The Trump administration launched a new official website on Friday local time to release a batch of "new, never-before-published" UFO-related files. The news was confirmed by the Pentagon. It is worth noting that the U.S. government once again generously used the term "UFO" in this project, and the website domain name directly adopted the eye-catching war.gov/ufo.
access:
https://www.war.gov/UFO/
According to an announcement posted on social platform The Pentagon said the materials had been reviewed for security, but that a significant portion "has not yet undergone analysis sufficient to resolve all anomalies." The official also emphasized that relevant archives will be continuously supplemented in the future in a "rolling release" manner, and the content of the website will continue to expand.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s move to release files can be traced back to a turning point in public opinion at the end of 2017. At that time, the New York Times and Politico and other media revealed that the Pentagon had invested approximately US$22 million to secretly run a confidential project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) to investigate various incidents in which the military encountered UFOs. Since then, the new, more technical term "UAP" has gradually replaced the traditional "UFO" term, and the public's interest and doubts about "unknown things" in the sky have increased, including concerns about multiple drone sightings in the United States in 2024.
However, it is not easy to truly clarify "which phenomena are truly unexplainable". The report pointed out that the sky today is completely different from the past: frequent launches by commercial rocket companies such as SpaceX and the deployment of a large number of satellites in orbit are constantly changing the visual background of humans looking up at the stars. That’s why archival collections, supported by military intelligence and interagency reviews, are of particular value in studying which phenomena stem from natural or man-made activities and which may remain mysteries.
This wave of declassification of official files has also quietly affected popular culture in recent years. Inspired by the news about government-sponsored UFO investigation projects, many film and television works have developed narratives around extraterrestrial life, government cover-up, and folk conspiracy theories. For example, the film "Jules" released in 2023 tells the delicate relationship between a man and an alien that crashed in his backyard; another film "Bugonia" revolves around the conspiracy theory that "aliens are among us"; and Spielberg's upcoming new film "Disclosure Day" directly references the government's cover-up of the truth.
Compared with the past, the large-scale disclosure of UFO documents today would have become sensational news, but in reality, the focus of the American people's attention has shifted. The report pointed out that today, many people are more worried about the pressure of daily life: how the Iran war will push up oil prices, the rising cost of living, unemployment blamed on artificial intelligence, medical security, climate change and other more "immediate" issues. Compared with these real-life dilemmas, those unknown light spots and images in the sky no longer seem so urgent.
From a mechanism point of view, the release of UFO files originated from an inter-agency collaborative project - the "Presidential Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Encounters Unblocking and Reporting System" (PURSUE). The program is led by the White House and is jointly promoted by relevant departments from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Defense Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Analysis Office (AARO), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other intelligence agencies. Prior to this, the independent news website 404 Media had noticed that the Executive Office of the President had registered the impactful domain name aliens.gov in March, but as of now, the website has not been officially launched.