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A possible UFO sighting over a busy southern African airport, and yet more mysterious glowing orbs in the sky above the US feature in the latest batch of previously classified documents released by the Pentagon on Friday in its stated quest for “transparency” amid the irrepressible debate about the chances of extraterrestrial life.
In keeping with the first two document drops of government papers last month, Friday’s tranche of more than 50 files contains no proof that the tantalizing videos and written accounts of possible alien encounters are anything other than perception, vivid imagination or conspiracy theories.
Despite the assurance by the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, that the release “demonstrates the Trump administration’s earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency”, the Pentagon repeats the disclaimer that everything contained in the hundreds of files released so far are “unresolved cases”.
The government “is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena”, it states.
The releases feature “plenty of black-and-white murk but nothing that looks even a little like an alien spacecraft”, Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at the Atlantic, wrote drily last month in a column entitled The Truth Is Still Out There.
Friday’s batch includes reports of strange glowing orbs hovering above an unidentified north-eastern US city in 2025 and 2026 that piqued the FBI’s interest enough to dispatch two agent investigators to interview witnesses who reported fast-moving red and white objects.
One of the witnesses, according to the FBI report, stated he “had always been interested in the topic of UAP [unidentified aerial phenomena]” and in 1987 claimed to have seen flashing red lights in the sky “like the front end of Kit from the tv show nightrider”.
Another document recalls a summer 2008 incident in Zimbabwe, when the CIA became concerned about a report of an “unidentified object hovering at high altitude over Harare international airport”.
The disc-like object, which was reported as having “a series of rotating lights on the underside” and “beams” of light emanating from it, could have been “an advanced reconnaissance device belonging to a foreign government”, or “an unidentified flying object of extraterrestrial origin”, the report surmised. The FBI made no determination either way.
A 2022 incident, meanwhile, saw several military personnel in Colorado Springs reporting the presence of an object resembling an “angular, non-symmetrical potato” in the sky.
An early evaluation of the sighting concluded it was “sunlight reflecting from mountain snow cover [that] illuminated the underside of low-altitude clouds”, but the government’s all-domain anomaly resolution office (AARO) said it was a “low-confidence assessment” and declared the incident unresolved.
The Pentagon has promised more releases of government documents related to UAPs on unspecified future dates, fueling speculation that Donald Trump’s February directive to government agencies to release files about the search for alien life was an attempted distraction tactic from whatever bad news his administration was facing at the time.
After the first release on 8 May, the Republican former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, known as an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist and once an ally but now a fierce critic of the president, wrote on X the she was “so sick of the ‘look at the shiny object’ propaganda” from the administration “while they wage foreign wars, let rapist and pedophiles run free, and ruin the value of our dollar”.
Other critics have attacked the inclusion in the files of ambiguous or unproven testimony from members of the military and even Nasa astronauts who reported seeing mysterious lights during several Apollo spaceflights in the 1960s and 1970s. At least some of those sightings were, experts say, easily explained as reflections of sunlight through the windows of their capsules.
Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, said in a YouTube interview this month that such “credentialling” had given the issue undeserved credence.
“That changed it from kind of the tinfoil hat-wearing weirdos to, you know, oh, it’s a navy pilot,” he said.
Shermer also pointed to a video purportedly of an alien craft, but actually showing the deployment of a parachute.
Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the AARO who earlier this year called the government’s analysis of UAPs “a self-licking ice cream cone”, told Scientific American that the files served no purpose.
“There’s nothing unexpected in their release. And without any analysis or context, [it] will only serve to fuel more speculation, conspiracy and armchair pseudoscience,” he said.
A CBS News/YouGov poll published this week, however, shows most Americans do not agree with him.
Eight in 10 respondents said the government knew more than it was telling about the existence of extraterrestrial life, 63% believe there is life on other planets, and more than one in five is convinced aliens have already visited Earth.
