Pentagon Unseals 162 UFO Files Online, Including Apollo 17 Lunar Photos and 28 Military Encounter Videos

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon began publishing its long-classified vault of UFO files on Friday, posting 162 records — including 6 photographs from Apollo missions, 28 videos and 14 image files — to a brand-new Defense Department website at war.gov/ufo. The release, ordered by President Donald Trump in March, is the first tranche of what officials say will be a rolling, indefinite declassification effort spanning material from the FBI, NASA, the State Department and the Department of Defense.

The documents catalogue military and civilian sightings dating from 1947 — the year of the Roswell incident — through the present. Among the more striking entries are a NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972 showing what the file describes as "three 'dots' in a triangular formation" hovering above the lunar surface, and a separate report in which Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison "Jack" Schmitt logged a flash on the moon's surface north of the Grimaldi crater. Roughly 41 minutes of video footage, captured between 2020 and 2026, accompanies the documents — much of it infrared gun-camera tape from Navy and Air Force aircraft tracking white objects performing maneuvers that pilots could not explain.

In one 2023 incident over Greece, a U.S. surveillance asset recorded an object making multiple 90-degree turns at an estimated 80 miles per hour. A 1994 file out of Tajikistan describes a bright, reflective object at 41,000 feet that appeared and disappeared from radar. A Navy crew aboard a destroyer in the western Pacific in 2022 likened the object they tracked to "the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings, except without the pupil." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who oversaw the unsealing under what officials are calling PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — said in a written statement that "these files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation" and that the public deserves an unredacted look.

Trump, in a Truth Social post Friday morning, framed the release in his characteristic style: "the people can decide for themselves, 'WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?'" Of the 162 files, 108 still contain redactions — but the Pentagon emphasized that "no redactions have been made to any files released under President Trump's directive concerning information about the nature or existence of any encounter reported as a UAP or related phenomena." The redactions, officials said, cover sources, methods and the names of intelligence personnel.

The Pentagon stressed that nothing in the cache constitutes evidence of extraterrestrial life or contact. The materials, the department said in its summary, detail "unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena." Senate UAP caucus members have been pressing for disclosure since the 2023 testimony of former intelligence officer David Grusch, who alleged the existence of a secret recovery program — claims the Pentagon has consistently denied.

Future tranches will appear "every few weeks," according to the Pentagon, as additional records are located, declassified and reviewed. Skeptics — including Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, who reviewed the videos for CBS News — say the released footage, while striking, shows nothing that cannot be explained by atmospheric refraction, sensor artifacts, balloons or drones. But for a UAP transparency movement that has spent two decades pushing for sunlight, Friday marked a watershed: the U.S. government, for the first time, has published its UFO archive on a public-facing federal website and invited Americans to draw their own conclusions.