In February, as Americans were searching through the Epstein files, President Trump announced plans for a large release of government data pegged to another topic that’s stoked conspiratorial flames: unidentified flying objects. On Friday, the Defense Department dropped what it called a “new, never-before-seen” tranche of documents related to UFOs. “Have Fun and Enjoy!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The URL is compelling: war.gov/UFO. But if alien watchers are looking for proof that the government is harboring evidence of extraterrestrial life, they’ll need to wait a little longer. The first release was fairly limited, with more files to be published “every few weeks,” according to the site.
So far, visitors to the site can learn about an incident during the Apollo 12 mission in 1969, when Alan Bean told Houston he was seeing “flashes of light” that were “sailing off into the distance.” (Bean made the same claim in public in the years before his death in 2018.) The files also contain an account from Apollo 17 astronauts describing bright lights that look like “the fourth of July” that were rotating “way out in the distance.” The image from the encounter just looks like a dot deep in space.
But the files also include a photo of a UFO encounter in September 2023 that shows an “apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky.” The blob is enormous and scary — much larger and alienlike than the usual flashes of light or objects behaving strangely that are seen in UFO videos. But a quick look at the captions reveal it is a “composite sketch” of an actual field with a “graphic overlay” rendered by an FBI lab.
Friday’s release, with just 161 files, leaves much to be desired. And even the Defense Department isn’t sure about everything in there. “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,” the website stated.
