What I Found in the Pentagon's New UFO Release

I have always been into UFOs.

Not in a "I want to believe" poster way — more in a "what does it actually mean when serious people see something they can't explain" way. I read every Project Blue Book book I could find as a kid. I knew the Roswell timeline before I could spell Albuquerque. I always wished there was a single place where you could just read the documents.

Today the Department of War — yes, that's the new name — published one.

But before I get into what's in the release, let me back up. Because if you've never been the kind of person who reads UFO books cover to cover, the file dropping at war.gov/ufo is going to feel like it appeared from nowhere. It didn't. There's an 80-year arc of public attention behind it, and the release only makes sense if you know that arc.

When the public first started looking up

The first time the American public collectively looked at the sky and wondered, in the kind of organized way that gets newspaper coverage and government reports, was the mystery airship wave of 1896-97. People in California first, then across the Midwest, reported a cigar-shaped craft with searchlights moving against the wind. Newspapers covered it for months. Sketches were printed. Reports came in from Sacramento, Omaha, Kansas City, Chicago. Whatever it was, it predated heavier-than-air flight by seven years.

The thing we now call a "UFO" got its modern name on June 24, 1947. A businessman named Kenneth Arnold, flying his private plane near Mt. Rainier, saw nine bright objects moving in formation. He told a reporter the motion was "like a saucer if you skip it across the water." The reporter wrote flying saucer. The phrase stuck within days.

Three weeks later, on July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico issued a press release announcing they had recovered a "flying disc." The next day they retracted: it was a weather balloon. The detail nobody expected at the time: by then "flying saucer" was officially in the American vocabulary, and the FBI was already getting letters from citizens about them.

By 1952 the public had been to Washington, D.C., where for two consecutive weekends in July, radar operators at Andrews AFB and the National Airport tower tracked unidentified objects flying over the Capitol. Jets were scrambled. The objects accelerated and disappeared. President Truman ordered the Air Force to investigate.

By 1969 the Air Force had closed Project Blue Book, the first official US UFO investigation, after twenty-two years of cataloguing 12,618 reports. Of those, 701 were officially "unidentified." The Air Force concluded none represented a national security threat and stopped looking.

And then the public conversation went quiet. For almost fifty years.

It came back loud in December 2017, when The New York Times broke the story of a Pentagon program called AATIP that had been studying UAP since 2007. The footage they printed alongside the article — the Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet sensor video known as the Tic Tac — re-opened the modern conversation in a single afternoon. Six years later, in 2023, an Air Force veteran named David Grusch testified to Congress under oath that the US had recovered non-human craft. The 2024 NDAA created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — the same AARO whose case files are in this release.

That's the public arc. It's roughly the arc that hooked me. I read the Project Blue Book books in middle school. I followed the NYT story when it broke in 2017. I watched Grusch testify live. I have always wanted to read the actual paperwork.

What is a UFO, technically

A "UFO" is a UAP now — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the term the Pentagon and NASA both adopted in 2022. It is a deliberately neutral phrase. Anomalous means "we don't know what it is," not "we've ruled out anything earthly." The reframing matters: most UAP turn out to be balloons, drones, atmospheric optics, or radar artifacts — and the few that don't are unidentified, which is the entire point of the category.

The Pentagon's working definition: "airborne objects whose origin, identity, or trajectory cannot be readily determined." That's it. No claim about who made them.

This is the lens I read the release through.

Why I find this stuff cool

Three reasons, honestly.

First, professional witnesses watching things they can't explain. Navy aviators have the best aerial training in the world. When a Super Hornet pilot says they don't know what they just locked their radar onto, that means something. The 2004 Nimitz Tic Tac was reported by Commander David Fravor — a guy who later commanded an entire fighter squadron. He's still publicly saying he doesn't know what he saw.

Second, the paper trail. Government bureaucracy is slow but it's thorough. When something gets logged in a case file, it stays there. The FBI's master flying-saucer folder, 62-HQ-83894, has been sitting in the Central Records Center since 1947, with every letter, every clipping, every cross-reference number. Reading those records is reading a snapshot of what people thought was real at the time. It's a primary source on American culture, separate from whatever it says about the sky.

