By Andrew Follett
Monday, August 17, 2026
A newly
released fifth tranche
of UFO files held by the Department of War offers quite a few examples of
strange lights in the sky, but nothing close to credible evidence of
extraterrestrial intelligence. Still, the files had much to say about recent,
widely publicized incidents involving UFOs — and the U.S. government’s
engagement with them.
The most interesting report in this tranche was a 2021
Gulf of Oman incident involving an AC-130 gunship firing on small, fast-moving
objects that appeared to evade the American aircraft’s shots. Similar reports
often turn out to be balloons, drones, birds, flares, or optical illusions that
sometimes manifest under combat conditions where there is limited resolution.
Another highlight was a February 2024 incident in Ukraine
that involved a reconnaissance drone observing what was apparently an enormous
disk (that was previously reported). But estimating range by staring at
something on a screen is exactly how parallax errors happen. Such a math error seems more probable in this case.
The final interesting incident was sworn testimony from “a
senior U.S. intelligence officer” investigating an area where loud noises had
been heard and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena spotted on radar in a remote
mountain range near a government-owned weapons test range. While in a helicopter,
the intelligence officer and a crew observed “countless orange orbs swarming in
all directions” that “match the speed and flight path” of nearby fighter jets
and “chase” them. Though this case may sound compelling, the fact that it
occurred on a test range while fighter aircraft were actively training in the
same airspace points to a likely source: simple flares bouncing and moving via
wind effects.
No photos were taken by the senior officer, and most
recording of the object seems to have fallen outside the helicopter’s FLIR
field of view. The facts of the case, therefore, are dependent on human
description, which is exactly how many prosaic events remain “unresolved.”
Similar Western military reports have been attributed to military flares.
The Department of War has said that, due to limited data,
it cannot make a definitive determination on the provenance of
any of the 41 files, 12 videos, 22 documents, and 3 images released in the
fifth tranche. The released materials consist primarily of sensor footage of
anomalous lights and objects, pilot and agent reports, and historical film
analysis. There were no recovered materials, communications, biological
samples, or other physical evidence that would demonstrate non-human technology
or extraterrestrial intelligence in this or any of the other released tranches.
The lack of definitive insight into the question of
potential extraterrestrial life and the genesis of recent UFO incidents is not
surprising; the Pentagon usually releases files on unidentified phenomena for
transparency and aviation or military-safety reasons. For the military,
“unidentified” means that there was insufficient data to resolve the object’s
origin, not that it was necessarily “alien.” Indeed, decades of official
investigation have produced no physical evidence of alien life, recovered alien
craft, or verified non-human technology — only a continuing stream of ambiguous
sensor and eyewitness data.
The department began releasing the file tranches in
February after President Trump directed federal agencies to “begin
the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and
extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified
flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these
highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
The result of this new release has been very similar to
the first tranche: All hype, no aliens.
UFO-believers like Representative Tim Burchett (R.,
Tenn.) downplayed the first release, moving the goalposts by
writing on X that “the 1st drop will be big but in comparison to what is
coming they will be a drop in the bucket. I would say ‘Holy Crap’ is coming.”
All of the photos of events recorded in the latest
tranche have plausible alien-free explanations. Furthermore, in an era in which
91 percent of Americans nearly always carry a
high-definition camera through their smartphone, we should demand higher
standards of evidence for claims of extraterrestrial contact.
Importantly, the Department of War’s releases expand the
public record of anomalous aerial observations by credible observers such as
military personnel, pilots, and intelligence agents. They document interesting,
sometimes multi-witness or multi-sensor events going back decades that resist
easy prosaic explanations in the released material.
Skeptics and the government’s own framing treat reported
UFOs as ambiguous phenomena that could still involve drones, balloons, sensor
artifacts, optical effects, classified terrestrial systems, or incomplete data.
But successive drops continue the pattern of transparency on unresolved cases
without delivering anything even approaching a decisive ‘smoking gun.’
And that’s extremely telling, because, as I’ve been saying for years, there exists enormous media pressure
to publish attention-grabbing headlines when anything supposedly “alien”
emerges. But the best explanation for strange lights in the sky around the
world is never aliens. I’ve been digging into these releases for months, and
I’ve found no evidence of space invaders — but plenty of highly obvious cases of lens flare, bad lighting,
color-correction flaws, and barracks ghost tales.
The heavy pre-release hype promising historic revelations
has, so far, delivered little more than scanned paperwork that serves to merely
fuel public curiosity further. UFO believers have for decades claimed that
“disclosure” — i.e., government declassification of secret contact with
extraterrestrial aliens — is imminent. The first major UFO book pushing
“disclosure” was retired Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying
Saucers Are Real, which was
first published in 1950 and claimed that alien crafts are real and far
beyond human technology, but that this alleged fact was suppressed by the U.S.
government to avoid public panic. In the intermediate 70 years, UFO books have
been making identical claims that have simply never come to
pass.
Every generation rediscovers the same pattern. Lights in
the sky, radar blips, pilot reports, and grainy videos generate excitement;
better data, triangulation, or simple trigonometry almost always reveal
balloons, drones, flares, aircraft, birds, atmospheric effects, optical
illusions, or classified conventional technology. No verified physical evidence
(e.g., materials, biologics, or clear multi-sensor records) has ever been
produced, and governments have strong incentives to keep ordinary black projects
secret while letting UFO lore serve as a convenient cover or distraction.
The military also may wish to let the media frenzy
continue to obscure real government secrets. After all, the U.S. government has
a long track record of using alleged aliens as an
explanation for programs it would rather not reveal — and to request budget
expansions. In the 1950s and 60s, the Air Force and the CIA often intentionally
called sightings of highly secret U-2 spy planes “UFOs” to hide the true nature
of the aircraft. A CIA official who worked on spy plane projects later attributed over half of all UFO reports during that time to
the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird projects.
This latest file release from the Department of War only
underscores the notion that the default explanation for any unidentified object
should remain the mundane explanation, unless and until extraordinary,
independently verifiable evidence forces a different conclusion. And, after
many decades of modern UFO claims, that threshold has never been crossed.
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