Guide · Oct 18, 2026

The Pentagon UFO Files: What's Been Released So Far

Six batches of government UAP records have gone up at war.gov/ufo since May. Here's what's in them, what “unresolved” really means, and how to read them yourself.

By the UAP Press editorial team · Last updated Oct 18, 2026

Photo: the Pentagon, looking northeast toward the Potomac River and the Washington Monument. DoD photo by Master Sgt. Ken Hammond, U.S. Air Force, public domain.

Short answer: Yes, the Pentagon is releasing UFO files, and you can read them yourself at war.gov/ufo. The program is called PURSUE. Six batches have come out since May 8, 2026, the latest on September 18. They hold military sensor videos, FBI witness interviews, NASA astronaut transcripts and decades-old Air Force records. None of it confirms anything extraterrestrial, and the government doesn't claim it does.

What's documented: The release dates, file counts and the Pentagon's own description of what the files are. The Pentagon says every case on the site is "unresolved," meaning it couldn't decide what was seen.

Status: Ongoing. As of October 17, 2026, no date has been announced for a seventh release.

What PURSUE is

On February 19, 2026, President Trump posted that he would direct the Secretary of War and other 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 Department of War's site quotes that post as the program's starting point.

The result is the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE. The Department of War runs it with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. When it launched, the department listed the White House, the Department of Energy, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), NASA, the FBI and parts of the intelligence community as partners.

The department calls it a review of "tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper, spanning many decades." That's why it comes out in batches. The files go up on war.gov/ufo, which has a searchable database and bulk downloads. If you're wondering why the government says "UAP" now, we cover that in why "UFO" became "UAP".

Every release so far

These counts come from CBS News, which tallied each batch on the day it came out. The Pentagon's own announcements mostly don't give totals.

Release	Date	Files	What stood out
01	May 8, 2026	162 (120 PDFs, 28 videos, 14 images)	Apollo transcripts, the "orbs launching other orbs" reports, an FBI sketch of a "bronze metallic object"
02	May 22, 2026	64 (51 videos, 7 audio, 6 PDFs)	Mostly infrared military clips; NASA "fireflies" audio
03	June 12, 2026	72 (53 documents, 10 images, 6 videos, 3 audio)	Five federal agents' accounts of a two-night event in the western U.S.
04	July 10, 2026	40 (14 documents, 19 videos, 4 audio, 3 images)	Files from the Pentagon, NASA, CIA, FBI and the Energy Department
05	Aug. 7, 2026	41	An AC-130J gunship encounter over the Gulf of Oman; eight FBI interview forms
06	Sept. 18, 2026	71 (55 PDFs, 15 videos, 1 audio)	37 research papers from a 2008-2012 Pentagon program; Edward Ruppelt's 1952 briefing

One note on Release 06: CBS counted 71 files, 67 from the Defense Department and 4 from local police in Colorado. An unofficial tracking site, uapfiles.app, counts 72. We've used the CBS figure.

Each release adds to the pile. Nothing earlier has been taken down.

What's actually in them

Read enough of the files and four kinds of material keep turning up.

Military sensor video. This is the bulk of it. Most clips are infrared footage from aircraft, showing a bright or dark speck moving across the screen. Each comes with a short description. In the first release, the report with a 2023 video taken in Greece said the object made multiple "90-degree turns" at roughly 80 miles per hour, according to CBS. Release 05 included six versions of one September 2021 encounter, filmed on cellphones pointed at the screens of an AC-130J gunship over the Gulf of Oman. The intelligence report says the crew "observed approximately 25 instances of UAPs" during a live-fire exercise. AARO couldn't resolve it. If you're wondering why nearly every clip is a blur, that's normal for distant objects on these sensors, and we explain why in why UFO photos are always blurry.

Witness accounts. A lot of the paper is testimony, written down by FBI agents or AARO staff. In Release 03, five federal law enforcement special agents described two days of lights in the western U.S. in October 2023. One witness said smaller orbs were "being hatched from the larger very bright orange light." Another said they looked like "grapes being expelled from a basketball." The same event first surfaced in Release 01, and the Pentagon called it "among the most compelling" of its reports, ABC News reported. Release 05 included a former military pilot's 2024 interview with the FBI. He recalled a silent triangle that blocked out the stars over Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002, and estimated it at 500 feet across. Those are accounts of what people say they saw. The files don't add physical evidence for any of them, and EarthSky noted after the third release that none of the batches had mentioned any.

Astronaut records. NASA transcripts and audio from the Mercury and Apollo missions show up in several releases. In a 1969 transcript, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin described "a fairly bright light source which we tentatively ascribed to a possible laser." The second release included astronauts talking about "fireflies" outside the capsule. The Pentagon's own note on that clip says NASA "later determined" they were frozen condensation coming off the spacecraft, lit by the sun.

Old Air Force and intelligence paperwork. Release 06 includes an hour-long 1952 recording of Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt, who went on to run Project Blue Book. He said about 20 percent of the 800 reports the Air Force had looked at were "very good reports offered by very reliable people" and that "just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn." The same release has a copy of the 1952 Tremonton, Utah, film. A 1953 review panel, the Robertson Panel, concluded it most likely showed birds.

What "unresolved" means, and what it doesn't

This is the part most coverage skips. The Pentagon's site says: "The materials archived here are unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena." It adds that this "can occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of sufficient data."

So "unresolved" isn't a finding that something is unexplainable. It means the government didn't have enough to close the case. The May 8 announcement went further: "many of the materials have not yet been analyzed for resolution of any anomalies." Some files on the site haven't been looked at closely at all.

