The Trump administration on Friday uploaded dozens of previously classified documents, photographs, and videos to the Department of War website, the third release of UAP files since the archive launched on May 8 and a move that has now drawn more than 1.7 billion hits worldwide, the Daily Mail reported.
The new tranche includes FBI field reports from 2025, Cold War, era CIA panel findings, a 1958 CIA memorandum about an alleged "space message," and a 2008 CIA cable that put agency assets in Zimbabwe on high alert after an object hovered over Harare's main airport. Several citizen-submitted videos, at least one of which the U.S. government analyzed and authenticated, round out the batch.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth framed the release in blunt terms, tying it directly to the president's agenda on government openness:
"These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation, and it's time the American people see it for themselves. This release of declassified documents demonstrates the Trump Administration's earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency."
For decades, Americans who reported unexplained aerial encounters were met with official silence, bureaucratic runarounds, or outright dismissal. The material released Friday suggests that behind closed doors, federal agencies took the reports far more seriously than they ever let on.
Among the newly released records is an FBI report documenting a July 2025 sighting in the northeastern United States. A witness returning home from work spotted a bright object hovering roughly 25 feet off the ground, below a tree line, at an estimated distance of 90 feet from their backyard.
The witness's spouse also saw the object. The FBI report described it as a "brilliant red sphere" about one meter in diameter, with a white plasma center "about the size of a basketball." The object then rose slowly, drifted left, and a second identical orb appeared directly above it.
Both witnesses watched the two orbs travel silently westward over a nearby tree line, moving "in lockstep as if flying in formation or connected to one another." The objects appeared to merge into a single orb before vanishing, covering roughly 75 yards from their original position. The witness recorded the encounter on an iPhone 14 Pro Max.
Officials noted that the sighting occurred within 25 miles of several other unexplained incidents already in the government archive, events labeled "Triangle Orbs," "Red Orb Rotation," and "Orbs Over the Pond." That geographic clustering raises questions no agency has publicly answered.
This is the same administration that has made a broader habit of pushing government disclosure into the open, whether the subject is UAPs, federal spending, or the conduct of entrenched bureaucracies.
A separate video in the release, filmed in 2024, showed glowing lights hovering above a pond in the northeastern U.S. at an estimated distance of 2,700 feet. The object remained largely stationary for about 45 minutes before suddenly disappearing.
Officials described the object as a "plasma-like sphere" that intermittently changed shape and brightness. At times, the primary light source appeared to split into smaller luminous points. The footage was cropped to protect the witness's identity, but officials stated that no other edits, enhancements, or alterations were made.
One citizen-submitted iPhone video in the batch was later analyzed and authenticated by the U.S. government, a detail officials confirmed but did not elaborate on. What criteria the government used for that authentication, and which agency performed it, remain unanswered.
The fact that ordinary Americans armed with smartphones are now contributing authenticated evidence to the federal UAP archive marks a shift from the old model, in which military pilots were the only credible reporters and the public was kept at arm's length.
The third tranche reaches back decades. A CIA file labeled "Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, Report, 1952, 1953" warned that public fascination with flying saucers could become a national security risk, not because the objects themselves were necessarily dangerous, but because a flood of sighting reports could overwhelm military reporting channels and distract personnel from genuine threats.
That same panel discussed the so-called "Foo Fighters," glowing objects reported by Allied pilots during World War II. Pilots described them as mysterious lights that appeared to fly alongside their aircraft and perform unusual maneuvers. The government's own records show officials took these encounters seriously enough to convene a formal scientific review, then buried the findings behind classification walls for seven decades.
The administration has shown a similar willingness to challenge legacy narratives and push its own version of the facts on other fronts, from media disputes to government reform.
Also in the batch: a 1958 CIA memorandum detailing a conversation with Dr. Leon Davidson about the alleged destruction of a mysterious "space message" and the device said to have transmitted it. A censored version of that memo had long been publicly available, but the newly released version apparently contains material that was previously redacted.
One of the more striking documents is a CIA cable dated July 2, 2008. It reported that CIA assets in Zimbabwe were placed on high alert after an unidentified object "hovered at an undetermined altitude directly over the Harare airport." The cable was circulated throughout the U.S. government and military during the final months of the George W. Bush administration.
That a CIA station would issue a formal alert over an aerial object above a foreign capital's airport, and distribute it across the national security apparatus, suggests a level of institutional concern that no administration before Trump's has been willing to let the public see.
The broader pattern of this White House using federal authority to expose what previous administrations kept hidden extends well beyond UFOs. The same instinct has driven actions like the Interior Department's decision to cut dozens of progressive group partnerships and redirect federal priorities.
The Pentagon said the Department of War website has received "unprecedented levels of interest" since its May 8 launch, logging more than 1.7 billion hits worldwide. The second release came two weeks after the site went live. Friday's upload is the third.
Many of the images and videos in the release were submitted by American citizens, officials noted. Some were captured on consumer devices, iPhones in particular. Image captions in the batch reference incidents near a sensitive national security site in the western U.S. in October 2023, a law enforcement sighting described three years ago, and an artistic interpretation of a 2022 incident near Colorado Springs, Colorado.
The sheer volume of public engagement, nearly two billion page views, suggests an appetite for government transparency that Washington has historically underestimated or ignored. For years, officials across both parties treated the UAP subject as a fringe curiosity. The traffic numbers tell a different story.
This administration has pursued a broader strategy of using disclosure as a governing tool, whether the subject is UAPs, foreign-influence investigations, or federal oversight failures. The common thread is a bet that the public can handle information that bureaucrats long decided to keep from them.
For all the new material, significant questions persist. No agency has explained what criteria the government used to authenticate the citizen iPhone video. The identities of the witnesses remain protected. The geographic details of the northeastern sightings are withheld. No investigator has publicly stated which agencies examined the cases or what conclusions, if any, they reached.
The 1952, 1953 CIA panel worried that public interest in UFOs could clog military channels. Seven decades later, the opposite problem may be more pressing: decades of official silence have left the public with more questions than the government seems prepared to answer, even now.
Previous administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, chose to sit on these files. Some, like the pattern of officials sitting on inconvenient findings, reflect a deeper institutional habit of shielding the public from information that might embarrass the agencies holding it.
Hegseth put the administration's position plainly:
"The Department of War is in lockstep with President Trump to bring unprecedented transparency regarding our government's understanding of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)."
Whether that transparency ultimately explains the phenomena or simply confirms how much the government still doesn't know, the principle is the same. The American people paid for these investigations. They have a right to see what their government found, and what it couldn't explain.
Transparency isn't a partisan value. But it took this administration to act on it.
