U.S. News
The Government Released Its UFO Files. Here’s What Was Actually in Them.
By Mike Harper · May 19, 2026
On May 8, the Pentagon released the first tranche of what the Trump administration described as “new, never-before-seen” files related to unidentified aerial phenomena — declassified documents, videos, and reports the government has held for decades. Trump posted on Truth Social: “With these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”
The public reaction was somewhat more measured than that framing suggested.
The 161 documents, videos, and reports were published through PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — accessible at war.gov/UFO, a dedicated portal the Pentagon created specifically for the release. Additional files will be added “on a rolling basis,” with a second major batch expected approximately 30 days after the first — meaning another release could come any day now.
What the files actually contain is a mix of the genuinely intriguing, the previously public, and the definitively ambiguous.
Among the more notable documents: a transcript from the Apollo 8 mission in which astronaut Frank Borman reports a “bogey” — an unknown aircraft — alongside a debris field of “very, very many… hundreds of little particles.” The transcript includes handwritten annotations in the upper right corner that read “UFO Sighting by Borman.” The Apollo 8 file had not been publicly available before. A separate report documents an “unresolved” UAP encounter in May 2022 over Kuwait, accompanied by an infrared image showing an elongated area of contrast that the report cannot explain.
The Pentagon described the released materials as “unresolved cases” for which the government could not make a definitive determination based on available evidence — a characterization that is both honest and, depending on your priors, either reassuring or alarming.
The scientific community’s reaction was mixed. Several astronomers and UAP researchers noted that many of the files appear to describe phenomena consistent with camera artifacts, atmospheric conditions, balloons, space debris, or unreliable eyewitness accounts accumulated over decades of military aviation. Others pointed to the Apollo 8 transcript and the Kuwait image as genuinely unexplained. None of the released materials confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life. The Pentagon explicitly stated as much.
UFO fans, for their part, had a notably mixed reaction on social media. Some expressed confusion at the inclusion of computer-generated imagery in the release; others argued that much of the material had been circulating in paranormal publications for years and was not as “never-before-seen” as the administration’s framing implied. The gap between “never-before-seen by the government” and “genuinely new information about non-human intelligence” is, it turned out, a large one.
The release came weeks after former President Barack Obama said during a podcast appearance that aliens “are real” — a comment he later walked back, clarifying he meant “the odds are good there’s life out there” and that he had seen no evidence of alien life while in the White House. Trump’s disclosure directive followed Obama’s comment by days.
Whether the second batch of files, expected this month, produces anything more definitive is the question the UAP community is watching. The portal is public and searchable. If you want to see what the government released, it is at war.gov/UFO.