That's also why the site leaves out solved cases. The Pentagon says it reports those separately, as the law requires.

Did the Pentagon confirm UFOs are real?

It depends on what you mean. The government has confirmed that its pilots, sensors and agents keep reporting things they can't identify. That's what the files are.

It hasn't confirmed that any of them are alien craft. The Pentagon's message to the public is that people can "make up their own minds." AARO's reviews, ABC News reported, haven't found anything that led the office to conclude UAP are extraterrestrial. Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO's former director, told ABC there was "nothing unexpected" in the first release and warned it would "fuel more speculation" without analysis.

What's new and what isn't

Some of this really is new to the public: recent sensor clips, FBI interview forms from the past few years, and AARO case memos written in 2026. Other material has been out for years. Reuters reported on day one that analysts said many of the documents had already been made public. Writer Jason Colavito said most of the first batch had been released "decades ago," though he praised the color scans.

Release 06 is a good example of both. Its 37 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents came from the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, which the Defense Intelligence Agency ran from 2008 to 2012. They cover warp drives, wormholes and invisibility cloaking. All 37 were already public through Freedom of Information Act releases, CBS reported, but the new copies restore some details, such as the names of the offices that wrote them. The Pentagon's notes say they "should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed." For what that program and others cost, see how much the U.S. government spends on UFOs.

PURSUE isn't the first time the Pentagon has put out UAP video either. The best-known Navy clips came out before it, and one of them is the subject of our Tic Tac case file. Other famous footage still hasn't been authenticated at all, like the clip played in Congress that we cover in did a Hellfire missile really bounce off a UFO?

The other half of the record: resolved cases

PURSUE shows you only the cases nobody closed. For the ones that were closed, you need AARO's annual reports.

AARO's fiscal year 2025 report covers June 2, 2024 to May 30, 2025. In that period it received 319 UAP reports. It resolved 114 of them, plus 256 older cases, for 370 in all. It put 191 of the new reports into what it calls an "active archive," meaning there wasn't enough data to analyze them yet. AARO says all its resolved cases turned out to be ordinary things such as balloons, satellites, birds, aircraft and drones. A new modeling tool let it close 238 reports as "satellite flaring." That's a big reason we wrote how to spot a Starlink satellite train.

There's a third track too. The National Archives holds Record Group 615, the UAP Records Collection that Congress created in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. Agencies including the FAA, ODNI, NSA, the FBI and the Air Force have transferred records there, and the Archives adds more as they arrive.

The September waiver

On September 14, 2026, four days before Release 06, the Department of War announced a legal waiver for current and former service members, civilian staff and contractors. It lets them share UAP-related defense information with the PURSUE team without being penalized under their nondisclosure agreements. It covers only what they tell the PURSUE team, not the press or the public. Anything they hand over still goes through security review before it could be released.

Whether that changes what shows up in future batches is an open question.

How to look through the files yourself

Start at war.gov/ufo. The database lets you filter by release, agency and file type, and each release has bulk downloads. Be warned that they're big: Release 02's videos alone are 5.6 GB.

A few habits help:

Read the description before the video. The written notes give the date, place, sensor and what the crew reported. The clip alone usually can't tell you any of that.
Check the date. A 1950s Blue Book memo and a 2025 sensor report sit side by side, and they're very different kinds of evidence.
Look for redactions. CBS counted redactions in 108 of 162 files in Release 01 and 64 of 71 in Release 06. For the first batch, the Pentagon said it withheld things like witness identities, the locations of government facilities, and sensitive military details unrelated to UAP.
Search for a resolution elsewhere. If a case looks familiar, check AARO's site. It publishes its own case analyses, such as the "Go Fast" video.
Keep the claim and the evidence apart. A witness saying an object was 500 feet wide is a record of the witness's estimate, not a measurement.

If you've seen something yourself, here's how to report a UAP sighting.

When is the next release?

Nobody outside the Pentagon knows. The gaps between batches have been two, three, four, four and six weeks. All six came out on Fridays. After most of them, the department said it was "actively working on the next release." As of October 17, 2026, it hasn't announced a date for Release 07. We'll update this page when it lands.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Has the Pentagon released UFO files?

Yes. Under a program called PURSUE, the Department of War has published six batches of UAP records at war.gov/ufo, starting May 8, 2026. The most recent came out on September 18, 2026.

Where can I see the Pentagon UFO files?

On the Department of War's site, war.gov/ufo. It has a searchable database you can filter by release, agency and file type, plus bulk downloads for each release.

Did the Pentagon confirm that UFOs are real?

It has confirmed that the cases in the files are unresolved, meaning it couldn't determine what was seen, often because there wasn't enough data. It hasn't said any of them are alien craft, and AARO says every case it has resolved turned out to be something ordinary.

What's in the Pentagon UFO files?

Mostly military infrared videos, FBI witness interviews, NASA astronaut transcripts and audio, and older Air Force and intelligence records. Release 06 added 37 research papers from a 2008 to 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency program.

How many UFO files have been released?

By CBS News counts, the six releases hold about 450 files: 162, 64, 72, 40, 41 and 71. One unofficial tracker counts 72 in the sixth release. The Pentagon hasn't published a running total.

When is the next Pentagon UFO file release?

No date has been announced as of October 17, 2026. The Pentagon says files come out on a rolling basis. The gaps between the first six releases ranged from two to six weeks.