Trump admin set to release 'very interesting' UFO files as theories spiral over what they contain
After years of speculation, denial, grainy footage and congressional hearings, the United States government is actually doing it - the UFO files are being released.
The White House confirmed it would begin releasing the long-awaited declassified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) intelligence today, with successive drops coming out in weekly tranches rather than one giant data dump.
Think less 'Epstein Files' chaos and a more slow, controlled drip of information that will probably drive the internet mad for months.
The timeframe was revealed during a West Wing meeting on Thursday.
Advert
Speaking with independent journalist Jeremy Corbell in a conversation shared with the New York Post, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a member of the House Oversight Committee's task force on declassification, said: "It's going to start tomorrow. It's going to have some stuff in there from pilots, and maybe one video."
Those pilot materials are expected to relate to encounters American military pilots had with unidentified objects while on active duty, the kind of credible, on-record testimony that makes it significantly harder to dismiss as tinfoil hat territory.
Burchett added that while not everyone in Congress in on board with the releases, but he's confident enough President Trump will follow through.
"I totally support and am grateful to President Trump for keeping his word and being the president of transparency and disclosure.I would like to remind people that transparency won't all happen at once, it will take some time."
It's worth noting that the first release don't include the 46 UFO videos that congress has separately demanded that the Department of War make public. So there's still plenty of stuff to come.
The appetite for answers has only grown in recent months. A video shown at a previous congressional hearing, provided by a whistleblower, appears to show a US Reaper drone firing a Hellfire missile at a glowing orb off the coast of Yemen, only for the missile to bounce off it.
According to CBS News, the Pentagon has never commented on the footage. Nobody has yet explained what the object was.
What will be in the UFO files - according to experts
Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of the Pentagon's UFO investigation office, didn't exactly set pulses racing.
Speaking to CBS News, he warned that people expecting smoking gun evidence of alien life are likely to come away frustrated. "There are going to be unsatisfied people," he said.
"You're going to have a bunch of people who are going to continue to cry conspiracy, they're going to say there's a cover up..
Having led the investigation from 2022 to 2023, Kirkpatrick said flatly: "I don't expect to see anything new."
But not everyone is writing it off. Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb said he believes that buried within hundreds of mundane explanations, there could be genuine outliers.
"There might well be a few incidents out of hundred that would really be anomalous, and that's what I'm looking for," he said, specifically objects that appear to operate beyond the known limits of human technology."
NASA physicist Federica Bianco was grounded, telling CBS News that nothing she'd seen so far suggested phenomena that 'violate the laws of psychics and require an alien society visiting us to be explained'.
However she was quick to add: "The probability that we are the only life form or even the only technical society in the universe is negligibly small."
Neil deGrasse Tyson characteristically cut straight to it, with the renowned astrophysicist saying there's really only one thing worth finding.
"An actual alien," he said. "If one is presented, then no documents are necessary at all."
What does the general public think about the UFO files?
Predictably, the internet has thoughts.
Reddit has been buzzing since the announcement, and while there's genuine excitement, there's also a healthy dose of scepticism from people who've been there before.
The most upvoted take pretty much summed up the mood: "My prediction, nothing of substance will be released, no hard proof," commented one Redditor.
"More of a yes, there are things out there that we cannot explain. No we do not know what they are."
Others were more specific about what they expected the actual footage to look like. "More blurry radar videos, maybe a floating orb in the distance here and there," one commenter predicted.
"Sprinkle in an octopus paper bag floating fast against the wind.. all in black and grey vid of course... wham bam and done."
One comment cut through the cynicism with a point worth taking seriously. "As I have said in the past, no video is ever going to meet your expectations. They are taken from the same reaper drones/plane cameras as before.
"They are tools made to capture planes and heat, not intergalactic ships in astonishing detail. It's the mere fact that we have them on video that is the astonishing part."
Maybe the most detailed prediction of all was delivered with the weary confidence of someone who has watched too many previous drops fall flat.
"Going to call it now: That video is going to be 23 seconds long, at night time, and constantly going in and out of focus. The documents are going to be very open ended and inconclusive," they wrote.
"There will be ZERO mentions of bodies/ships being recovered and ALLLL documents regarding Project Blue Book will be 'mistakenly' left out or heavily redacted due to "ongoing investigations."
Topics: UFO, Science, Donald Trump
Thomas Bamford