The Pentagon on Friday unsealed the first tranche of what it described as “new, never-before-seen” files to otherworldly encounters, months after President Donald Trump directed the government to begin disclosing intelligence to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena, and unidentified flying objects.
Trump, in a post on Truth Social, characterized the dissemination of the archives as an effort to achieve “complete and maximum transparency.”
“With these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’” the president wrote, adding, “Have Fun and Enjoy!”
The Department of Defense — in coordination with the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Energy, NASA and the FBI — disclosed 162 files on its newly launched “UFO” website. Additional batches are expected to be released on a rolling basis as they are discovered and declassified.
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a statement. “It’s time the American people see it for themselves.”
The Pentagon, however, cautioned that much of the material remains analytically indeterminate.
“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,” a caveat accompanying the files said.
In the initial release, accounts of unidentified objects were reported in the skies over Greece, Iraq, Japan, Kuwait, the United States and elsewhere.
One of the documents includes a transcript of a conversation between Mission Control and astronauts James “Jim” Lovell and Frank Borman during 1965’s Gemini 7 space mission. The transcript opens with Borman’s report of a “bogey” — a contemporary nomenclature for an unknown aircraft — as well as a debris field he said consisted of “very, very many […] hundreds of little particles.” The record is accompanied by handwritten annotations documenting the encounter, including a note in the upper-right corner reading “UFO Sighting by Borman.”
A separate document contains an “unresolved” unidentified aerial phenomenon report from May 2022 over Kuwait, with an image showing an elongated area of contrast in the upper-left quadrant that appears to increase in intensity along its length.
The Trump administration’s disclosure comes in the wake of a viral moment in February, when former President Barack Obama appeared to lend credence to long-running public speculation by saying during a podcast appearance that aliens “are real.” He later walked back the remark.
Speaking on Wednesday, Obama clarified: “One of the things you learn as president is government is terrible at keeping secrets.”
“If there were aliens, or alien spaceships, or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, seen, photographs, what have you, I promise you, some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend,” Obama asserted.
But at the time, Trump told reporters he “doesn’t know if they’re real or not,” while criticizing his predecessor’s comments as a “big mistake.” He subsequently pledged to release any files on UFOs and extraterrestrials citing the “tremendous interest” in the topic, a move that garnered bipartisan support.
Tanya Noury is a reporter for Military Times and Defense News, with coverage focusing on the White House and Pentagon.
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