The Pentagon released its first batch of declassified UFO files on Friday May 8, 2026, fulfilling a directive President Trump issued in February through a Truth Social post ordering government agencies to make public their records on unidentified aerial phenomena and what he specifically called “alien and extraterrestrial life.”
The release, 162 files including 120 PDFs, 28 videos and 14 images, is now publicly accessible on a new government website with no security clearance required.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth framed the disclosure in terms that matched the anticipation:
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation, and it’s time the American people see it for themselves.”
The Program And The Website
The interagency release is operating under the acronym PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, a program led jointly by the White House, the Pentagon, the Director of National Intelligence, the Energy Department, NASA and the FBI.
The structure mirrors the approach the Department of Justice used when it began releasing the Epstein files in December 2025, a centralized website where documents are posted in batches and can be accessed by anyone.
The website itself, according to reporters who accessed it Friday morning, has a retro aesthetic, black-and-white military imagery of flying objects and statements displayed in typewriter-like font.
The Pentagon posted to X:
“The American people can now access the federal government’s declassified UAP files instantly. The latest UAP videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entire United States government are all in one place, no clearance required.”
The site was reportedly glitchy in the early hours following the release, a reminder that a government website receiving its first significant public traffic load encounters the same technical challenges as any other web infrastructure under sudden demand.
What The Files Actually Contain
The first release covers incidents dating back decades across multiple government agencies.
The 162 files include old State Department cables, FBI documents, transcripts from NASA crewed space flights, eyewitness testimony, photographs and videos of sightings of unexplained objects from around the globe.
Of the 162 files, 108 contain redactions. The Pentagon specified that information was withheld to protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites unrelated to UAP.
The statement also included a specific assurance:
“No redactions have been made to any files released under President Trump’s directive concerning information about the nature or existence of any encounter reported as a UAP or related phenomena.”
In other words, any information about what these objects actually are or might be was not redacted.
The most immediately compelling specific document is a NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
The image, taken from the surface of the moon, shows three dots arranged in a triangular formation in the sky above the lunar surface. The Pentagon’s accompanying caption notes that “there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly” in the photograph, and that a new preliminary analysis has indicated the formation could be a “physical object.”
A transcript of Apollo 17 communications released alongside the photograph details the crew’s exchange about what they observed: “Now we’ve got a few very bright particles or fragments or something that go drifting by as we maneuver,” an operator told the command center.
A separate set of photographs from the Apollo 12 mission also shows strangely shaped objects captured on film during the lunar mission.
The two sets of Apollo photographs together represent arguably the most striking visual material in the initial release, images from the moon showing formations that NASA, more than 50 years later, cannot definitively explain.
A more recent document is an FBI interview from September 2023. The subject is identified only as a drone pilot. He reported seeing a “linear object” with a light bright enough that he could “see bands within the light.”
His account to the FBI, “The object was visible for five to ten seconds and then the light went out and the object vanished.”
The interview reflects the FBI’s role as one of several agencies collecting eyewitness accounts of UAP encounters from civilians with professional aviation backgrounds.
What’s Missing From The UFO Files?
The anticipation built around Friday’s release was significant, Trump himself had teased it at a Turning Point USA rally in Phoenix in April, telling supporters:
“The first releases will begin very, very soon. So you can go out and see if that phenomena is correct. You’ll figure it out.”
What the files do not contain, based on initial review, is any confirmation that the United States government has verified the existence of extraterrestrial technology or alien life.
That finding is consistent with what the Pentagon’s own All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office concluded in its 2024 debut report, which found no evidence that any government investigation had confirmed the existence of non-human technology.
Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist and former career intelligence officer who led the AARO office until 2023, said in advance of the release that he has seen the government’s relevant records and believes there are no bombshell revelations to be made.
He described Trump’s transparency push as “bluster” and, specifically, as a “shiny object” designed to distract Americans from the ongoing war with Iran.
Whether that characterization proves accurate will depend on what subsequent releases contain, this is explicitly the first of several batches of files.
The Congressional Context
Pressure for disclosure from Congress predates the Trump directive by years.
In 2022, Congress created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office specifically to investigate UAP and declassify as much material as possible.
That office’s 2024 debut report revealed hundreds of new UAP incidents, the largest single disclosure of UAP case information in government history at that point, while concluding there was no confirmed evidence of alien technology.
A small group of Republican lawmakers has been pushing for more aggressive disclosure, accusing the Pentagon of holding relevant documents back.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna sent a letter to the Pentagon in March demanding the release of 46 specific UAP videos that had been identified by government whistleblowers.
She confirmed Friday that those 46 videos were not included in the initial release but are “expected to be released in a later Pentagon release.”
Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the most vocal congressional advocates for UAP transparency, thanked Trump after the release “for keeping his word” and added a note of patience for those expecting everything at once:
“I would like to remind people that transparency won’t all happen at once, it will take some time.”
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman issued a statement applauding the transparency push.
“We will remain candid about what we know to be true, what we have yet to understand, and all that remains to be discovered,” Isaacman said. “Exploration and the pursuit of knowledge are core to NASA’s mission as we endeavor to unlock the secrets of the universe.”
What Does The Trump Directive Covers?
Trump’s February 2026 Truth Social directive specifically called for the release of files related to “alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”
The language was broader than any previous presidential directive on the subject and specifically named extraterrestrial life, a category that previous administrations had generally avoided addressing directly in official government communications.
The directive placed the Pentagon, the Director of National Intelligence and other agency heads on notice that the White House wanted these materials made public.
The PURSUE program that resulted is the implementation structure, a centralized collection point designed to allow the public to access everything in one place rather than through the piecemeal FOIA request process that UFO researchers have relied on for decades.
The White House indicated Friday that this is the first of a series of releases.
No timeline for subsequent batches has been publicly specified, though Luna’s expectation that the 46 whistleblower-identified videos will be in a future release suggests additional material is already being prepared.
What Do The Documents Prove?
The Apollo 17 photograph and transcript are the documents that will receive the most sustained attention in the days and weeks following Friday’s release.
A photograph from the lunar surface showing three objects in triangular formation, taken by astronauts of the United States government in 1972, held in government archives since then, now accompanied by an official acknowledgment that “there is no consensus” on what the objects are, is the kind of specific, attributable, government-certified document that the UAP research community has spent decades trying to extract through FOIA requests.
Whether the objects in the Apollo 17 photograph are alien spacecraft, debris, camera artifacts, ice crystals, mission equipment or something else entirely is not resolved by the Pentagon’s release.
The new preliminary analysis suggesting a “physical object” interpretation is a step, it rules out some purely optical explanations — but it does not constitute a definitive identification.
That is, depending on your perspective, either the fundamental honesty of the disclosure or its fundamental limitation.
The government is telling the public that it has photographs from the moon that show objects it cannot explain.
It is also telling the public that it has not concluded those objects are alien in origin. Those two statements can be simultaneously true.
The files are now publicly available. The public has been invited, as Defense Secretary Hegseth put it, to see it for themselves.
