The Pentagon on Friday released 64 new files tied to UFOs and UAPs, including 51 videos that show objects captured from military aircraft and come with detailed descriptions. The batch also includes six PDF files and seven audio files, widening a public archive that has been building for two weeks on the Defense Department’s new site.
The release matters because it adds fresh footage and records that lawmakers asked to see in March, including material found by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. Some of the clips are tied to encounters in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility between 2018 and 2023, and one video appears to show a fighter jet shooting down an unidentified object over Lake Huron in 2023. Later reports suggested that object may have been a balloon operated by a hobbyist group, underscoring how some of the most dramatic images can turn out to have ordinary explanations.
Among the videos is a 2022 clip that shows multiple spherical objects moving in and out of the water near a submarine. The documents also include historical accounts of UFO sightings, a report on Soviet intelligence activities and Department of Energy files on UFO reports, including one from PANTEX, a key nuclear weapons facility. The Pentagon said many of the materials do not have a substantiated chain-of-custody, which leaves open questions about where some of the footage came from and how it was handled before being posted.
The new file dump follows the first group of documents, photos and videos uploaded two weeks earlier, after the Pentagon said the material had been ordered public by President Trump in an executive order earlier in 2026. On May 8, the Defense Department said the public could make up its own mind about what the files show. Friday’s release gives the public more to weigh, but not more certainty.
That uncertainty is plain in a late-2025 account from a currently serving senior intelligence officer, who described a close UAP encounter aboard a military helicopter. He wrote that he and the crew had “a series of close UAP encounters lasting over an hour,” adding that “in the distance, we saw countless orange orbs swarming in all directions against the backdrop of the mountain.” He said the crew were “virtually speechless after these observations,” and said two large orbs flared up side by side close to the helicopter, appearing orange with a white or yellow center. The officer’s description is vivid. The question now is not whether the Pentagon has more material to show, but how much of it can be traced, verified and separated from misidentification before the archive becomes its own kind of mystery.