Third, the unanswered question is genuine. I am skeptical by default. I work in tech. I know about confirmation bias and pattern-matching. But the official position of the United States Department of War, today, is that it cannot identify a meaningful chunk of objects appearing in its sensor feeds. That's not woo. That's an honest report from people whose job is to know.

So when the Pentagon stood up war.gov/ufo this morning, I downloaded the whole thing.

What dropped today

war.gov/ufo — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. One hundred sixty-one declassified records. 3.8 gigabytes of PDFs, videos, and FBI photo plates. Mission reports, FBI files going back to 1944, NASA Apollo crew transcripts, State Department diplomatic cables.

I pulled all of it within hours of it going up, OCR'd what was scanned, extracted images from the PDFs, and went looking for the stuff I would have wanted to find as a kid. This is what I came back with.

First, the cool stuff

Before getting into anything serious, let me show you what's actually in here. The Department of War made their own poster art for each of the 28 UAP videos in the release — and each one is a real frame from real military sensor footage. They look like this.

Click any of them. They're sensor frames pulled from MQ-9 Reaper, F/A-18, and P-8A Poseidon footage — usually the moment the object appears in the operator's reticle. The grayscale, the heavy redactions, the green target boxes. These are not stock images. An aviator was actually looking at this when they reached for the report form.

The release contains the full videos behind these stills. Two of them, served from this site directly — press play:

Left: DOW-UAP-PR35, Aegean Sea, October 2023. Right: DOW-UAP-PR46, INDOPACOM, 2024. Both EO/IR sensor footage from MQ-9 Reaper missions.

Reading the FBI's 1947 mailbag

The thing I wanted to see most was the FBI's master flying-saucer case file, 62-HQ-83894. It runs from June 1947 — the month "flying saucer" entered American slang — through 1956. The release includes the actual physical folder.

Here's what's inside it. On August 5, 1947, J. Edgar Hoover personally signed a memorandum to the Director of Intelligence at the War Department General Staff, the Pentagon, by special messenger:

What's wild about reading this in 2026 is realizing the Director of the FBI was personally forwarding citizen letters about flying saucers to the Pentagon two weeks after the Roswell story broke. This is not lore. This is in the file.

So I wanted to see the citizen letters too. Here's one of them — the "Reibold letter" referenced in Hoover's memo above.

"Gentleman: On July 7th 1947, 10:30 P.M..."

A handwritten letter on lined paper, mailed to "Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington D.C." by a man named Fred R. Reibold of Omaha, Nebraska:

Reibold goes on to describe a solid circular disc, "approximately the size of a silver dollar and 1/4 inch thick, burning with extreme heat." He says the Omaha World-Herald was notified and a reporter came out. A boy kicked the object and it broke into pieces. The reporter collected the fragments and said he'd have them analyzed.

What I love about this letter — the man wasn't claiming it was alien. He was an Omaha resident who saw something land in his street, watched it scorch the pavement, had it analyzed, and was pissed off that the official explanation came back as "pipe ashes." The letter is genuinely angry.

And right after the letter, on the next page of the file, the actual newspaper clipping he was complaining about, mounted on Department of Justice letterhead with the eagle watermark visible behind it:

This is the chain in full: a citizen sees a flaming disc → a newspaper publishes a debunking → the citizen mails the FBI to dispute it → the FBI logs both letter and clipping → Hoover personally forwards them to the Pentagon. Inside of one month. I cannot tell you how cool it was to read this exact sequence of paper documents in 2026.

The other letters in the file

It wasn't just Reibold. The 1947 file is full of correspondence from regular Americans trying to make sense of what they were seeing. Some of it is sober. Some of it is satirical. Some of it is unwell.

The folder isn't just sightings. It's what the public was actually doing with this idea in 1947. Letters. Clippings. Theories. Cranks. Sober skeptics. People trying to sell things. All of it filed together under the same case number, under the same red SECRET stamp.

