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Pentagon releases more UFO files, including documents on secretive military program
The Pentagon on Friday released a new group of files about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP or UFOs, including a batch of documents regarding a mysterious military program studying aerospace threats.
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Stefan has covered national politics for more than a decade and helps oversee a team covering the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, immigration and federal law enforcement. Read Full Bio Stefan Becket Updated on: September 18, 2026 / 11:21 AM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google Washington — The Pentagon on Friday released its sixth batch of files on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP or UFOs, including dozens of documents detailing a military program that commissioned studies of warp drives, wormholes and injuries that researchers linked to possible encounters with unknown craft. Friday's release includes a total of 71 files — 67 provided by the Defense Department and four from local law enforcement in Colorado. There are 55 PDF files, 15 video files and one audio file. Most of the files — 64 out of 71 — contain redactions. The dates of the documents range from 1952 to 2025. What's in the latest UFO files? The most noteworthy documents deal with a secretive military initiative known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. The Defense Intelligence Agency established the program in 2008 to study various aerospace threats decades into the future. The initiative ended in 2012. One document describes the goals of the program and requirements for contractors who would work on it: "One aspect of the future threat environment involves advanced aerospace weapon system applications. The objective of this program is to understand the physics and engineering of these applications as they apply to the foreign threat out to the far term, i.e., from now through the year 2050. Primary focus is on breakthrough technologies and applications that create discontinuities in currently evolving technology trends." The release includes 37 "Defense Intelligence Reference Documents," or DIRDs, produced under AAWSAP, dealing with topics like warp drives, wormholes, antigravity, negative mass propulsion and invisibility cloaking. All 37 have been publicly available for years, including through Freedom of Information Act releases by the DIA. But Friday's versions include some details the agency had previously withheld, like the names of the agency offices that produced the documents. In notes accompanying the documents, the Pentagon says the DIRDs are "best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research" and that they "should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed." While most of the DIRDs examine ideas that are typically the domain of science fiction, one is a 38-page highly technical study from 2010 analyzing "evidence of unintended injury to human observers by anomalous advanced aerospace systems." Researchers recounted that "three previous fit and active individuals experienced an anomalous ['irregular, incongruous and inconsistent with their domain'] aerospace-related event" and suffered a range of medical symptoms in the aftermath, including heat and redness on their skin and hair loss. One of the individuals showed "signs of radiation illness" and "over several years developed signs of malignant transformations." The document did not identify the source of the exposure that led to the symptoms, but said the three individuals were "antennae engineers." The author compared the cases to 42 published and roughly 300 unpublished incidents of conventional radiofrequency injury where the source of the radiation was known. "Sufficient incidents/accidents have been accurately reported, and medical data acquired, as to support a hypothesis that some advanced systems are already deployed, and opaque to full US understanding," the author found. Most of the videos in Friday's disclosure are similar to those from previous releases: grainy footage captured by military cameras of unexplained objects zooming across the screen at high speed. One unexplained incident from 2022 shows a UAP "traveling at various speeds between 80-180 miles per hour." An accompanying report on the encounter shows operators were flying a mission in the Middle East when they spotted various objects at unknown altitudes. The crew reported that the objects were between 1 and 2 meters in size and were "flying spora[d]ically within the target area." Your browser does not support the video tag. Another video captured over the Middle East shows roughly half a dozen objects flying in tandem. The report says there were "six small spherical objects" that "seemed to be agile" and were "frequently changing direction." The incident remains unexplained. Your browser does not support the video tag. Four of the videos originated from local law enforcement in Colorado who submitted reports to the Pentagon's office that investigates UAP. The Pentagon said the partially blurred footage was captured by cellphone cameras in October 2023. "The reporting officer described the phenomenon as 'silent' and as featuring 'red, blue, and green flashing lights,'" the military said in notes accompanying one of the clips . Your browser does not support the video tag. The historical files include an hour-long audio recording and transcript of remarks by Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt from 1952 in which he explains the service's investigation into UFO incidents. In the presentation, Ruppelt revealed that roughly 20% of the 800 UFO reports the Air Force had investigated were still a mystery. "We've gone through these reports and come up with the fact that about 20% are very good reports offered by very reliable people and … just absolutely no conclusions can be drawn," Ruppelt said. Ruppelt would go on to run Project Blue Book, an Air Force program that investigated UFOs from 1952 to 1969. Several other files related to Project Blue Book were also included in Friday's disclosure. On Monday, the Pentagon announced the creation of a legal waiver that would allow current and former employees previously bound by nondisclosure agreements to share UAP-related information with the government. More from CBS News Kennedy Center says "nothing is being demolished" as Trump says it could be "ripped down" House passes bill to shield Americans from data center energy costs House panel recommends holding Leon Black in contempt in Epstein probe AI is making it easier for adversaries to target U.S. military, experts say Go deeper with The Free Press Trump’s UFO Dump Leaves Earthlings Wanting More What Should Smart People Think About UFOs? © 2026 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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