these objects decides they belong to its rival. In the Gulf, Iran and the US have watched the same skies for 20 years.
The recovery teams
From Stringfield's Blue Berets to JSOC and privatised teams that shoot at each other: who goes out to get the craft.
One corner of New Mexico
Most of the history happens within about 300 km of Albuquerque, from Trinity to the White Sands lure.
The closed airport
Lights closed airports in Asia from 2010, long before Europe's wave of 2025; the official word changed to "drone" on the way.
The helicopters
Helicopters keep turning up beside the objects: encounters, escorts, and the retrieval flights.
Where the record is thickest
Search 461 cases, the people in them and the documents behind them
Strength A to E
How much evidence, how many witnesses, and how much backing a case has.
Plausibility
Where secrecy hides the papers by design, we judge how plausible the account is. Only Moderate and above are featured.
Who says so
Every claim is marked: on the record, a named witness, an unnamed insider, or the narrator's own reasoning.