On Friday, the United States Pentagon published a new tranche of declassified records documenting decades of reported Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), more commonly known to the public as UFOs. The release, which fulfills a presidential mandate issued earlier this year, adds dozens of new accounts spanning 80 years, stretching from 1948 to modern day, including vivid first-person testimony from a senior intelligence officer and never-before-seen combat footage of a shootdown of an unknown object.
The newly released materials consist of six written documents, multiple audio recordings, and 51 separate video files. Among the most notable documents is a 116-page 1950 report compiled by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program, which catalogs 209 distinct civilian and military sightings of unexplained craft—including green orbs, disc-shaped vehicles, and fireball objects—across the United States between 1948 and 1950. One section of the historic report details a string of encounters in Sandia, New Mexico, where witnesses observed unknown objects that maneuvered erratically, vanished mid-flight, and occasionally exploded in the atmosphere.
The most dramatic new account comes from an anonymous senior U.S. intelligence officer, who shared a first-hand encounter that occurred in 2025 while he was on board a military helicopter conducting operations over the western United States. The officer and his team had been dispatched to investigate reports of loud, unusual thuds in mountainous test range territory, where multiple other personnel had reported UAP sightings in the days prior. During the more than an hour-long encounter, the officer described counting “countless orange orbs” swarming across the terrain just above ground level. The objects, which he measured as unusually hot on thermal detection, flared their brightness up and down repeatedly, and were oval-shaped with bright white or yellow cores that emitted light in all directions. After several minutes of fluctuating brightness, the swarm of orbs merged into a distinct triangular formation before disappearing entirely. The officer told investigators he was too stunned and focused on assessing whether the objects posed a national security threat to capture any photographs of the encounter, leaving only his written testimony.
Most of the newly released video footage is grainy infrared footage captured by U.S. military aircraft between 2018 and 2023. One of the most high-profile clips included in the release shows a U.S. fighter jet shooting down an unknown blurry object over Lake Huron in February 2023. This incident occurred at the height of national tension following the transiting of a Chinese surveillance balloon across U.S. airspace, when the Biden administration ordered the downing of multiple unidentified high-altitude objects near the U.S.-Canada border. Another clip documents a spherical UAP moving at high speed over the Yellow Sea in 2022. The Pentagon notes that many of the released videos lack a fully documented chain of custody, meaning there is no guarantee they have not been altered or tampered with at any point since their original capture.
This release marks the second batch of UAP records declassified under an executive order issued by President Donald Trump earlier this year. The Pentagon published its first tranche of 161 declassified files on May 8, and committed at that time to release additional materials in the coming months. Following the first release, President Trump issued a public statement encouraging American citizens to review the materials and draw their own conclusions, writing, “with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”
Unlike many popular theories surrounding UAP releases, the Pentagon has stressed that none of the declassified files to date draw definitive conclusions about the existence of extraterrestrial life, nor do they provide confirmed evidence of alien technology. U.S. officials have repeatedly stated that the public is free to interpret the disclosed materials as they see fit. The release also includes reference to an unexplained object captured during NASA’s 1969 Apollo 12 mission to the Moon, which has been highlighted and enlarged for public review.
Transparency advocates in Congress have welcomed the release but pushed for even faster disclosure of remaining classified records. Congressman Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who has long called for full government transparency around UAP encounters, thanked President Trump for the new release on social media platform X, writing simply “Let keep digging!” When the first tranche of files was released earlier in May, Burchett noted that the initial release was just a small fraction of the total records held by the government, teasing that more dramatic revelations are still to come. The Pentagon has confirmed that additional batches of declassified UAP files will be published on a rolling basis in the coming months, as officials complete the declassification review process.