Pentagon releases fifth batch of UAP files under Trump executive order

The Pentagon on Friday (August 7, 2026) released a further 41 files on unidentified anomalous phenomena — the fifth tranche issued under an executive order President Trump signed in January directing the military and other agencies to produce more UFO-related documents. The records, drawn from the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and the Executive Office of the President, range from 1950 to this year. The department said more would follow on a rolling basis.

The German-language UFO and anomalous-phenomena outlet Grenzwissenschaft aktuell (GreWi) argues that the tranche contains no new sensations and no clear evidence of an exotic phenomenon. It notes that much of the historical and FBI material was already public, including US Naval Photographic Interpretation Center analyses of two UFO films from 1950 and 1952, which concluded the objects had properties incompatible with natural phenomena or known aerospace technology. GreWi reports that the MAGA representative Paulina Luna praised the release as unprecedented transparency, in GreWi's rendering but disputes that framing, saying censored material does not meet the standard Trump promised; it criticises the lack of scientific commentary and says researchers and the public continue to await the evidence.

The release's most prominent material is video: GreWi counts 16 clips, mostly from the Department of War, including six versions of a September 2021 encounter over the Gulf of Oman, captured by an infrared sensor aboard a Special Operations AC-130J gunship and released as cellphone recordings of its screens. An intelligence report said forces on board observed approximately 25 instances of UAPs during a live fire exercise, describing cold orbs flying at lower altitudes between 250 and 1,300 mph in different formations and manoeuvring aggressively, and appearing to react to the aircraft firing its main cannon. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office could not resolve the encounter. GreWi notes that three clips repeat footage of a 2019 Pacific Ocean incident recorded aboard the USS Omaha and published in 2021 by the journalist Jeremy Corbell, and says metadata such as altitude, speed and coordinates have been stripped, making unusual behaviour hard to distinguish from an ordinary balloon.

Other entries remain unresolved. One clip submitted by US Central Command shows what appears to be an object over a populated Middle East area in 2025; another, captured in the western United States this year by a "US Government Special Agent", is described by the Pentagon as showing "two, slow-moving 'black-hot' areas of contrast, visible in infrared imaging". A partially redacted FBI report records the agent seeing a black object and then a second to its right, both black hot and moving together at the same speed, over five to ten minutes. The release also includes eight redacted 302 witness-interview forms, most paired with FBI artist renderings.

A 2024 interview records a former military pilot saying that pilots had begun seeing strange lights between midnight and 3 a.m. the previous year; he said he first saw them on a Massachusetts-to-Ireland flight in October 2023 while flying at 37,000 feet, and believed the lights were higher, possibly at 50,000 feet or above. He described white lights that brightened and faded on cycles of ten seconds to a minute. He also recounted that over Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002 the stars were blacked out by what appeared to be something huge moving west to east in an equilateral-triangle shape, silent, at a consistent speed and altitude, possibly 150 knots, and an estimated 500 feet in size.