WASHINGTON, September 18 — The Pentagon released a sixth batch of documents on unidentified anomalous phenomena on Friday, more than six months after President Donald Trump ordered the files unsealed, and the haul does nothing to settle the question that has hung over the subject for decades. The newest tranche, posted under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE, comprised sixty-seven items from the Pentagon and four from local law enforcement in Colorado.
That works out to fifty-five PDF documents, fifteen video clips and one audio file. Sixty-four of the files, written between 1952 and 2025, contain redactions.
The collection is housed on WAR.GOV/UFO, and the Department of War said it will keep releasing material on a rolling basis. “Today, the Department of War is publishing the sixth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) files as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE),” said Sean Parnell, Secretary of War for Public Affairs and Chief Pentagon Spokesman.
“The collection continues to be housed on WAR.GOV/UFO, and the Department will release additional files on a rolling basis.” The first tranche landed on May 8, 2026. The Pentagon has framed the wider effort as an unprecedented undertaking requiring coordination between dozens of agencies and the review of tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper and spanning many decades.
It remains unclear how many unreleased documents remain.
What is actually in the files
The oldest item is a Project Blue Book investigation into an incident near Tremonton, Utah, on July 2, 1952. The Air Force assessed the principal witness, Delbert C. Newhouse, a U.S. Navy Warrant Officer specialising in photography, as honest and reliable, and as an expert with more than a thousand hours of aerial-photography experience.
Newhouse reported observing a dozen or so reflective objects and recorded the event on colour motion-picture film using a handheld Bell & Howell Auto Master camera. A video clip of the incident is among the newly released files.
At the other end of the timeline sits a 2025 report from United States Central Command detailing the sighting of “six small spherical objects, grouped,” seen “frequently changing direction” at 480 mph. Another video, from 2023, appears to show circular objects flying over the Yellow Sea, spotted by an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military vessel. None of it amounts to definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life or alien spacecraft.
What the documents do contain is reports, videos and sensor data of objects moving in unusual ways or at high speeds that analysts could not immediately identify. Some sightings are attributed to mundane explanations — weather balloons, drones, debris, camera optical artifacts or sensor limitations.
The files also include details on injuries that researchers had linked to possible encounters with unknown craft.
The technical reality behind the exotic language
One document addresses the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, established by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2008 to study aerospace threats. “One aspect of the future threat environment involves advanced aerospace weapon system applications,” it states. “The objective of this program is to understand the physics and engineering of these applications as they apply to the foreign threat out to the far term, i.e., from now through the year 2050.
Primary focus is on breakthrough technologies and applications that create discontinuities in currently evolving technology trends.” It also included thirty-seven Defense Intelligence Reference Documents discussing advanced technologies including warp drives, traversable wormholes, antigravity, negative-mass propulsion, invisibility cloaking and spintronics. As CBS News reported, all thirty-seven had been publicly available for years through the DIA’s Freedom of Information Act releases.
Friday’s versions include some details the agency had previously withheld, such as the names of the agency offices that produced the documents. That is the detail that matters for anyone expecting a smoking gun. Under the hood, much of this tranche is a re-release with marginally better metadata, alongside genuinely new sensor footage and a handful of historical case files.
The rolling cadence means the next tranche is due within weeks, and the question of how much remains unreleased is still unanswered.
