'Never-before-seen' files on UFOs released by Pentagon

The Pentagon has started releasing "never-before-seen" files on UFOs.

The batch includes a NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, showing three dots in a triangular formation.

The Pentagon said "there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly" but a new, preliminary analysis indicated it could be a "physical object".

It comes after Donald Trump, who has been teasing the announcement since February, promised last month some "very interesting documents" related to UFOs would be released by the US defence department "very, very soon".

The Pentagon said on Friday the US president "is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public, who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files". More files will be released "on a rolling basis".

The latest unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) videos, photos, and original source documents are included on a new Pentagon website, filled with black-and-white military imagery and videos of flying objects, complete with captions in a typewriter-like font.

What's in the new release?

The new release contains 161 files, including old state department cables, FBI documents and transcripts from NASA of crewed flights into space.

There are more than 20 video files showing unidentified objects captured by military sensors in locations from Japan and Syria to North America.

The objects range from fast-moving specks captured in the distance to an American football-shaped object spotted over the East China Sea in 2022.

A state department cable from the US embassy in Tajikistan in 1994 details how one Tajik pilot and three Americans witnessed a brightly lit UAP while flying a jet over Kazakhstan.

The object was "making 90 degree turns, doing corkscrews and manoeuvring in circles at great rates of speed", according to the cable.

In a 1969 debriefing of Apollo 11 crew members, astronaut Buzz Aldrin recalled spotting several unusual sights, such as a "sizeable" object close to the moon and a "fairly bright light source" that the crew felt could be a laser.

One document has an FBI interview with a person identified as a drone pilot who, in September 2023, reported seeing a "linear object" with a light bright enough to "see bands within the light" in the sky.

"The object was visible for five to 10 seconds and then the light went out and the object vanished," according to the FBI interview.

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US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said: "These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fuelled justified speculation - and it's time the American people see it for themselves."

Congress ordered the Pentagon to start releasing decades of files on UFO sightings in 2022, and created an office to declassify material that year, as some members of the military shared encounters with unexplained aircraft.

Its first report in 2024 revealed hundreds of new UAP incidents, but found no evidence that the US government had ever confirmed a sighting of alien technology.

(c) Sky News 2026: 'Never-before-seen' files on UFOs released by Pentagon