Pentagon Releases Decades of Classified UFO Records to Public

On May 8, 2026, the Department of Defense uploaded 162 previously classified files to a new government website — war.gov/UFO — marking the first batch of what officials describe as an ongoing effort to release the federal government's records on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the military's current term for UFOs [1][2]. The files span nearly eight decades, from a November 1948 Air Force intelligence assessment of unidentified objects over Europe to military encounter reports filed as recently as 2026 [3][4].

The release is the opening salvo of PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — an interagency program established after President Donald Trump directed the Department of Defense in February 2026 to "find, review, identify, declassify and publicly release" unresolved UAP records across the federal government [5][6].

"These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — it's time the American people see it for themselves," said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth [3]. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called the release "the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort" [3].

What's in the Files

The initial tranche consists of 120 PDFs, 28 videos totaling 41 minutes of footage, and 14 image files drawn from six agencies: the Department of Defense, the FBI, NASA, the State Department, the Department of Energy, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [4][7].

The material covers incidents across multiple continents and decades. Highlights include:

• Apollo-era lunar photographs from the 1969 Apollo 12 mission and the 1972 Apollo 17 mission showing unexplained objects above the lunar horizon. The Pentagon noted "no consensus about the nature of the anomaly" in the Apollo 17 image but said preliminary analysis suggested a possible "physical object" [2][7].
• A 1948 Air Force intelligence memo describing multiple unidentified objects observed across Europe, deemed "perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking" [3].
• A 1955 CIA report documenting Senator Richard Russell's observation of "flying disc aircraft" from a train window in the Soviet Union, partially redacted [3].
• A 1965 Gemini 7 transcript in which astronauts James Lovell and Frank Borman reported a "bogey" and debris field [2].
• An FBI historical case file (1947–1968) on "flying discs," including Roswell incident documentation [4].
• A September 2023 FBI interview with a federal law enforcement officer who described orbs resembling "the Eye of Sauron," with the Pentagon calling these reports "among the most compelling" in its holdings [8].
• A 2024 Iraq encounter in which a mysterious craft crossed U.S. aircraft surveillance at high speed during an unrelated operation [8].
• A 2025 intelligence account describing a "super-hot" orb hovering above ground that traveled 20 miles faster than pursuing helicopters [8].
• State Department diplomatic cables (1985–2025) detailing international UAP incidents [4].

No review by AARO, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, has concluded that any UAP is extraterrestrial in origin [8]. Most reported sightings cluster near active military operations, concentrated in Cold War-era hotspots and the Middle East [8].

The Scale of Redaction

Of the 162 files, 108 — roughly two-thirds — contain redactions [5][7]. The Department of Defense stated that information was withheld to "protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP" [5]. Officials added that "no redactions have been made … concerning information about the nature or existence of any encounter reported as a UAP or related phenomena" [5].

Several documents contain entire pages blacked out [8]. The gap between the initiative's rhetoric — described by the department as a "historic transparency effort" — and 108 partially redacted files is the kind of distance that sustains the distrust the initiative was designed to address [5].

The Pentagon also cautioned that "many of the materials have not yet been analyzed for resolution of any anomalies" and were "only screened for security purposes" [2][7]. In other words, the government released raw case files without conclusions about what the reported phenomena actually were.

Legal Authority: Executive Order, Not the Disclosure Act

The release was driven by presidential directive, not by the UAP provisions Congress inserted into the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (Sections 1841–1843) [9]. Those provisions required the National Archives to establish a "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection" and mandated that every federal agency review, identify, and organize UAP records for potential public disclosure by October 2024 [9].

Under the NDAA framework, agencies can "postpone" disclosure if release would pose "a grave threat to military defense, intelligence operations, or the conduct of foreign relations," but must notify Congress within 15 days and periodically review postponed records, with mandatory public release 25 years after creation [9]. Representative Eric Burlison introduced a UAP Disclosure Act of 2025 as an amendment to the FY2026 NDAA to strengthen these timelines [10].

The Trump administration's PURSUE initiative runs parallel to — but operates under different authority than — the congressional framework. The executive order gives the president broad declassification power, while the NDAA provisions create a more structured, legislatively mandated process with independent review mechanisms. Whether PURSUE satisfies or supersedes the NDAA requirements remains an open legal question.

How Many Records Exist — and How Many Are Still Hidden

The 162-file release represents a small fraction of the government's total UAP holdings. The Department of Defense has not disclosed how many UAP-related records exist across federal agencies. For context: Project Blue Book alone generated 12,618 case files between 1952 and 1969 [11]. The AARO historical record report reviewed classified and unclassified archives across the entire U.S. government since 1945 and conducted approximately 30 interviews [12]. AARO's most recent annual report, covering May 2023 through June 2024, received 757 new UAP reports in that period alone [13].

Source: ODNI Annual UAP Reports

Data as of Nov 14, 2024CSV

The surge in reporting — from 144 cases pre-2021 to 757 in a single year — reflects both expanded reporting mechanisms and reduced stigma, not necessarily an increase in actual incidents [13]. Of AARO's case holdings, 49 were resolved during the May 2023–June 2024 period (explained as balloons, birds, drones, satellites, and aircraft), 243 were recommended for closure, and 444 remained in an "Active Archive" due to insufficient data [13].

The Cost of Looking Up

The U.S. government has spent more than seven decades and tens of millions of dollars investigating aerial phenomena — though the total remains difficult to pin down because early programs operated within larger Air Force intelligence budgets.

Source: AARO Historical Record Report Vol. 1

Data as of Mar 8, 2024CSV

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and its predecessor, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), received $22 million from 2007 to 2012 — a figure that remained secret until the New York Times disclosed the program in December 2017 [11][12]. AARO, established in 2022, operates with an annual budget of approximately $27.5 million [14]. Between AATIP and AARO, there was a roughly 40-year gap in formal government UAP investigation following the termination of Project Blue Book in 1969 [12].

