The Pentagon Just Dropped Its First Batch of UFO Files
War.gov/UFO is now home to declassified files on orange orbs, bronze ellipsoids, and a moon photo no one has been able to explain since 1972.
Friday, May 8, 2026
(Composite sketch via war.gov/UFO)
EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—The U.S. government's UFO vault just got pried open, well, sort of.
The Department of War published its first tranche of declassified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) records on Friday morning under a clunkily named new program: the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE.
The release went live at war.gov/UFO and consists of 162 files: 120 PDFs, 28 videos, and 14 standalone images, drawn from the FBI, the Department of War, NASA, and the State Department.
The drop is the long-awaited follow-through on Trump's February 19 directive ordering the Pentagon to start releasing government files on aliens, UAPs, and UFOs. The order was announced after publicly accusing Barack Obama of leaking classified information by saying on a podcast that aliens are "real." A month later, the White House quietly registered aliens.gov, although today’s document dump was published elsewhere.
Per the Department of War's press release, every record published Friday is an "unresolved" case, meaning the U.S. government couldn't definitively explain what was observed. Additional tranches are promised "on a rolling basis."
"These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation," Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said in the release, "and it's time the American people see it for themselves."
The marquee items, based on a review of the primary documents, include a multi-witness federal-law-enforcement case involving seven federal agents in the western U.S. describing orange orbs that emit smaller red orbs, a glowing object hovering near a rock pinnacle, and a spotlight beam that one agent reported stopped short "as if blocked by something invisible."
Another interesting document detailed a multi-witness September 2023 sighting at a U.S. test site in which an FBI Lab composite sketch depicts a 130-to-195-foot bronze metallic ellipsoid that "materialized out of a bright light in the sky" and "disappeared instantaneously.”
The release also includes decades-old material, like a fuller version of an FBI case file documenting UFO investigations from 1947 to 1968, NASA astronaut transcripts from Apollo 11, 12, 17, Skylab, and Gemini VII, and State Department cables from Papua New Guinea, Kazakhstan, Mexico, and Turkmenistan.
Interestingly, the Department of War announced it had retrieved the original 1972 Apollo 17 film from an archive to forensically re-analyze a photo containing three "dots" in a triangular formation in the lunar sky.
There are also a number of new videos of odd flying objects, but they all appear to be blurry, and are unlikely to flip any hardened skeptics into believers.
The files are also noteworthy for what they don’t include. There’s nothing from the Department of Energy, CIA, NSA, NRO, or DIA, no crash retrievals, no biological material, and no physics conclusions.
But that could change.
This is Release 01. The Department of War says more files will land "every few weeks," with the conspicuously absent CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA, and Department of Energy presumably waiting their turn.
While the recent file drop may seem less like an Area 51 warehouse full of government secrets, and perhaps more like a messy filing cabinet, it’s at least an official window the public can look through. Hopefully, its name—PURSUE—suggests the hunt is only just getting started.
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