The Trump administration has now released five rounds of previously classified UFO files to the public, a transparency push that has drawn rare bipartisan praise and surfaced decades of unexplained military and civilian encounters the government never resolved.
The Pentagon on Friday published its fifth tranche of declassified files on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, as part of President Trump's Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, known as PURSUE. The release includes FBI interview summaries, witness accounts spanning seven decades, and military sensor footage, all material the government had kept from public view until now.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth framed the disclosure as a fulfillment of the president's directive. The files landed on a dedicated government website at war.gov/UFO, where Americans can review the material themselves.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed the release in a statement reported by Fox News:
"Today, the Department of War is publishing the fifth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) files as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE)."
The government officially classifies the archived materials as "unresolved cases", meaning no definitive determination has been made about the nature of the observed phenomena. That label is worth keeping in mind. These files do not prove alien life. But they do confirm that the U.S. government has collected, classified, and sat on reports of aerial objects it could not explain, for decades.
Among the most striking documents in the release is a three-page FBI interview summary from a military pilot who described a silent, 500-foot equilateral triangular object over Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in 2002. The pilot told the FBI he had been stargazing with a colleague at roughly 4:30 a.m. when stars began disappearing above them.
The object displayed no visible lights and traveled at approximately 173 miles per hour. It rolled 90 degrees onto its left side while veering right, then returned to level flight. The pilot's summary captured the moment simply: "It appeared as if something huge went overhead."
The second pilot present also witnessed the event. His reaction, recorded in the FBI summary: "Did you see that?"
The pilot did not report the encounter at the time. But beginning in October 2023, while flying commercial routes, the same pilot reported a new string of unexplained sightings. On a flight from Boston to Dublin at 37,000 feet, he first noticed lights he believed were hovering at least 13,000 feet above his aircraft. The lights brightened and faded in cycles lasting ten seconds to one minute. Some held position. Others traveled in straight lines or changed direction suddenly.
He described roughly ten encounters, each lasting between 45 minutes and two hours. The lights resembled aircraft landing lights, but their behavior did not match planes, meteors, satellites, or Elon Musk's Starlink constellation. During a February 2024 flight, the pilot recorded more than ten such lights near Sioux Falls while traveling at approximately Mach 0.80. He said he never felt threatened and believed the lights stayed at least 100 miles away.
The Trump administration's broader push to declassify intelligence documents that previous administrations kept hidden has become a recurring theme, one that extends well beyond UAPs into election security and other national security matters.
Two separate Colorado Springs encounters appear in the files. In October 2023, an unnamed witness standing in a parking lot with a co-worker on a clear night reported a strange dark-gray cloud that appeared stationary and looked "pixelated or distorted." A red light emerged from the cloud, followed by an enormous solid-black triangle displaying diffuse red light at each of its three corners.
The witness estimated the object was as large as the parking lot itself and three to five stories thick. It initially moved at a speed comparable to a helicopter, then "almost instantaneously" accelerated to an estimated Mach 1 or Mach 2. Waves appeared to radiate from the craft, producing a shimmering distortion similar to a heat mirage. There was no noise, no visible propulsion, and no unusual odor.
The object rolled 90 degrees onto its left side while veering right, the same maneuver described by the Bagram pilot, then returned to level flight and disappeared to the south. The cloud vanished with it. About one minute later, the witness called his wife. She told him his voice sounded "robotic," as though electronic interference was disrupting the call.
The FBI report records the witness's account but offers no conclusion about what he saw and does not independently verify his estimates of the object's size, speed, or altitude.
A second Colorado Springs report from 2023 describes a smaller triangular object that passed roughly 300 feet above a couple's home. The witnesses described it as "almost see-through," surrounded by haze and ripples, "like you were looking at an object that is underwater." The object banked until nearly vertical without changing direction or altitude, then disappeared within four seconds.
The release also includes an analysis of films shot over Utah and Montana in the early 1950s. The objects appeared disk-shaped and blue-white. Analysts calculated that objects in the Utah footage traveled at up to 2,457 miles per hour, with acceleration reaching 965 times the force of gravity.
The report concluded that birds, balloons, and conventional aircraft could not explain the calculated movements. The objects were described as neither identifiable natural phenomena nor "commonly known man-made objects." But the analysts acknowledged a significant caveat: their speed and acceleration figures relied on assumptions about the objects' distance from the camera, which they admitted was arbitrary.
That kind of honest qualification runs throughout the files. The documents preserve what witnesses reported and what analysts could measure, but they do not leap to conclusions. The government labeled these cases unresolved, not confirmed, not debunked.
The administration has also released never-before-seen images and videos from the Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions, dating to 1969 and 1972 respectively, as part of the broader UFO file releases. Those materials were made available on the same war.gov/UFO portal.
One of the more unusual accounts describes an encounter from this year. Two witnesses reported red lights descending over a remote area of the western United States. One light allegedly hovered just six feet above the ground. Another glow appeared to move through a dry wash roughly 330 feet behind the witnesses.
After the encounter, one witness discovered that his mechanical watch had jumped 25 minutes ahead. His phone, his vehicle clock, and his companion's digital watch all showed the correct time. The mechanical watch continued running normally afterward but remained 25 minutes fast.
A separate file describes a large metal sphere that reportedly crashed into the center of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1963, gouging a 13-foot-deep hole. The object had window-shaped openings covered with thick glass and contained a human body dressed in heavy clothing bearing indecipherable inscriptions. The records preserve witness statements and media reports from the era rather than verified government findings, and they offer no evidence that the object was extraterrestrial.
The transparency effort has earned something rare in Washington: agreement across party lines. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, said simply, "Transparency is the only path to truth." Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, said Americans "deserve transparency, accountability, and access to information regarding UAPs and disclosure that the government has kept hidden from the public for decades."
That bipartisan moment on the UFO files stands out in a political environment where the two parties agree on almost nothing. When a Democratic senator publicly praises a Trump initiative, the underlying demand, stop hiding things from the public, clearly cuts deeper than partisan loyalty.
Rep. Tim Burchett went further. The Tennessee Republican, as Breitbart reported, claims he has seen far more shocking classified UAP material from "every alphabet agency there is" that has yet to be released. If Burchett is right, these five tranches are only the beginning.
Not everyone is impressed by what has come out so far. National Review's Andrew Follett argued that the released materials contain "no credible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence" and that the footage shows mundane technical artifacts rather than alien phenomena. Follett noted the releases include no crash-recovery details, no reverse-engineering data, no biological autopsy reports, and no official analyses concluding anything beyond "unidentified."
"After such immense hype, the released photos show little," Follett wrote. That is a fair point, if the standard is definitive proof of alien life. But the administration never promised little green men. It promised to stop hiding files. On that front, it has delivered.
The broader pattern of holding intelligence officials accountable for concealing information from elected leaders and the public has become a defining feature of this administration's approach to the national security bureaucracy.
Hegseth put the administration's position plainly:
"These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation, and it's time the American people see it for themselves."
Whether the files contain proof of something extraordinary or simply decades of unanswered questions, the principle is the same. A government that classifies what it cannot explain owes its citizens more than silence, and five releases in, this administration has at least started paying that debt.