Inside the bureaucracy

The file also shows how the FBI actually processed this stuff. They had teletype-printed memos on pink paper. They had the standard Office Memorandum form. They had a stamp for everything.

I love every detail of this stuff. The pink paper. The "STANDARD FORM NO. 64." The fact that the FBI San Francisco field office filed reports about flying disc sightings on Guam. The "COPIES DESTROYED 270 NOV 18 1964" stamp. This is what bureaucracy looked like when bureaucracy was paper.

The two names everyone knows: Roswell and Area 51

If you've ever talked to a non-UFO-person about UFOs, you have talked about Roswell or Area 51. Neither is directly named in this release — but both are the cultural reason a folder like 62-HQ-83894 even exists. So before going further, the timing is worth a moment.

Roswell happened on July 8, 1947

The Roswell Army Air Field issued its press release that morning, was retracted the same day, and was front-page news in newspapers across the country by the next morning.

Now look at the dates on the FBI letters above:

• Reibold's flying-disc sighting in Omaha: July 7, 1947 — one day before Roswell broke.
• The "Sky-Scanners Committee" satirical letter: July 11, 1947 — three days after.
• Reibold's letter received by FBI Internal Security: July 16, 1947 — eight days after.
• Hoover's memo to the Pentagon: August 5, 1947 — four weeks after.

Read in that timeline, the 1947 portion of the FBI file is the direct paper trail of the public reaction to the Roswell announcement. Within days of the press release, hundreds of citizens — suddenly aware of "flying saucers" — wrote to the FBI. The FBI saved every one. Hoover personally forwarded a representative sample to the Pentagon.

The Reibold letter is striking because it predates the Roswell announcement by 24 hours. Whatever happened in his street that night, it happened before "flying saucer" was even a national story.

Area 51 is a different shape of question

Area 51 is real — Groom Lake, Nevada, on the Nevada Test and Training Range. The US government denied it existed until 2013, when the CIA quietly declassified its history as the U-2 and SR-71 development site. The cultural Area 51 — the Bob Lazar version, alien spacecraft in Hangar S-4, recovered material — has no analog in this release.

But here's what the release does contain. The 2025 Western US Event witness statement — the SECRET//NOFORN one written by a senior US intelligence official — describes a multi-day incident at "a US test site" in the "Western US," with federal partner agencies, state-partner organization helicopter pilots, and military aircraft training in the same airspace. The exact location is redacted.

It's almost certainly not Groom Lake itself — Groom doesn't run that joint federal-LE / state-partner protocol — but the fact that an active US test site in 2025 is logging multi-day "orbs launching orbs" sightings, on the record, in a SECRET//NOFORN witness statement, is closer to the cultural Area 51 mythology than anything that's been officially released before. The mythology has been running for 78 years. The paper documents are now landing.

Skipping forward: the modern stuff

Now jump 70 years. Same release, same project, but it's 2025 and the witnesses are not Omaha residents — they're senior US intelligence officials in helicopters with FLIR.

The September 2023 sighting at a US test site

The most heavily documented modern incident in the release is something that happened at a US military test site in September 2023. The release contains:

• 24 redacted still images ("FBI Photos B1-B24") pulled from a US military system
• 8 photo plates from the FBI Lab (A1-A8)
• A composite sketch with overlay drawn by FBI artists from witness descriptions
• Three FBI 302 witness statements (Serials 3, 4, 5)
• A 3-page SECRET//NOFORN witness statement (USPER) from a senior intelligence official

What the witnesses described: an ellipsoid bronze-metallic object, 130 to 195 feet long, that materialized out of a bright light in the sky and disappeared instantaneously. Three independent witnesses, one of them describing the color as "metallic bronze," another as "metallic/gray," another only seeing "a bright light over the horizon."

