The War Department has announced that it has published “never-before-seen files” of unidentified unusual phenomena (UAPs) on a new government webpage, and plans to add material on a “rolling basis”. Some Pentagon UAP footage was made public during President Donald Trump’s first term, but this new page appears to be the result of Trump’s February Truth Social post, which called on DOW and related agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”
The webpage – war.gov/UFO – includes a carousel of images and files from DOW, FBI, NASA, and others, presented in a way that deliberately plays up to the conspiratorial nature of UFO fans in general. However, you don’t have to spend long clicking on images and downloading PDFs to realize that there isn’t much in the way of actual evidence of aliens. Whether or not the files are expected to divert attention from the second Trump administration’s other lackluster projects – a disastrous war with Iran, for example – they are more interesting as an example of how a bureaucracy processes and catalogs unexplained phenomena, rather than as a smoking gun proving that extraterrestrials have visited Earth.
Suspicions have persisted for decades that the U.S. government knows more than it is letting on about unidentified paranormal phenomena (the term replacing unidentified aerial phenomena and UFOs), but formal research on the subject was not officially confirmed 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 continued by others. Government groups and taskforces, most recently the Office of All-Domain Discrepancy Resolution, an organization currently working inside DOW, have contributed to this new release of files.
Videos of the UAP previously shared during the Trump administration were unclear, but a government report said it was not an alien spacecraft. It’s not clear whether the new files released by DOW will change anything, but they at least raise an interesting curiosity.
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