The documents, videos, photographs, and transcripts represent “unresolved” cases of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the US government’s term for what are commonly called UFOs. The cases are considered “unresolved” because the government is “unable to make a definitive determination of the nature of the observed phenomena,” the Trump administration said.
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Jacqueline McCleary, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University, described the records as “fascinating” and encouraged the public to approach them with an open mind.
“It’s good to have these sort of unexplained phenomena destigmatized, because when it becomes destigmatized, then honest widespread study of what is fundamentally a scientific phenomenon can start to take place,” McCleary said Saturday.
Files on UFOs, released Friday, May 8, 2026, by the Pentagon, are photographed in Washington. Jon Elswick/Associated Press
While Trump ordered the records declassified and released in February, the broader push to publicize the materials and treat their study as a vital national security concern rather than a fringe specialty has been growing for years.
In 2017, a New York Times report revealed the Defense Department had run a program to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects.
In 2022, the federal government established the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which tracks reports of unidentified flying objects.
That office’s first report was released in 2024 and revealed hundreds of new incidents, but found no evidence that the US government had ever confirmed a sighting of alien technology.
Among the records released Friday was a FBI memo about closing the investigation into the burning metallic fragments spotted in Rindge, N.H.The Boston FBI office said there “has been no speculation that a guided missile originating in a foreign land landed” there.
Some of the newly-released records reflect post-World War II anxieties in New England and elsewhere over communism. In 1966, a 63-year-old woman from Goffstown, N.H., wrote to Hoover, the FBI director, that she subscribed to a publication from the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, but after reading her first issue, became worried the group was backed by communists, the newly-released records show.
McCleary said the records released Friday from Gemini 7 and three Apollo missions during the 1960s and 1970s resonated with her.
The materials include an audio recording of astronaut Frank Borman reporting an unidentified object to NASA mission control in Houston during Gemini 7, transcripts from flight crew debriefings, and five photographs of the lunar surface during the Apollo 12 mission.
The moon photographs show unknown objects above the lunar surface.
“At this point, those are lights. It could be any number of things. It doesn’t mean it’s non- human intelligence. It’s just something unexplained that was witnessed by the Apollo astronauts,” said McCleary. “As someone who grew up fascinated by the Apollo missions, it’s been neat to see this other dimension.”
In a Medium post shared with the Globe, Avi Loeb, director of the Galileo Project at Harvard University, discussed the lights above the lunar surface.
“These light sources could be flashes from asteroid impacts (as reported by the Artemis II astronauts) or optical artifacts,” he wrote Friday.
Avi Loeb, photographed in 2019, directs the Galileo Project at Harvard University. Lane Turner/Globe Staff
Loeb’s mention of last month’s NASA mission refers to micrometeors the astronauts spotted as they flew by the moon.
A review of the files by Loeb’s research team found “none of the objects is sufficiently extraordinary to require an exotic origin,” he wrote.
“Interesting details regarding the videos are unfortunately redacted, and all images could be explained as either reflections in the camera optics or human-made objects,” he wrote.
Loeb said he discussed the records Friday during two dozen television interviews.
“The biggest impact of today’s release is psychological: this topic deserves to be within the mainstream of public or scientific discourse,” he wrote. “Like any detective story, the mystery can be resolved with high-quality evidence.”
The materials released Friday by Trump covered 161 records published on the Pentagon’s website. They include military records as well as materials from NASA, the FBI, and U.S. Department of State.
More files are expected to be released on a rolling basis, the Trump administration said in a statement.
Trump celebrated the release of the files on Friday with a post on Truth Social.
“Have Fun and Enjoy!,” he wrote.
A research group, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, said in a statement Friday that it will review the files and provide its conclusions about what records can be “readily explained,” require further investigation, or “contribute meaningfully to the scientific study” of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
Now that some of the files have been made public, McCleary said it’s not clear why so many of the materials had been previously kept secret.
During the Cold War, government officials may have been reluctant to publicize unexplained sightings, worried they could turn out to be Soviet technology, she said.
The “government culture of extreme secrecy just persisted over the decades,” McCleary said.
The National UFO Reporting Center, a nonprofit in Washington state, has received nearly 3,000 reports from Massachusetts since 1995, according to its website.
In an email, Loeb said the discovery of an extraterrestrial visitor would “constitute the most important scientific discovery ever made” and hopefully “inspire us to do better.”
“It will promote a new sense of unity among all humans in the same way that a knock on the front door by a neighbor quiets down loud arguments within a house,” he wrote.
Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi.