The Pentagon on Friday released an initial group of previously secret files documenting reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — a move sought for decades by some.
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a statement on X.
Among the highlights is Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, telling a 1969 debrief of seeing a “sizeable” object close to the lunar surface, and a “fairly bright light source” the crew felt could be a laser.
Photo: the US Department of Defense via Reuters
Alongside numerous written reports is a collection of video files from military cameras around the globe. Objects include a football-shaped object spotted over the East China Sea in 2022; and footage recorded in the last few years of dots moving erratically, and at different speeds, over Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.
The release follows a directive from US President Donald Trump in February for federal agencies to begin identifying, declassifying and releasing government files related to UFOs, now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), and the possibility of alien life beyond Earth.
The move, the US president said at the time, was “based on the tremendous interest shown” by the public, and reflected renewed appetite for information about the US government’s knowledge of, and perceived involvement in, programs tracking and even housing supposed aliens and their spacecraft.
Last month, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman gave the drive for greater transparency at the agency more credence by stating the space agency planned missions to space at least in part because of the possible existence of extraterrestrial alien lifeforms.
“The odds that we will find something at some point to suggest that we are not alone are pretty high,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press.
Even so, the first batch of 162 files released on Friday, incorporating hundreds of pages on a monochrome new defense department Web site, offered little new or conclusive evidence.
The public “can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files,” the Pentagon statement said.
They include old state department cables, FBI documents and transcripts from NASA’s crewed flights into space. Other pages, stretching back decades, feature ambiguous eyewitness accounts of encounters with or alleged sightings of UFOs.
For example, one previously confidential 1947 report from US Air Defense Command headquarters in New York features an account by the pilot and navigator of a Pan Am commercial jetliner who said they momentarily sighted a mystery “bright orange object” in the sky.
The object was visible for only seconds, then disappeared quickly behind a cloud and was not seen again, the crew members said.
A more recent document details an FBI interview with someone identified as a drone pilot who, in September 2023, reported seeing a “linear object” with a light bright enough to “see bands within the light” in the sky.
“The object was visible for five to 10 seconds, and then the light went out, and the object vanished,” the person was quoted as saying in the FBI interview.
Meanwhile, Aldrin was not the only astronaut to report a strange occurrence. A NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 shows three dots in a triangular formation. The Pentagon, in an accompanying caption, said: “there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly,” but that a new, preliminary analysis indicated that it could be a “physical object.”
Numerous other pages recount similar but unproven accounts of sudden, brief, or unexpected phenomena witnessed in the sky.
The Pentagon called Friday’s publication of the documents an “initial release,” in partnership with multiple federal entities including the White House, office of the US director of national intelligence, the US Department of Energy, the FBI and NASA.
“Additional files will be released by the Department of War on a rolling basis,” the Pentagon said, using the unofficial name for the defense department.
“While all of the files have been reviewed for security purposes, many of the materials have not yet been analyzed for resolution of any anomalies,” it conceded.
Despite Friday’s hyped release, the policy of the defense department “drip feeding” information to the public is not new.
In 2024, a Pentagon report concluded there was no evidence of extraterrestrial activity, and that most sightings were weather related or misidentified balloons, birds or satellites.
Earlier the same year, a separate report published by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office said the US government was not, and never had been secretly hiding alien technology or extraterrestrial beings from the public, and that a rumored facility in the New Mexico desert purportedly housing alien beings and spacecraft was a hoax.
It followed a claim by former US intelligence official and whistleblower David Grusch that the US government conducted a “multi-decade” secret UFO program that found “non-human” beings.
Additional reporting by AP
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