WASHINGTON — The Pentagon began publicly releasing previously classified files on unidentified anomalous phenomena on May 8, 2026, posting decades of military, State Department, FBI and NASA records on a new government website. The release includes more than 20 video files of unidentified objects captured by military sensors in locations including Syria, Japan and North America, along with hundreds of pages of sighting reports dating to the 1940s.

President Donald Trump had announced the document release months before it occurred. "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!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

The new Pentagon website, which displays black-and-white military imagery and a typewriter-style font, presents cases the government deems unresolved because they could not be explained with certainty. The Pentagon described the files as new and never-before-seen, though some had been made public years ago.

A 1994 State Department cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan recounted that one Tajik pilot and three Americans saw a brightly lit UAP while flying a jet over Kazakhstan. The cable described the object as making 90-degree turns, doing corkscrews and maneuvering in circles at great rates of speed. A 2023 military report from the Aegean Sea cited a UAP flying just above the ocean surface at about 80 mph and making multiple 90-degree turns. A separate 2023 report over Syria described a UAP shaped like a bouncy ball traveling at 483 mph for at least seven minutes; that object was later determined to be benign. The release also includes a football-shaped object spotted over the East China Sea in 2022, as well as military videos showing small ambiguous dots moving above landscapes in Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.

The most recent video, dated January 1, 2026, appears to show two circular lights flying in North America. A 1969 Apollo 11 debriefing recorded an astronaut recalling a "sizeable" object close to the moon. A NASA photograph from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission shows three dots in a triangular formation. In a caption to that image, the Pentagon said "there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly," adding that a new preliminary analysis indicated it could be a "physical object."

A 2024 Pentagon report found no evidence that the U.S. government has recovered alien technology or confirmed evidence of alien life. Congress created an office to declassify UAP material in 2022, and that office's 2024 debut report documented hundreds of new incidents. In a 1948 report, U.S. airmen in the Netherlands reported recurring flying saucer sightings; Swedish counterparts saw the objects and believed they did not come from "any presently known culture on earth."

Sean Kirkpatrick, former director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said there was nothing unexpected in the release and that without analysis it would "only serve to fuel more speculation, conspiracy and arm-chair pseudoscience."