Many of the files are marked “SECRET.” More than a dozen center on events that occurred in New Mexico.
The Pentagon on Friday released what it described as an “unprecedented, historic” batch of previously classified files concerning UFOs, UAPs and over 80 years of government conjecture about the existence of “alien and extraterrestrial life.”
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a statement.
The release contains 162 documents — 120 PDFs, 28 videos and 14 image files — dated from 1945 through late last year. They discuss unexplained phenomena, a subject that has fascinated New Mexicans since an unassuming rancher discovered a mysterious crash site outside Roswell 79 years ago next month.
The files include an FBI memo on the famous “Roswell Incident,” describing a “flying disc,” though the government’s official account — that the crash was tied to a secret high-altitude balloon experiment to detect sound waves from Soviet-era atomic bomb tests — remains unchanged.
Indeed, believers in visitors from another world may be disappointed to learn that the release offers no firm conclusions as to the existence of alien life.
Nonetheless, documents dating from the Cold War up to more recent U.S. incursions into the Middle East leave plenty of questions unanswered — and evince a fascination with the unknown shared even among high-ranking members of the American military.
Faded ink on yellowed pages punched through typewriters by the orderlies of colonels, generals, directors of intelligence and even inaugural FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reveal a sense of urgency to discover what was behind unexplained sightings.
“Although all plausible scientific thinking suggests that we will not find any other intelligence race, the probability that we will is finite, and perhaps should not be completely ignored,” Maxwell W. Hunter II, a member of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, wrote in a 1963 memo titled “Thoughts on the Space Alien Race Question.”
The files cover dozens of day- and nighttime sightings by military personnel and civilians that could not, and in some cases, still have not been elucidated.
“We have encountered a phenomenon which we cannot explain,” Leavitt Corning, a colonel in the U.S. Army, wrote in a 1945 memo about sightings during World War II. “Crews have been followed by lights that blink on and off changing colors etc. The lights come very close and fly formation with our planes.
“They are agitating and keep the crews on edge when they encounter them, mainly because they cannot explain them,” Corning added. “It is requested further information be furnished on this subject, such as similar experiences of other night units.”
The “Roswell Incident” took place two years later as one of the precipitating events of what soon become known as the “flying disc craze.”
From the late 1940s through the early 1950s, reports poured in from across the U.S. from people who claimed to have seen errant objects zooming across the horizon. The objects’ widely reported metallic disc appearance became the subject of sci-fi novels, TV shows and film for decades to come.
Despite many reports deemed to be false or fabricated, the U.S. Air Force took many of the sightings seriously.
In 1952, the military initiated “Project Blue Book,” which systematized the collection and review of such reports, crosschecking them with classified military projects and potential incursions into U.S. airspace by foreign entities.
Many of the sightings during this era, as well as theories that purported to explain them, were logged right here in the Land of Enchantment, particularly around the state’s many military installations, where a “green fireball phenomenon” was widely noted.
Friday’s release contains a handwritten letter from Santa Fe resident Madeline Gwynne Merchant, who in July 1947 wrote the FBI asking for $10,000 for “field data” she had collected on aerial phenomenon in northern New Mexico.
“According to her theory, ‘Flying Disks’ are being fired from a locality in Central Mexico from a laboratory which is being operated by the Russians,” the FBI wrote regarding Merchant’s account. “She claims they are being aimed at the United States for the purpose of sighting in on important atomic energy and aircraft installations.”
Merchant’s request contained a curious postscript: “Am a former newspaper person, and very proud of it. Am 39, but dress and feel some younger.”
Another FBI memo, dated March 1950, states that an investigator with the Air Force claimed to have recovered three “so-called flying saucers” in New Mexico. The objects were described as “ circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter.”
The saucers, the investigator claimed, contained “three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture,” though the report was never verified.
From 1948 to 1950, there were roughly 150 “observations of aerial phenomena” around installations in New Mexico, according to the files. Lincoln LaPaz, a former director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, concluded in March of that year that roughly half of the sightings were “meteoric in origin.”
Regarding the other half, however, LaPaz expressed concern.
He suggested that purported velocity of the green fireballs and flying discs could reach New Mexico “in less than 15 minutes” had they been missiles fired from the then USSR.
There were also some overt gags during the height of the flying saucer craze.
According to a March 1950 note from the FBI Albuquerque field office, for example, a University of New Mexico student who wrote for the school newspaper sent a doctored photo “showing a flying saucer crashed and burning on the side of the mountain, little men walking away and four flying saucers hovering around the crashed one.”
Albuquerque agents were none too pleased with the hoax.
The files released Friday also add texture to other famous UFO stories from New Mexico, including that of Socorro police officer Lonnie Zamora, who claimed to have responded in April 1964 to the crash-landing of a mysterious metallic vehicle — a report often explained as either a test of a lunar lander from nearby White Sands Missile Range or a hoax concocted by local students.
Outside of New Mexico, six of the files provide new information about mysterious sightings by NASA astronauts during the Apollo era.
During the third crewed Apollo 11 mission — the first to land humans on the lunar surface — astronaut Buzz Aldrin noted “little flashes” inside the lunar module, and later, “a fairly bright light source which we tentatively ascribed to a possible laser,” he reported.
One photograph in particular, taken from the lunar surface during the Apollo 17 moon landing, shows three dots in a triangular formation in the upper-right quadrant of the frame.
Similar flashing lights and objects spotted around the moon were reported by other Apollo astronauts.
Dozens of other more recent images, as well as videos, provided by Air Force personnel depict unidentified objects captured on high-speed infrared cameras affixed to aircraft on missions around the world — from the Western U.S. to Europe to the Middle East.
During a nighttime mission last year over African airspace, military personnel captured images of an “orb” they described as “super hot” hovering over the ground below.
In a 2023 incident in an undisclosed location in the western U.S., federal agents claimed they saw an orb in the sky, “similar to the Eye (of) Sauron from the Lord of the Rings, except without the pupil, or maybe an orange Storm Electrify bowling ball,” a report reads.
Other instances of glowing orbs were also reported in the files, with no official explanation as to their origin.
The release is part of an order from President Donald Trump to begin releasing government documents regarding unexplained phenomena. The declassification comes on the heels of the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran and ongoing public pressure for further releases in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
The White House has announced plans to declassify additional documentation regarding UFOS and UAPS in the future.
“Whereas previous Administrations have failed to be transparent on this subject, with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Have Fun and Enjoy!”
John Miller is the Albuquerque Journal’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.
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