The Defense Department launched a web page Friday containing records spanning nearly 80 years of UFO-related material, some of which was redacted or had already been made public.
The released records include blurry images from videos captured by the military this year and in 2025 labeled as “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Another one purports to show three clustered lights above the moon’s terrain captured during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
“The materials archived here are unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena,” the web page says. “This can occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of sufficient data, and the Department of War welcomes the application of private-sector analysis, information and expertise.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement that the information being released was something the American public has long wanted made public.
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“The American people have long sought transparency about the government’s knowledge of unidentified anomalous phenomena,” Gabbard said. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is actively coordinating the Intelligence Community’s declassification efforts with the Department of War to ensure a careful, comprehensive, and unprecedented review of our holdings to provide the American people with maximum transparency. Today’s release is the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort.”
Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine who has reported on UFO sightings since the 1990s, called the release of the documents frustrating.
“It’s the usual grainy videos and blurry photographs and stories about weird things in the sky of which there have always been thousands of reports over the decades, so there’s nothing new there,” he told NOTUS.
The Defense Department said it plans to release more documents on a rolling basis. The records come from the FBI, Defense Department, NASA and the State Department.
One document detailed an incident that reportedly occurred in late 2025, though the exact date is redacted. The document is an FBI interview with a “senior U.S. intelligence official” who described an encounter at a military facility. The official said they saw a “super-hot” orb that traveled for approximately 20 miles at a speed that was “too fast for the helicopter in pursuit.”
The official also noted seeing a “swarm” of lights moving in all directions, with four to five orbs flaring up and down.
In September 2023, the FBI interviewed U.S. citizens who reported seeing an object that was a “metallic bronze in color.” Another citizen had described seeing an object that was “metallic/gray in color” at a U.S. test site.
Based on these descriptions, the FBI took a photo of the site and added a graphic overlay of the object, which eyewitnesses had described as materializing out of a bright light and disappearing almost instantly.
“There’s one artist’s rendition of an orb, which is a translation meaning, ‘We don’t have any evidence or any photographic evidence or any physical evidence of any kind, so we’re just going to have an artist sketch what somebody said,’” Shermer said about the graphic. “So it’s just a story.”
The files include photos from NASA that are labeled as showing unidentified figures seen from the moon in 1969 from the Apollo 12 landing site, though the website notes some of these photos were previously released.
Unexplained aerial phenomena came up in a high-profile conversation days before the Trump administration’s release of the information. In an interview with late-night host Stephen Colbert that aired Tuesday, former President Barack Obama addressed conspiracies that the federal government had captured aliens.
“For those of you who still think that we’ve gotten little green men underground somewhere, one of the things you learn as president is the government is terrible at keeping secrets,” Obama said.
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