On May 8, the US department of war released the first tranche of declassified files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, also called unidentified flying objects) at the order of President Donald Trump. The first release included 162 documents, photos and videos, with further updates planned through the grandiosely-named PURSUE programme, or the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. The effort also involves the White House, Nasa, FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
Immediately, the Iran-aligned Lego-style satirical viral brigade, Explosive Media, released a rapid-fire rap video telling Trump to “Keep the UFO files, drop the Epstein list”, highlighting off-the-bat what many Americans already feel—that Trump is in serial deflection mode trying to wrench attention from his domestic economic, foreign policy and Epstein files disasters.
The Spectator’s take on the infodump was scathing: “The release is the latest example of UFO activity that began with a controversial 2017 article in the New York Times describing a secret Pentagon programme to investigate UFOs. It was controversial because two of its three authors were UFO enthusiasts who omitted to add that the project also included looking into ghosts and werewolves.”
Controversial or not, the NYT revealed the existence of the Pentagon’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22-million government project that in 2007-12 was tasked with investigating UFOs/UAPs. In 2022, the Biden administration established the AARO, which built up a caseload of more than 2,000 by early 2026.
In 2021, the Pentagon showed disdain at evidence of aliens. A Nasa report in 2023 hedged a bit but said more or less the same thing. SpaceX owner Elon Musk, well-known for advancing the theory that the universe could be an artificial construct, said that thousands of his satellites had seen no evidence of unexplained visitations.
But does political deflection really explain the slow revelations of PURSUE? What do the released files have in hold for extraterrestrial hypothesisers (of whom many have been quietly embedded in various US administrations down the decades)?
US presidents themselves have been coquettish on the issue. Jimmy Carter had filed a personal UFO sighting report. Ronald Reagan had breathlessly reported seeing from his aircraft a light “shoot straight up into the heavens”. Barack Obama said, “They’re real—but I haven’t seen them.”
The released files are unusually—or, as detractors claim, expectedly—anodyne. They show little that was not known before: fuzzy dots speeding about, too tiny to figure out what they are, often in frames with portions redacted with black masking; an ornate four-pointed star dipping and rising; two enhanced photos with unexplained smears taken on the moon by Apollo 12 and 17 astronauts. It is all nebulous enough for Sean Kirkpatrick, physicist and former director of AARO, to say that minus analysis and context, it “will only serve to fuel more speculation, conspiracy and armchair pseudoscience, particularly from the playhouse politics theatre company”.
But Kirkpatrick has often been dismissed by ‘UFOlogists’ as inordinately sceptical. AARO’s first report in 2024 divulged hundreds of new UAP sightings—the growing scale of which is breathtaking given the slow crawl over the past decades—but no US government report that had confirmed alien technology. A second report of more recent sightings is due soon, but expectation of revelations is low.
The files already in the public domain include videos of unidentified aerial phenomena taken over Greece (2023-24), Iraq (2022-24) and the UAE (2023-24)—and while they are not many, their inclusion is significant in that perhaps for the first time, the rest of the world is included in UAP sightings. This includes an American football-shaped UAP that the US-Indo Pacific Command reported near Japan in 2024. An ellipsoid, a shape mentioned as unusual in UFO lore, a similar object had been rendered by FBI Lab from eyewitness reports of a sighting in the US in 2023.
It is all very intriguing. But here’s the thing: of the 162 files initially released, four were retracted soon after and 108 bear redactions. In effect, the majority of Trump’s “transparency release” is blacked out. The Pentagon’s explanation is that the masking protects “eyewitness identities, location of government facilities, and sensitive military information not related to UAP”. In short, confirming everything that UAP researchers have been convinced about for more than half-a-century—that the US government continues to keep eyewitnesses from the public eye, conceals xenotech skunkworks and hides military confirmation (not just suspicion) of evidence.
But redaction is a Trump administration standard operating procedure. It knows full well that they act as an incentive, a challenge, a promise: they keep the public eye tightly focused while the action, so to speak, takes place elsewhere. They maintain the public desire to be gifted more. And they leak hope from Olympus into the public domain. But this promissory does not come with an estoppel. It cannot be enforced.
Whatever the Trump administration’s intent, it has paid off. The citizenry’s attention is pinned. There were more than 340 million hits on the war.gov/UFO, which is hosting the files, within the first half-day. That’s more than 97 percent of the US population.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
