First UFO Files Released!

The Pentagon released a new UFO website containing 162 files, including videos, photos, witness accounts, and historical documents. This is promised to be only the first batch in a rolling release schedule, with more documents promised to drop in coming weeks. Is this the start of an incredible disclosure process, or a disappointing attempt at a political distraction?

Buildup

President Trump, 3 weeks ago: “I recently directed the Secretary of War… to begin releasing government files relating to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena… I am pleased to report this process is well underway. We found many very interesting documents, I must say, and the first releases will begin very, very soon.”
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Chris Mellon, last week: “We’re hoping that this is going to be very meaningful and extensive, but we’re also under the impression it is going to take a while and it is not necessarily going to be as extensive as many people might want to see… It’s not a nothingburger… They have a considerable amount of data, they have since WW2, and the body of data is growing… ”
- NewsNation quoted him as saying it will be an “avalanche of materials” but that wasn’t actually in the video clip?
UAP whistleblower David Grusch, 3 days ago: “I don't want to be too prophetic or say ‘by a certain date, something's going to come out’, because there's a lot of causal factors, but I do have confidence that it's gonna escalate in the next 60-90 days and I think there's gonna be a lot of pressure… to get the substantive empirical holdings that I've talked about (not videos or anything like that) out into the ether.”
FBI Director Kash Patel, 3 days ago: “We already delivered our first tranche of information… We are all for it. There’s nothing in this subject we don’t want released.”

First Release

President Trump: “As for my promise to you, the Department of War has released the first tranche of the UFO/UAP files to the Public for their review and study… Whereas previous Administrations have failed to be transparent on this subject, with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”
Journalist Peter Doocy: “A White House official left this hard drive on my desk overnight. [It’s labelled] ‘AARO files copy 2 of 3’… This is the first big batch of UFO disclosure ordered by President Trump. Some of the clips and videos on there have popped up different places before. Some of them have not and we have been going through this all morning and overnight… All of these videos have [now] gone live on war.gov/UFO.”

Summaries

AP: “Trump’s administration says the public can draw its own conclusions with the information in the files, which includes old State Department cables, FBI documents and transcripts from NASA of crewed flights into space. A new Pentagon website housing the documents on UAPs has a decidedly retro feel, with black-and-white military imagery of flying objects displayed prominently on the page, with statements displayed in typewriter-like font.”
The Debrief: “The release comes as part of a newly established program that the White House has dubbed the ‘Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters,’ or PURSUE, which officials describe as an ongoing effort to identify, review, and declassify decades of UAP-related records held across multiple federal agencies.”
Pentagon: “In just 12 hours, the site has received 340 million hits from Americans and truth seekers worldwide seeking unfiltered UAP information.”
CBS: “Out of the 162 files, 108 contain redactions. The Pentagon said information was withheld to ‘protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP.’”
Disclosure Foundation: “The modern operational material is one of the most important parts. The first drop includes 93 entries mentioning AARO and 81 involving MISREPs or mission reports. That means much of this release is tied to formal government reporting channels, not just old newspaper clippings.”
CBS: “The documents contain eyewitness testimony, photos and reports of sightings of unexplained objects, detailing incidents dating back decades from around the globe… Friday's release included 120 PDFs, 28 videos and 14 image files. Other photos are contained in PDF documents. The images are mostly still pictures from footage of suspicious objects filmed by military aircraft. Six of the photos show phenomena observed by NASA astronauts during the Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions, captured in photographs taken from the surface of the moon.”

Apollo

CNN: “During the Apollo 12 mission, the second crewed moon landing [in 1969], one of the astronauts, Alan L. Bean, reported to mission control seeing ‘flashes of light’ that are just ‘sailing off in space.’ ‘It looks like some of those things are escaping the Moon,’ the astronaut says. ‘They really haul out of here and just press off at the stars.’ Three years later, during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, two astronauts reported seeing ‘very bright’ particles of light. ‘It’s like the Fourth of July out there!’ one of them, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt, said.”
CBS: “One Apollo 17 photo, from December 1972, is described as depicting ‘three 'dots in a triangular formation’ in the lunar sky. The Pentagon said the photo had been released previously, but the military and NASA are completing a new review of the original film to try to explain what it shows. ‘While this photo has been previously released and discussed by keen observers, there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly. New preliminary US government analysis suggests the image feature is potentially the result of a physical object in the scene,’ the Pentagon caption said. Another document says Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt reported seeing ‘a flash on the lunar surface north of Grimaldi (crater).’”
Dr Beatriz Villarroel: “The Apollo 17 report describes flashes strikingly similar to those detected by the VASCO team -- transient flashes we believe originate from flat, highly reflective and tumbling objects in Earth orbit. Large numbers of them.”
Disclosure Party: “So NASA does have UFO files.”
Journalist Ross Coulthart: “They supposedly did an inquiry a few years ago and found there was no evidence of UAPs. We now know somebody in NASA lied. They lied to the public.”
Former AATIP Director Lue Elizondo: “Wait until the videos and audio come out from… the space shuttle missions… When I was at US Space Force with Dave Grusch… Dave and I had access to some incredible information… Wait til the American people find out what NASA knows and what’s been going on with the International Space Station and before that the space shuttle missions.”

