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The US Department of Defense (DoD) released a trove of files on UFOs. The files include images along with government documents and correspondence, some of which were classified until now.

“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation – and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” said US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in a statement on where the files are displayed.

The images are mostly photographs taken by members of the US military showing small dots or indistinct shapes in the sky. Of more interest are the hundreds of pages of files relating to UFOs, also called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), from the FBI, Air Force and various other government departments.

Many of the pages are correspondence between the government and concerned members of the public. Some are pamphlets from special-interest groups such as the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America or the Fraternity of Cosmic Sons and Daughters, and others are requests from children to the head of the FBI – many to J. Edgar Hoover, who served in the role from 1935 to 1972 – for help with school projects.

Letters from UFO enthusiasts through the years, from the 1940s to now, show remarkable similarities in the sentiments they express: a feeling that UFO sightings have been mounting, that the government must be hiding something and that they are sure to be persecuted for saying as much.

The responses to these letters, and the internal government communications that have been released, seem to show something different – many thousands of reports of UFO sightings have been taken seriously and investigated, and there has been no indication that any of them have been extraterrestrial. This mirrors the 2023 results from NASA’s task force on UAPs, which found that normal aircraft and weather phenomena account for most reports, with only a few remaining unexplained due to blurry images and low-quality data.

The documents that have made the biggest splash are images and transcripts from NASA’s Gemini 7, Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions, each referencing some bright lights that the astronauts saw in space and could not explain. Most of these sightings have already been investigated and explained as micrometeoroid impacts on the moon or the spacecraft, bits of floating debris, and camera or film defects, although a few have remained unexplained thus far.

The DoD has opened a new investigation into the images that remain unexplained, and has been directed by the administration of President Donald Trump to “conduct separate reporting” on any unresolved UAP cases. According to the website, this is only the first of many rolling document drops expected “every few weeks” as more files are found and declassified.