The composite sketch is the cover of this post. Here's the surrounding imagery:

Show all 24 FBI still images

In addition to the 24 B-series stills, the file includes 8 high-resolution FBI Lab photo plates (the A-series). These are the same incident, photographed and processed differently — closer in feel to traditional aerial reconnaissance prints:

The follow-on event in 2025 — orbs launching orbs

The 2023 incident was followed up two years later by something stranger. Over two consecutive days at the same general location, three independent two-agent teams of federal law enforcement special agents — plus two senior US intelligence officials, helicopter pilots, and an LP/OP team using FLIR — observed the following:

That last one is the line I keep coming back to. The actual quote, from the redacted USPER witness statement filed at SECRET//NOFORN:

"...at one point my beam went from shining far into the distance to stopping about 50 yards away on nothing in particular, it just was not projecting into the distance and then it was."

I do not know what that is. The Department of War doesn't seem to either.

The 1994 Tajik Air case

The single best historical case in the release isn't from the FBI or the military — it's from the State Department, and it's one of those things where the paper trail is what makes it.

On January 27, 1994, three American pilots flying a Boeing 747SP at 41,000 feet over Kazakhstan spent forty minutes watching a single bright object maneuver in circles, corkscrews, and 90-degree turns at high G. The chief pilot, Captain Ed Rhodes, took photographs with a pocket Olympus camera.

Forty-five minutes later, as the sun rose, the 747 flew under the contrails the object had left behind. Rhodes estimated the contrail altitude at approximately 100,000 feet — too high for normal aircraft to leave contrails. The contrail paths reflected the object's earlier maneuvers.

The next day, the chief pilot walked into the US Embassy in Dushanbe and gave a deposition. The Embassy filed a cable. Cable 94 DUSHANBE 259, January 31, 1994, released in full and unclassified.

"They watched the object for some forty minutes as it maneuvered in circles, corkscrews and made 90-degree turns at rapid rates of speed and under very high G's. Captain Rhodes took several photos with a pocket Olympus camera... After some time, the object adopted a horizontal high-speed course and disappeared over the horizon."

The pilots specifically ruled out a meteor — they had collectively seen "thousands of falling stars and other space junk entering the atmosphere in their years of flying passenger aircraft for PanAm." Rhodes' own assessment, recorded in the cable: "the object was extraterrestrial and under intelligent control."

The Embassy comment was characteristically dry: "We have no opinion."

This is what I love about diplomatic cables. Three professional pilots see something. They report it through proper channels. The cable goes to State, CIA, DIA, Beijing, Moscow, Almaty, Tashkent, Ashgabat, Bishkek. And the cover note says, basically, "figure it out yourself."

More from the modern military stack

Same source, different theaters, different platforms.

Left: DOW-UAP-PR19, Middle East, May 2022 (MQ-9 Reaper EO/IR). Right: DOW-UAP-PR43, Africa, 2025 — the most recent video in the entire release, from an MQ-9 mission over the Sahel.

Left: DOW-UAP-PR23, Iraq, December 2022. Right: DOW-UAP-PR37, Middle East, 2020.

Left: DOW-UAP-PR22, Syria, July 2022. Right: DOW-UAP-PR21, Iraq, May 2022. Eight inline videos total on this page; the remaining 20 are on the DVIDS public archive — they're too large to host inline, but they're all in the release index.

The 28-video set in the release covers two distinct eras: NASA Apollo / Gemini audio from 1965-1973, and a continuous string of CENTCOM and INDOPACOM sensor footage from 2016 to 2025. There's almost nothing in between.

The pattern across the modern military stack is consistent. Roughly 25-30 of the records are formal Mission Reports (MISREPs) and Range Fouler Debriefs filed by aircrews using AARO's official UAP reporting form. Across all of them:

The Department of War's own reading of these is unresolved but probably-conventional — drones, balloons, atmospheric effects in active conflict zones. Not exotic technology. About forty unidentified sensor contacts across CENTCOM and INDOPACOM over eight years, almost all assessed as not intelligently controlled.

That's a finding in itself. It's not the "every UAP is alien" position. It's not the "every UAP is a duck" position either. It's the careful middle: something is there in our sensor data, often, that we cannot identify, and most of it does not appear to be deliberately steered.