Videos

CBS: “The roughly two dozen videos, which run for a total of 41 minutes, show reported encounters around the world between 2020 and 2026. Most show footage from an infrared camera tracking a white object that appears as a speck on the screen moving through the air. The report that accompanied a video taken in Greece in 2023 said the object was making multiple ‘90-degree turns’ at approximately 80 miles per hour. One of the videos shows an object described as resembling a football in the Indo-Pacific and another from Syria shows two semi-transparent, irregularly shaped orange areas that each appear for two seconds.”
Retired Navy Pilot Ryan Graves, on the 8-point star video: “It’s tough. The video that you’re referencing, the first thing that I see when I look at that, we have to remember that we’re looking at the infrared energy that’s coming from the device, not necessarily the physical shape of it. So what does that heat signature tell us, what does that field coming off the back tell us about the propulsion systems or how it’s maneuvering? I don’t have these answers. I don’t know. I haven’t see anything that looks like that. I will say, with the reports that we’ve had at Americans for Safe Aerospace, other witnesses have described the same thing and have already reached out to me since it dropped, to remind me that they had the same experiences. So although these are onesie-twosie videos that the government has decided to release, this is something average people are seeing as well, not just sensor operators.”

Documents

CBS: “The bulk of the documents feature modern incident reports from members of the military detailing their encounters with strange objects or unexplained phenomena in Iraq, Syria, the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Aden, Greece and elsewhere. One pilot described seeing a ‘triangular and metallic UAP’ flying at 25,000 ft. over the Mediterranean.”
CBS: “The release also includes the FBI's case file detailing reports of unidentified objects and ‘flying discs’ from 1947 to 1968. Spanning 18 separate documents, the case file features ‘high-profile incident accounts, photographic evidence from sites like Oak Ridge, TN, and technical proposals regarding potential propulsion systems,’ according to the Defense Department's summary. The Pentagon said the FBI has previously released portions of the case file… but Friday's version includes fewer redactions and ‘several newly declassified pages.’”
CBS: “Other documents detail historical encounters, including the famous crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. One section of the FBI case file includes a memo written by an agent in the bureau's Dallas field office to FBI headquarters. The agent reports that a major in the Air Force called to tell the office ‘that an object purporting to be a flying disc was recovered near Roswell, New Mexico… The disc is hexagonal in shape and was suspended from a ball[o]on by cable, which ball[o]on was approximately twenty feet in diameter,’ the memo said.”
CBS: “A more recent document detailed the experience of several federal law enforcement agents in an undisclosed location in the western U.S. in 2023. The file, prepared by the Pentagon, reported that teams of agents had seen various orbs and strange figures in the sky or just off the ground. One incident… involved agents seeing ‘orange 'orbs' in the sky’ that emitted ‘smaller red 'orbs' in groups of two to four.’ ‘These events were witnessed by multiple teams from varying locations and vantage points over a two-day period,’ the file said. ‘Due to the sequential nature of the events, it is not known whether there was a single orange 'mother' orb that released the groups of red orbs or whether there were multiple orange orbs at play.’”

