For nearly 75 years, the US government and its intermediaries have ridiculed people who report Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created a task force that recommended debunking all reports of UAPs, then called UFOs. In the 1960s, a government-created study by the University of Colorado falsely suggested there were few to no UAPs. In the 1980s, the US military and intelligence agents fed false information to investigators and journalists and drove at least one man to a mental breakdown.
That Cold War era of secrecy has been replaced by a new age of disclosure, as the DoW’s release of a third tranche of videos and documents last week shows. The documents released last week show that the FBI is actively investigating and even reconstructing images of UAPs based on testimony. The files reveal that FBI and perhaps other federal agents investigated UAPs, witnessed them, and made and gathered videos. In one case, six “federal agents,” with no agency specified, testified about seeing a large, unidentified orb appear to launch smaller orbs somewhere in the Western US in 2023. Two agents reported interacting with a UAP that made itself look like a car traveling on the road ahead of them.
In a separate 2025 incident, a senior intelligence enforcement official described searching for UAP in a helicopter in close proximity to a sensitive military testing range. According to the agent, he, a colleague, two pilots, and multiple ground observers watched as multiple brightly illuminated “orbs,” which were tracked simultaneously on radar, appeared near their helicopter. The DoW released 32 infrared sensor images associated with the event.
There is still far more secrecy than disclosure. In response to a demand from Congress, the Department of War in 2022 created a new agency called AARO that claims to investigate cases and to release documents about major events. And yet AARO has failed to publish the second volume of a historical report, which its director had promised to publish in early 2025, and which, according to legal requirements signed into law in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, is now over two years overdue. The first volume of the historical review excluded a significant amount of relevant information. The former AARO director ridiculed UAP disclosure advocates after he left his position. And AARO has not yet released unredacted versions of heavily redacted UAP task force memos and reports. The three tranches released reveal that AARO has, to date, failed to realize the intent of Congress in creating it.
In other cases, AARO is either covering up or making serious errors in the way it describes important cases. In an official AARO memo about the 2023 incident by its Director, Jon Kosloski, which was included in the Friday tranche, he claims there were six witnesses, but the release only contains five. He also claims there was no video, even though Witness 2 said there was.