NASA's contribution: Apollo and Gemini

Fifteen NASA records, mostly transcripts and audio from Apollo 11 / 12 / 17, Skylab, and Gemini 7. The famous one is NASA-UAP-D3 / D3A: Frank Borman's "bogey" report from Gemini 7 on December 5, 1965, with the audio publicly released by NASA itself for the first time. Honest caveat on this one: the historical interpretation, including Borman's own later statements, is that the "bogey" was the spent S-IVB second stage of their own Titan booster.

The Apollo crew transcripts contain the famous "fragments tumbling like the Fourth of July" passage from Apollo 17. Read in context, the crew themselves attribute the fragments to ice or paint flakes coming off the S-IVB during the maneuver — not anomalous. But the visual material NASA released alongside the transcripts is genuinely interesting:

Six NASA-released stills — five from Apollo 12 (1969), one from Apollo 17 (1972). Click any for full size.

Foo Fighters and the 1944 night sky

The deepest layer in the release is from World War II. A single PDF in the corpus contains SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) messages and memorandums about "night phenomena (foofighters)" — anomalous lights observed by Allied pilots over Europe in 1944-1945. Multiple references to the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, who reported orange and red glowing balls following their P-61 Black Widow aircraft on missions over Germany.

There's also an FBI interview from 1957 — Wladyslaw Krasuski, who described seeing a large circular vertically-rising vehicle near a German military compound in 1944, shortly before the war ended.

The Foo Fighter reports are the oldest UAP records in the US government's possession that are publicly released. They predate Roswell by three years. They predate the term "flying saucer" by three years. And the soldiers reporting them at the time were P-61 Night Fighter pilots flying combat missions over Europe, not Omaha residents on their porches.

I keep finding myself thinking: people have been seeing things they can't identify, and writing them down, for at least 80 years. We are now downloading the first place where the US government put all those writings in one folder.

What I keep coming back to

I read every record in this release. I OCR'd the scanned ones. I extracted images from the PDFs. I watched a representative chunk of the 28 videos. I tabulated the credibility weights against my own internal "what would actually make me believe a sighting" list. I wrote a longer technical writeup of the corpus structure and the build pipeline I used.

What I keep coming back to, after all of that, is two things.

First: the Reibold letter. A guy in Omaha wrote to the FBI in his own handwriting because the local paper had him pegged as a fool, and the FBI saved his letter for 79 years until somebody declassified the folder. Whatever you think happened in his street that night, that exchange — citizen writes in, J. Edgar Hoover personally forwards it to the Pentagon, the file outlives both of them — is a thing that did happen. That's not lore. That's a paper document I can show you.

Second: the spotlight quote. "It just was not projecting into the distance and then it was." Modern, documented, witnessed by federal agents and a senior intelligence official, in 2025, on US soil, recorded in a still-classified statement that AARO has measured against. I do not know what that is. The Department of War, after all of its sensors and analysts, doesn't appear to either.

I started this post saying I'd always been into UFOs. What I actually mean is: I've always been into the paperwork around UFOs. The letters, the case files, the cables, the Office Memorandum forms. The fact that intelligent careful people have been carefully documenting things they can't explain for the better part of a century. The release at war.gov/ufo is the largest single-day delivery of that paperwork the US government has ever made.

That's the part I find cool. That's the part I think is worth showing.

Build notes

If you want to do this yourself: the war.gov site is behind Akamai with strong TLS fingerprinting that blocks curl, Invoke-WebRequest, and even Playwright Chromium. What works is curl_cffi impersonating Chrome 131, hitting the underlying CSV at /Portals/1/Interactive/2026/UFO/uap-csv.csv directly. The video files are on DVIDS CloudFront and are easier — just scrape the public DVIDS video page for the cloudfront.net URL.

For OCR on the 1947 scanned material I used easyocr (CPU); for image extraction pypdfium2. The full pipeline (download + OCR + image extraction + page renders) ran in about 90 minutes on a normal residential connection.

Local archive: 115 PDFs / 14 images / 28 videos / 17 poster slides / 3.82 GB. Source: war.gov/ufo.