On May 8, 2026, the United States government stopped pretending it had nothing to show you.
The Department of War put a website on the open internet, war.gov/UFO, and behind it a system called PURSUE: the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. More than 160 files. No clearance. No FOIA queue. No redacted nothing-burger handed out a decade late. For the first time in the history of this subject, the federal government built a front door and told the public to walk through it. President Trump’s directive set it in motion. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the files had “long fueled justified speculation.” Trump told the country to look at the evidence and “decide for themselves.”
So we did. We went through all 162 files. And we named this entire publication after one of them.
This is why.
The file
It is designated DOW-UAP-PR38, and it is the oldest video in the release.
In 2013, an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform recorded one minute and forty-six seconds of footage in the Middle East. U.S. Central Command submitted it to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The government’s own description of what is on that tape: an area of contrast resembling an eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length.
Watch what it does. Ten seconds in, the sensor zooms. For the next eighteen seconds the object moves through the frame, and it drags a visible trail behind it. Then it leaves the screen.
Here is the detail that should stop you cold: the operator who recorded it wrote nothing down. No account. No description. No “I think it was a drone.” Nothing. A military sensor caught this thing, the footage went up the intelligence chain, and the person closest to it declined to put a single word on the record about what they had just watched. Thirteen years later, after running the full length of the government’s own resolution process, the case is still stamped unresolved. The United States government filmed an eight-pointed star maneuvering over the Middle East, ran it through every channel it has, and still cannot tell you what it was.
You may already have seen a piece of this. In 2024, the journalist Jeremy Corbell released a single still he called the “chandelier” UAP: a star-shaped object, military infrared, source unconfirmed. For two years that photograph was a claim, take it or leave it depending on whether you trusted the man holding it. On May 8, the government released the video it came from. The claim became a federal record. The chandelier is real, it is on file, and the people who held it back for thirteen years are the ones who finally let it go.
The tidy explanation people reach for is that a hot point source can throw a star-shaped flare across an infrared lens. Fine. But a lens flare doesn’t fly across the frame on its own and it doesn’t trail behind itself. This one moves, and it leaves a wake. That is the part nobody has explained, and it is the reason this file outlived every attempt to wave it off. An object the government recorded, tracked, and could not identify, wearing a shape that has been carved into temple walls for five thousand years. The eight-pointed star of Inanna. We did not pick the name to be clever. The release picked it for us.
And consider where it was filmed. The eight-pointed star is not a generic shape. It is one of the oldest symbols in human civilization, the emblem of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess the Akkadians later called Ishtar. It was pressed into clay and carved into temple stone in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, the heart of the Middle East, around 3000 BC. Five thousand years ago it marked her across the ancient Near East as the star of heaven. And in 2013, a U.S. military sensor recorded an eight-pointed star moving through the sky over that same ground, and the most advanced intelligence apparatus on Earth could not say what it was. The oldest symbol of the region, unidentified, over the region that invented it. Make of that what you will. We only insist that you notice it.
The rest of it
PR38 is the emblem. It is not the only thing in this release that matters.
The 2023 western-states case. Seven federal law enforcement officers, two days, multiple states, reporting independently. Orbs launching other orbs. A large glowing sphere. An object they could only call a “translucent kite.” This isn’t a grainy dot. It’s a stack of credible professional witnesses, and the government said so itself: the case is “among the most compelling within AARO’s current holdings.” That is the federal government grading its own files and putting this one at the top.
The modern military encounters. A 2025 report of a thermally “super hot” orb that accelerated and split into multiple objects. A 2024 incident over Iraq where a craft crossed a U.S. aircraft’s surveillance systems at high speed mid-mission. An infrared object near Japan. Real operators. Real sensors. Real reports the government can’t close.
The Apollo files. NASA transcripts of astronauts, Buzz Aldrin among them, describing lights they couldn’t account for. An Apollo 17 photograph with three lights in formation above the lunar surface. The astronauts who walked on the Moon saw things up there, and the transcripts have been sitting in a file the whole time.
The historical material runs back to the 1940s: an FBI eyewitness compilation from 1947 to 1968, released with fewer redactions than ever before. Whatever this phenomenon is, it has a paper trail older than the Air Force.
Why we exist
The momentum did not start this month. It started in December 2017, when the New York Times exposed a secret Pentagon program and aired the footage, and when Navy Commander David Fravor went on the record about the “Tic Tac” he chased off the Nimitz in 2004, an object that outflew his fighter and accelerated past anything he could explain. That testimony did not fade. It built. Intelligence assessments, the creation of AARO, congressional hearings, and now an official government archive on a .gov domain. The dam has been cracking for nine years. On May 8 it broke. The people switching sides this week, scientists, public figures, the ones who spent years rolling their eyes, are not early. They are the last ones through the door.
Here is the deal we are making with you. We will not insult you by pretending this subject is beneath serious attention. The government just spent its own credibility proving it isn’t. And we will not insult you by selling you a saucer every time a sensor catches something it can’t resolve. We take the evidence seriously. We tell you what is known, what is unresolved, and which is which. When the government itself says we don’t know what this is, that is not a dead end. That is the story.
We are 8 Pointed Star. We are named for a thing the most powerful government on Earth filmed, chased through every channel it has, and still cannot explain.
We are here to follow the evidence, wherever it goes.