The Department of War has announced that it’s published “never-before-seen files” of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) on a new government webpage, and plans to add material on a “rolling basis.” Some Pentagon UAP footage was declassified during President Donald Trump’s first term, but this new page appears to be the results of a February Truth Social post from Trump calling on the DOW and related agencies “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”
The webpage — war.gov/UFO — includes a carousel of images and files from the DOW, FBI, NASA and more, presented in a way that seems to intentionally lean into the conspiratorial nature of UFO fandom in general. You don’t have to spend long clicking through images and downloading PDFs to realize that there’s not much in the way of actual evidence of aliens, though. Whether or not the files are supposed to direct attention away from the other flailing projects of the second Trump administration — a disastrous war with Iran, for example — they’re much more interesting as an example of how a bureaucracy processes and catalogs unexplained phenomena than as a smoking gun that proves extraterrestrials have visited Earth.
Suspicion that the US government knows more about unidentified anomalous phenomena (the term that replaced unidentified aerial phenomena and UFOs) than it’s letting on has been around for decades, but confirmation of formal research into the subject wasn’t made official until the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was revealed in 2017. AATIP was formed in 2007 to study UAP and later disbanded in 2012, but its work has been carried on by other government groups and task forces, most recently the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, an organization currently working inside the DOW that contributed to this new release of files.
The videos of UAP shared during the first Trump administration were unexplained, but ruled by a government report to not be an alien spacecraft. It’s not clear new files released by the DOW will change anything, but they do make for an interesting curio at the very least.
