The Pentagon released a fourth batch of declassified UFO files on Friday, adding 40 new records, comprising 14 documents, 19 videos, four audio files and three images, to its growing public archive on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the term now used in place of UFO.
The material was pulled from multiple agencies, including the Pentagon, NASA, the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Energy, and published on the Pentagon’s UAP website. The files fall under an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump earlier this year directing government agencies to declassify selected UAP-related records. Friday’s release is the fourth in a rolling series that began on 8 May, followed by further batches on 22 May and 12 June.
Object tracked over Texas nuclear facility
One of the most detailed documents in the release, compiled by the Department of Energy, describes an unidentified object entering the airspace above the Pantex Plant, a sensitive nuclear weapons facility near Amarillo, Texas, on 1 September 2015. The site is the United States’ primary facility for the assembly, disassembly, maintenance and life extension of nuclear weapons.
According to the report, two security officers pursued the object by vehicle after the facility was placed on lockdown. They described it as diamond shaped, rounded at the top, roughly four feet tall and two feet wide at the base, and moving silently with no visible propulsion system. Witnesses differed on the object’s colour, variously describing it as black, silver, red or blue. The officers were unable to catch up with it before losing sight of it due to limited road access, though the report characterised the object as non-threatening.
“Unlike anything I had seen” in 28 years of service
Another file details a 2019 incident over the eastern United States, recorded in what the Pentagon calls a “range fouler debrief”, a standardised US Navy reporting form used when an unauthorised intrusion into controlled airspace occurs during active military operations or training.
The reporting aviator, who was present alongside four other crew members, wrote that the object displayed flight characteristics “unlike anything I had seen” in 28 years of service with the US Air Force and Navy. The object reportedly travelled in a straight line at high speed before accelerating out of the aircraft’s tracking field, and could not be reacquired even at lower zoom.
Atlantic and Indo-Pacific footage
The release also includes footage from a 2020 encounter over the Atlantic Ocean, showing a dark, reddish-brown object roughly four to five metres in height. The accompanying account from a Navy weapons systems operator was partially redacted, though the operator noted the object resembled “a large, somewhat misshapen balloon” before the aircraft returned to its ship.
More recent footage comes from the US Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility, including video of a military sensor tracking what analysts described as a six-pointed, star-shaped area of contrast over the Yellow Sea, and a separate object monitored over the East China Sea for several minutes. Additional infrared footage in the release was submitted by US Central Command, the Air Force and Indo-Pacific Command, covering incidents dated between 2023 and 2024.
Historical records included
The batch also contains older material, including a transcript of a 1949 conference at Los Alamos, New Mexico, attended by prominent physicists, some of whom had worked on the Manhattan Project, who attempted and failed to explain “green fireballs” reported over the nuclear laboratory.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell indicated that further disclosures are expected as agencies complete their declassification reviews.
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