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 has confirmed it will start publishing declassified intelligence on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) today. Rather than releasing everything in one go, the material is expected to arrive in weekly batches.
In other words, expect a managed, slow rollout instead of a single overwhelming dump — the kind of drip-feed that can keep online debate spinning for weeks.
The planned schedule was discussed during a West Wing meeting on Thursday.
In a conversation with independent journalist Jeremy Corbell that was shared with the New York Post, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) — who sits on the House Oversight Committee’s declassification task force — said: “It’s going to start tomorrow. It’s going to have some stuff in there from pilots, and maybe one video.”
The pilot-related content is expected to focus on incidents involving unidentified objects encountered by US military aviators while on duty — accounts that are harder to brush aside because they come from trained personnel operating within formal reporting systems.
Burchett also suggested that while there are still lawmakers who don’t support releasing everything, he believes President Trump will follow through on the commitment to publish the files.
“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.”
One caveat: this initial wave reportedly won’t include the 46 UFO videos that Congress has separately demanded the Department of War release. So even after the first drop, more material may still be pending.
Interest in the subject has intensified lately, especially after footage shown during a previous congressional hearing. That video, introduced by a whistleblower, appears to show a US Reaper drone launching a Hellfire missile at a glowing orb near Yemen’s coast — with the missile seemingly rebounding.
As reported by CBS News, the Pentagon has not publicly addressed the clip, and there has been no official explanation of what the object might have been.
Sean Kirkpatrick, who served as the first director of the Pentagon’s UFO investigation office, has urged the public to temper expectations.
In comments to CBS News, he cautioned that anyone hoping the releases will definitively prove extraterrestrial life could be disappointed. “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..
Reflecting on his time running the effort from 2022 to 2023, Kirkpatrick added: “I don’t expect to see anything new.”
Still, some researchers argue that even if most reports have conventional explanations, a small number may remain genuinely difficult to resolve. Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb has said he’s focused on identifying those rare cases.
“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 offered a more grounded view, telling CBS News that nothing she had seen to date pointed to phenomena that ‘violate the laws of psychics and require an alien society visiting us to be explained’.
At the same time, she noted: “The probability that we are the only life form or even the only technical society in the universe is negligibly small.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson took an even more blunt approach, arguing that paperwork alone won’t be convincing without something far more direct.
“An actual alien,” he said. “If one is presented, then no documents are necessary at all.”
Online reaction has been immediate.
Reddit, in particular, has been active since the announcement — a mix of anticipation and the kind of skepticism that comes from years of similar moments that never seemed to deliver definitive answers.
One of the most upvoted responses captured that caution: “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 speculated about what the visuals will actually 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.”
Another reply tried to reset expectations, arguing that even “disappointing” footage could still matter because of how and where it’s captured. “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.”
And one commenter offered a detailed, world-weary forecast of what the first release might look like in practice.
“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.”