More Coming

UFO researcher Timothy Alberino: “I've been told the UAP drops are going to get progressively more spectacular and that AARO is being frozen out of the process.”
Rep Tim Burchett: “Remember the Feds told us these files didn’t exist… The 1st drop will be big but in comparison to what is coming they will be a drop in the bucket. I would say ‘Holy Crap’ is coming.”
Rep Anna Paulina Luna: “There will be more files released. To include our request of the 40+ files. I talked to the Pentagon last night.”
Rep Anna Paulina Luna: “This is a great first step. Additional releases are expected in the coming weeks. A second tranche of documents, including additional requested video footage, is anticipated within approximately 30 days. Further records, videos, imagery, and investigative materials will continue to be released on a rolling basis.”
News Nation reporter Mills Hayes: “There is more coming out next week. 46 more declassified UAP videos that the House Oversight Committee requested are coming out next week.”
Fox News Host Will Cain: "My question for you… would be: Why? Why slow roll this out like it's a season of 'Game of Thrones'? Like, why would Episode 1 be somewhat uninspiring - leave us with more questions than answered - if there's something coming after the teaser? What's the point in staging the release?"
- Rep Eric Burlison: "From talking with the White House and this administration, this is not an easy thing to do. There's not one huge repository of all of these documents and videos and photos… So what the Agency is doing is going and finding, first and foremost, the items that are readily available to be released… Would you prefer to have them wait for… what would probably take years if they were to do a comprehensive study and then release it all at once, in one big batch? I would prefer that they release it as they find it."
- Cain: "And, if that's true, are we trying to prepare the American people with a slow drip, drip, drip tease of this stuff? If not, then Congressman, I would say, if this is all we've got, then I'm not sure that there's anything the American government really has that tells us anything about the existence of aliens? I'm just beginning to feel like this entire story is teased out always just beyond our reach."
- Burlison: "I can sense your frustration. I've experienced it personally myself. I've seen videos that I think are in the process of being declassified, so I think that there is more to come. If they're not going to be declassified, I'll probably do an effort to release them myself under Speech and Debate. But again, a lot of the footage that I've seen is similar to what has been released today. There's some that are pretty interesting, and especially given the environment and the circumstances of the videos. Whether they are videos of UAP that are flying around Russian submarines or a video of our aircraft that are firing on some of these UAPs? I've seen those kind of videos. And so I'm teasing that because I know that...I'm telling the administration, through you at this moment, that if they don't release those, then I have the capabilities of getting those videos and releasing them."

Resistance

Liberation Times: “Adding to frustrations, President Trump posted on Truth Social that ‘the people can decide for themselves.’ One source added, ‘These files do not include the finished intelligence analyses produced by various departments and agencies. Those finished analyses would be classified and require review by the original classification authority before release.’”
Liberation Times: “An intelligence source familiar with collection systems told Liberation Times, ‘The video footage that has been released came from tactical military systems with lower security classifications. What has not been released was collected by the national systems controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office and CIA, deployed in sensitive areas where no U.S. or allied presence is publicly acknowledged.’”
UFO whistleblower Dave Grusch: “It has come to my attention as of today that there are some actors within certain intelligence agencies, to include DIA and CIA specifically, that are blocking some of the President’s team in getting access and getting control on some of these historical records.”
Liberation Times: “Three sources have claimed to Liberation Times that the Trump administration is facing resistance in its quest to release more substantial information by figures linked to the CIA.”

Reactions

Blink 182 singer Tom Delonge: “I think that this is a tremendous thing that's happening, I think, for a bunch of different reasons. Number one, the government is now formally doing stuff. They're formally investigating it, formally reviewing it, formally putting it out… But I'm just really excited, I'm really proud. And I think that the net that they are casting right now, they're really getting things done, and the government's taking this seriously. And I'm still very connected to the subject and to a lot of people working on this, and I feel really good about it. I'm really optimistic that this is going to lead to more investigations, to more review.”
Rogue UAPTF: “Avoid the trap of saying ‘The UFO files have been released.’ They haven't. A very tiny subset of carefully screened and curated files, some of which had already been public for decades, have been released.”
Disclosure Foundation Executive Director Jordan Flowers: “While it's tempting to put a microscope on each file / image / video released today, let's be clear about what's happening: the U.S. government is now telling us — through multiple agencies, across multiple releases — that there are objects in our airspace with capabilities beyond anything we've built. That's not fringe. That's now the official position.”
Liberation Times: “Several intelligence and defense sources told Liberation Times that, in their view, UFO disclosure would mean: An explicit acknowledgement that the U.S. has recovered vehicles and bodies of non-human origin, potentially including living beings; And an acknowledgement that the U.S. government has entered into cooperative agreements with non-human entities, and has used their assistance to understand and adapt exotic technologies.”

References

Episode 86, posted on May 10, 2026