By comparison, France's GEIPAN — a unit of the French space agency CNES — has conducted the world's longest continuously operating government UAP investigation since its founding in 1977 [15]. Operating on a modest budget within CNES, GEIPAN has studied approximately 6,000 cases, with about 22% remaining unexplained [15]. Russia and China have both pursued UAP research — the Soviet Union secretly investigated thousands of cases during the Cold War — but neither has published comparable budget figures [16].

The Nuclear Connection

Among the most sensitive aspects of the released files is the continued pattern of UAP reports near nuclear assets. Over the past 75 years, U.S. military and intelligence personnel have reported unidentified objects near sites associated with nuclear power, weaponry, and technology — from early atomic test sites to active nuclear naval fleets [17].

F-18 pilots from the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group reported near-daily UAP encounters for several months between summer 2014 and spring 2015 during training maneuvers along the Eastern Seaboard. The objects appeared as discs, cubes within spheres, and small round formations — none with visible engines or exhaust [17]. The 2004 USS Nimitz encounter, in which Navy pilots tracked a white "Tic Tac"–shaped object with extraordinary flight characteristics, remains one of the most publicly discussed cases [17].

Declassified radar logs have documented objects breaching restricted airspace over active intercontinental ballistic missile silos [17]. Several Department of Energy incident reports describe UAPs near nuclear facilities during which electronic monitoring systems went offline [17]. How these incidents compare to officially acknowledged drone and balloon intrusions over the same sites is difficult to assess — the government has not released a comprehensive side-by-side analysis, and the categories of "UAP" and "known drone intrusion" overlap in ways the current classification system does not cleanly separate.

The Intelligence Community's Case for Caution

Career intelligence officials and national security lawyers have long argued that UAP disclosures, regardless of content, create genuine risks. The concern is not about confirming or denying extraterrestrial contact — it is about what the documents reveal about U.S. sensor capabilities, surveillance platforms, and collection methods.

Sean Kirkpatrick, who served as the first director of AARO before departing in 2023, responded to the May 2026 release by warning: "There's nothing unexpected in the release, and without any analysis or context, will only serve to fuel more speculation, conspiracy and arm-chair pseudoscience, particularly from the playhouse politics theater company" [8].

The redaction categories cited by the Pentagon — eyewitness identities, government facility locations, and military site information — suggest the government is concerned about revealing the geographic specificity of its surveillance infrastructure rather than the phenomena themselves [5]. This tracks with the standard intelligence community argument: even mundane UAP reports can expose where the U.S. was looking, with what sensors, and at what resolution.

FOIA Litigants and the Long Wait

The PURSUE release did not emerge from a vacuum. Civilian researchers have been prying these records loose for decades. John Greenewald Jr. founded The Black Vault in 1996 — when he was a teenager — and has since filed over 5,000 FOIA requests targeting the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, NSA, DIA, and other agencies, accumulating more than two million pages of declassified documents [18][19]. In 2020, The Black Vault filed a FOIA request to the U.S. Navy for additional UAP video footage; two years later, the government confirmed more footage existed but refused to release it, citing national security [18].

Whether the PURSUE release includes material that FOIA requesters had been specifically seeking — or whether it overlaps with records already obtained through litigation — has not been systematically assessed. The government has provided no mechanism for independent verification that the released files are complete and unaltered.

The Precedent Problem

Major government declassification efforts have a mixed track record on completeness. The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, widely considered the strongest declassification law ever written, created an independent review panel and mandated release with minimal redactions [20]. Yet as of 2023, NARA reported that 4,684 documents remained "fully or partially withheld" [20]. President Trump ordered the release of remaining JFK files in January 2025, and over 60,000 documents followed in March 2025 — more than three decades after the law was enacted [20].

The Church Committee investigations of the 1970s exposed FBI and CIA domestic surveillance programs, including COINTELPRO, but subsequent FOIA litigation revealed that agencies had withheld relevant materials from the committee itself. The pattern across declassification history is consistent: initial releases are described as comprehensive, and subsequent disclosures reveal gaps.

No chain of custody or authentication mechanism has been provided for the PURSUE files. There is no independent body — analogous to the JFK Act's Assassination Records Review Board — empowered to verify completeness. The Department of Defense is both the custodian of the records and the arbiter of what gets released.

Academic and Public Interest

The release arrives amid growing academic attention to UAP. Research publications mentioning "unidentified aerial phenomena" have more than tripled since 2011, peaking at 189 papers in 2025 [21].

Source: OpenAlex

Data as of Jan 1, 2026CSV

Political Cross-Currents

The release has attracted criticism from opposing directions. Representative Thomas Massie called the UFO disclosure the "ultimate weapon of mass distraction," accusing the administration of using UFO enthusiasm to deflect attention from controversy surrounding the handling of Jeffrey Epstein–related files [22]. Former President Barack Obama stated during a podcast that aliens were "real" but later clarified he "saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact" [7].

President Trump posted on Truth Social: "With these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, 'WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?'" [2]. The Pentagon itself adopted a similar posture, telling the public to "make up their own minds" [2].

What Comes Next

The Department of Defense has committed to releasing additional files "on a rolling basis" with new tranches posted "every few weeks" [1][4]. The scope of future releases — and whether they will include the analysis the first batch lacked — remains undefined. The 162 files released on May 8 are, by any measure, a beginning rather than a conclusion. Whether they represent a genuine shift toward transparency or a carefully managed information release depends on what follows — and on whether any independent body is empowered to verify what was left behind.