The Pentagon on Friday began releasing a new trove of declassified materials on unidentified anomalous phenomena, spanning decades of military encounters, government cables and astronaut debriefs. President Donald Trump, who had promised a major disclosure of UFO records, wrote on his Truth Social platform that the public can now “decide for themselves: ‘What the hell is going on?’ Have fun and enjoy!”
The files appear on a government website styled with black‑and‑white military imagery and typewriter‑like fonts. While the Pentagon described the material as “never before seen,” some of the reports had already been public for years.
Among the records is a 1994 cable from the U.S. embassy in Tajikistan detailing a flight over Kazakhstan. On board, a Tajik pilot and three Americans saw an intensely illuminated object that “made 90‑degree turns, corkscrewed and circled at high speeds,” the cable states. Another military report from the Aegean Sea in 2023 describes a UAP flying just above the ocean surface and making “multiple 90‑degree turns at an estimated speed of 80 mph.”
A U.S. intelligence officer told investigators that during a helicopter search last year he encountered a “super‑hot” sphere hovering above the ground. It traveled roughly 20 miles at high speed, and when he looked again he observed four or five more spheres whose brightness pulsed on and off.
In a 1969 debrief of the Apollo 11 crew, astronaut Buzz Aldrin recalled seeing a “considerable” object near the Moon and a “fairly bright light” that the crew thought might be a laser. A separate FBI interview from September 2023 records a drone pilot who reported watching a “linear object” with a light so bright he could “see bands within the light.” The object was visible for five to ten seconds, then the light went out and it disappeared. A NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 shows three dots in a triangular formation; a Pentagon caption notes there is “no consensus on the nature of the anomaly” but a preliminary analysis suggested it could be a “physical object.”
The release includes more than 20 video files captured by military sensors in locations ranging from Syria and Japan to North America. The footage shows everything from quick‑moving dots to a football‑shaped object seen over the East China Sea in 2022. The most recent video, from Jan. 1 of this year, appears to show two circular lights flying against a dark background over North America. Several files contain short clips of small, ambiguous objects moving over landscapes in Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.
A 1948 report from American aviators in the Netherlands expressed concern about recurring flying‑saucer sightings; their Swedish counterparts also saw them and believed they did not come from “any culture currently known on Earth,” the report says.
A widely‑shared video showing a star‑shaped craft zigzagging through the air in 2013 over the Middle East is probably nothing more than a hot jet engine producing a diffraction pattern in the camera, said Sean Kirkpatrick, former director of the Pentagon’s All‑domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Kirkpatrick warned that without proper analysis, the release “will only fuel more speculation, conspiracy theories and armchair pseudoscience.” The Pentagon’s own 2024 report already found no evidence that the U.S. government has recovered alien technology or confirmed extraterrestrial life.
Some lawmakers want even more transparency. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Fla.), who had demanded 46 videos flagged by whistleblowers, said Friday that the Pentagon will release those materials later. Rep. Tim Burchett (R‑Tenn.) thanked Trump for “keeping his word” but added that “transparency won’t happen all at once; it will take some time.”
The Sol Foundation, a UAP research group, urged Congress to mandate a comprehensive review of all classified UAP records. “While the new step taken today toward full disclosure of government knowledge on UAP is welcome, many more must be taken to end the decades of secrecy that kept the American people in the dark,” said executive director Peter Skafish and retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet. Trump has previously released records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., which revealed little beyond what was already known.