The Pentagon released 41 new UFO-related documents, images, and videos on Friday, the fifth disclosure under President Trump's executive order, including an FBI interview with a military pilot who described a silent, star-blocking triangle gliding over Bagram in 2002.
The files span more than seven decades of unexplained aerial encounters, from a 1950 record to a sighting captured on infrared video in the western United States this year. They draw from the FBI, CIA, State Department, Executive Office of the President, and U.S. Central Command, and they were posted on the Pentagon's UFO website at war.gov/UFO. A Pentagon spokesman said the department "will release additional files on a rolling basis."
The release marks the latest step in a transparency push that began when President Trump signed an executive order in January directing the military and other federal agencies to produce more documents related to unidentified anomalous phenomena, the government's formal term for UFOs. Previous administrations sat on this material. The Trump White House has now forced five separate disclosures into public view, and the files keep getting stranger.
The most striking account in Friday's batch comes from an FBI Form 302, a standard witness interview summary, filed in 2024. A former military pilot, whose name is redacted, told the FBI about an encounter over Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002.
CBS News reported the pilot's account in detail. At approximately 4:30 a.m. local time, the pilot noticed the stars above Bagram were disappearing, blacked out, as if something enormous had passed overhead.
"At approximately 4:30 AM local time, [redacted] noticed that the stars were getting blacked out over Bagram. It appeared as if something huge went overhead, from west to east, and was an equilateral triangle shape. The object was moving silently, at a consistent speed and altitude, possibly 150 knots, with no lights visible."
The pilot estimated the object was roughly 500 feet across but could not fully determine its shape. A second pilot in the area saw the same thing and asked a question that now serves as shorthand for the encounter: "Did you see that?"
That same pilot later reported a separate series of sightings. While flying from Massachusetts to Ireland in October 2023 at 37,000 feet, he observed white lights far above him, estimated at 50,000 feet or higher. The lights started dim, grew brighter, and faded out over cycles lasting ten seconds to a minute. He told the FBI he saw similar lights roughly ten more times after that first sighting, often between midnight and 3 a.m.
The account raises an obvious question: why did it take more than two decades for this pilot's 2002 encounter to surface in an official FBI interview? The documents do not say. But the pattern of delayed disclosure, military personnel sitting on extraordinary observations for years before anyone in government asks, is itself part of the story. Lawmakers like Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who has pushed for greater UAP transparency, have argued that the government's own culture of secrecy discouraged reporting.
A second major encounter in Friday's release dates to September 2021. Special Operations forces aboard an AC-130J gunship, a heavily armed aircraft used for close air support, observed approximately 25 unidentified objects during a live-fire exercise in the Gulf of Oman.
An intelligence report described the objects as "cold orbs" flying at lower altitudes at speeds between 250 and 1,300 miles per hour. They moved in different formations and maneuvered aggressively. Most unsettling, the report noted the objects "appeared to react to the aircraft firing its main cannon."
The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the investigative arm responsible for analyzing UAP encounters, could not resolve the incident. Six separate videos showing different angles of the same Gulf of Oman encounter were included in Friday's release. AARO also failed to resolve a separate 2025 encounter over a populated area in the Middle East, captured on video by a military aircraft and submitted by U.S. Central Command.
That pattern, sightings documented, investigated, and left officially unexplained, runs through the broader disclosure effort. A 2024 Pentagon report found no evidence the U.S. government had ever confirmed a sighting of alien technology or recovered alien materials. But "no confirmation" is not the same as "nothing there," and the volume of unresolved cases continues to grow with each release. Allegations from UAP whistleblower David Grusch about hidden government programs have only deepened public skepticism about how forthcoming agencies have actually been.
A third encounter, documented in a separate FBI report filed this year, describes a U.S. Government Special Agent who spotted two slow-moving objects in the sky over the western United States. The agent had received a report about a detected radio frequency and pointed a handheld infrared sensor in its direction.
What he saw were two black objects, both registering as "black hot" on infrared, meaning they were radiating significant heat. They moved together at the same speed. The agent photographed and recorded video of the objects before they drifted out of view. Total observation time: roughly five to ten minutes.
The Pentagon's own description of the accompanying video confirmed it "features two, slow-moving 'black-hot' areas of contrast, visible in infrared imaging." The objects remain unidentified.
Friday's batch also included eight FBI Form 302 interview summaries, some with heavy redactions. Among the additional accounts, the New York Post reported on a former Pentagon employee and his wife who described witnessing a silent, translucent triangle-shaped craft flying as low as 300 feet over their Colorado home in October 2023. The witness, documented in an FBI interview summary from January 2026, said the craft "looked like a perfect triangle... without any extra wings, fins, or any bubble for the engine housing" and "appeared almost see-through." It tilted to a near-vertical orientation without changing its path or altitude, a maneuver the witness said "did not match anything he encountered before." The entire sighting lasted four seconds, too brief to capture on camera.
The 41 files released Friday span from 1950 to this year, but earlier releases under Trump's executive order have pushed the historical record even further back. The Washington Examiner reported that previous batches included 116 pages from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program documenting 209 sightings of "green orbs," "discs," and "fireballs" near Sandia, New Mexico, between 1948 and 1950, along with a 1973 CIA intelligence report describing a silent bright green object observed in the Soviet Union.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has framed the effort as a break from decades of institutional stonewalling. "The Department of War is in lockstep with President Trump to bring unprecedented transparency regarding our government's understanding of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena," Hegseth said in connection with the broader disclosure push.
Trump himself has leaned into the public fascination. As the Associated Press reported, the president posted on Truth Social: "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 H*** IS GOING ON? Have Fun and Enjoy!"
Rep. Burchett urged patience. "I would like to remind people that transparency won't all happen at once, it will take some time," the Tennessee Republican said.
That caution is warranted. Experts have noted that many UAP videos, stripped of context, are easily misinterpreted, a point the Breitbart coverage of the broader release emphasized. Not every anomalous dot on an infrared screen is an alien spacecraft. But the accounts in Friday's files go well beyond ambiguous footage. Trained military pilots describing 500-foot silent triangles. Gunship crews watching cold orbs react to live cannon fire at speeds exceeding 1,000 miles per hour. A government agent tracking heat-radiating objects on a sensor after a radio frequency alert.
These are not anonymous internet posts. They are sworn or official accounts from military and law enforcement professionals, documented through FBI interview protocols and Pentagon intelligence channels. The question raised by NASA's own administrator, that these files reveal real unexplained phenomena even if no alien bodies have turned up, remains the uncomfortable middle ground the government occupies.
And the files are still coming. The Pentagon has committed to rolling releases, and the executive order remains in force. Five batches in, the government has produced enough material to confirm that something is happening in American and allied airspace that the Pentagon's own investigators cannot explain. What previous administrations chose to keep locked away, this one is putting on a public website and telling Americans to draw their own conclusions.
Decades of official silence bought the government nothing but public distrust. Letting the documents speak for themselves is the least Washington owes the pilots and agents who filed the reports, and the taxpayers who funded every classified filing cabinet those reports sat in.
