The War Department on Friday released 162 declassified files documenting decades of unidentified aerial phenomena, pulling back the curtain on encounters that stretch from the skies over New York in 1947 to a camera-recorded object over Syria as recently as 2023. The release marks the first batch of what officials say will be an ongoing disclosure effort ordered by President Trump.
The files describe thousands of reported "flying saucers" observed since the 1940s, sightings involving commercial airline crews, military pilots, ground officers, and entire cities. Some incidents left physical evidence. Others were tracked on radar. A few remain flatly unexplained after years of official investigation.
For Americans who have long suspected their government knew more than it let on, Friday's document dump is the most concrete step yet toward transparency on a subject Washington spent decades treating as a punchline.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth tied the release directly to a presidential directive. The Washington Examiner reported Hegseth's statement framing the effort in broad terms:
"The Department of War is in lockstep with President Trump to bring unprecedented transparency regarding our government's understanding of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena."
The files landed on a new government portal, war.gov/UFO, and officials said additional documents will follow on a rolling basis. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called Friday's release "the first in what will be an ongoing joint declassification and release effort." Multiple agencies are involved.
The first batch includes unresolved footage and records involving objects observed during the Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions, over the UAE in 2024, over Iraq in 2022, and near Greek airspace. Some of the material dates back nearly 80 years.
Trump himself had teased the release beforehand. Breitbart reported that the president told reporters, "I think some of it's going to be very interesting to people." The War Department's own statement confirmed the disclosure "follows the direction of President Donald J. Trump to begin the process of identifying and declassifying government files related to UAP in the interest of total transparency."
That is a striking posture from any administration. For decades, the federal government's default on UFO questions was deflection, denial, or silence. The fact that a sitting president ordered the files opened, and that his War Secretary publicly attached his name to the effort, represents a clean break from the institutional reflex to classify and forget.
Among the 162 files, the New York Post catalogued ten encounters that stand out for their detail, their witnesses, and the questions they leave open. The incidents span nearly five decades and multiple continents.
The earliest dates to 1947. Pan Am Captain Alpheus Powell was cruising toward La Guardia when he spotted a bright orange, "fuselage-sized" cylinder pacing his aircraft. His navigator, W. White, described a deep gold, elliptical craft traveling at roughly 175 mph, about 15 feet long and two to five feet deep. Two experienced aviators, same flight, same object.
In Sweden, investigators spent years, from 1948 to 1955, examining a reported UFO that plunged into a local lake. Intelligence officials were so convinced by the evidence that they sent naval divers to the bottom. The divers found a crater on the lake floor.
The administration has moved aggressively on other fronts as well. In recent weeks, Trump declared Iran hostilities ended in a War Powers letter as a congressional authorization deadline expired, another example of the president exercising executive authority on matters previous administrations left unresolved.
One of the most striking files involves Officer Lonnie Zamora, who in 1964 thought he was chasing a speeder through the New Mexico desert. What he found was something far stranger. The craft he encountered left four rectangular indentations in the dirt and three patches of charred grass, physical traces that gave investigators something more than testimony to examine.
The files also document two French encounters from the late 1970s. In 1976, a student pilot on a solo night flight watched a green sphere envelope his jet. A year later, a Mirage IV crew nearly collided with a glowing craft at 31,000 feet. These were not casual civilian reports. They came from trained military aviators operating high-performance aircraft.
In 1979, a metallic craft appeared over Antananarivo, Madagascar. The sighting did not stay in the sky. It sparked a city-wide blackout, an event that affected an entire urban population and went well beyond the testimony of a single witness or crew.
The Cold War produced its own entries. In 1989, seven military members stationed near a Soviet missile base watched three glowing disks. A Soviet fighter jet attempted to close in on the objects. The encounter unfolded in one of the most sensitive security environments on earth, witnessed by multiple uniformed personnel.
Amid the broader document release, the Trump administration has been managing a full domestic agenda. Reports surfaced this week that cabinet members have been lobbying Trump on immigration policy, a reminder that even historic disclosures compete for bandwidth in a busy White House.
Two incidents from 1994 stand out for sheer scale. The crew of Air France Flight 3532 reported an object that changed shape before vanishing. They described it as roughly 800 feet long. Radar confirmed something was there.
Separately, three veteran pilots over Kazakhstan tracked a UFO for a full 40 minutes. The object left contrails at an altitude of 100,000 feet, far above the ceiling of any known conventional aircraft.
The most recent file dates to 2023. A UAP was caught on camera over Syria, moving at 424 knots for seven minutes. The footage was recorded by military observers, though the specific camera system and unit involved remain unclear from the released material.
The release raises as many questions as it settles. The files do not identify what these objects were. They do not assign them to any known government, military, or private program. They do not resolve whether the phenomena are foreign technology, natural events, sensor artifacts, or something else entirely.
Several details remain vague. It is unclear what evidence in the files supports the claim that radar confirmed the Air France object. The Syria footage lacks public identification of the recording system. And the files do not explain why this material sat classified for decades when much of it involved foreign airspace or incidents with no obvious national-security sensitivity.
That last point deserves emphasis. Some of these encounters occurred over France, Sweden, Madagascar, and Kazakhstan. Others involved commercial airline crews with no security clearances. The reflexive classification of such material looks less like prudent secrecy and more like institutional habit, the bureaucratic impulse to stamp everything "classified" and let the file cabinets grow.
The Trump administration has not been shy about challenging that impulse across government. Earlier this spring, the president dismissed rumors of a cabinet shake-up even as he pushed agencies to operate with greater openness and accountability.
For years, Congress held hearings and passed legislation demanding UAP transparency. Lawmakers from both parties complained that the intelligence community stonewalled them. Whistleblowers alleged the government possessed materials it refused to acknowledge. And through it all, the bureaucracy slow-walked, redacted, and deflected.
Friday's release does not answer every question. But it does something no previous administration managed: it puts files on a public website, attaches senior officials' names to the effort, and promises more to come. The portal at war.gov/UFO is accessible to any American with an internet connection.
Whether the next tranches contain material that moves the debate forward, or simply add volume without clarity, remains to be seen. Officials said additional documents will be posted on a rolling basis. Gabbard's description of Friday as a "first" step implies the administration believes it has more to show.
The president himself, in a separate dramatic episode last week, described his own account of a Secret Service evacuation during the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting, a reminder that this administration operates at a pace that leaves little room for any single story to dominate for long.
But the UAP files deserve sustained attention. The 162 documents released Friday describe encounters witnessed by trained pilots, military personnel, intelligence officers, and radar operators across multiple countries and decades. These are not fringe claims from anonymous internet posters. They are records the U.S. government created, classified, and, until now, refused to share with the public that paid for them.
The debate over what flies in American skies matters less as a question of little green men than as a question of government accountability. Taxpayers funded the investigations. Military personnel filed the reports. Intelligence agencies made the classification decisions. And for generations, the public was told there was nothing to see.
Now 162 files say otherwise. The question is not whether every sighting was an alien spacecraft. The question is why it took a direct presidential order to pry these records loose from an establishment that would have been happy to keep them locked away forever.
When the government hoards information the public has a right to see, the problem is never the curiosity of the citizens. It's the arrogance of the institutions.