Washington — The Pentagon on Friday published its sixth release of records involving unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, commonly known as UFOs. The disclosure includes dozens of documents about a military program that commissioned research into warp drives, wormholes and injuries investigators associated with possible encounters with unknown aircraft.
The release contains 71 files: 67 from the Defense Department and four submitted by local law enforcement agencies in Colorado. The collection includes 55 PDFs, 15 videos and one audio file. Redactions appear in 64 of the documents, whose dates span 1952 to 2025.
What’s in the latest UFO files?
The most significant records concern the secretive Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP. Created by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2008, the initiative examined potential aerospace threats decades into the future before ending in 2012.
A program document outlines its objectives and the expectations for contractors. It says the effort was intended to study “advanced aerospace weapon system applications” and understand their physics and engineering in relation to foreign threats through 2050, with an emphasis on breakthrough technologies capable of disrupting existing technological trends.
The files include 37 “Defense Intelligence Reference Documents,” or DIRDs, created under AAWSAP. Their subjects range from warp drives, wormholes and antigravity to negative-mass propulsion and invisibility cloaking. All 37 reports have been publicly available for years, including through DIA Freedom of Information Act releases, but the newly issued versions reveal information previously withheld, including the names of the agency offices involved in producing them.
In accompanying notes, the Pentagon cautions that the DIRDs are “best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research.” The agency also says they “should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed.”
Although many of the reports address concepts more commonly associated with science fiction, one is a 38-page technical study from 2010. It examines what it describes as evidence of unintended injuries to human observers caused by “anomalous advanced aerospace systems.”
The researchers described three previously healthy and active people who experienced an anomalous aerospace-related event and later developed a range of symptoms. Those effects included skin redness and heat, hair loss, signs of radiation illness in one person and, over several years, signs of malignant transformations.
The study did not determine what caused the exposure. It identified the three people as “antennae engineers” and compared their cases with 42 published and approximately 300 unpublished incidents involving conventional radiofrequency injuries in which the radiation source was known.
The author concluded that enough incidents had been accurately documented, with medical information collected, to support the hypothesis that some advanced systems were already deployed but remained beyond the United States’ full understanding.
Most of the videos in the release resemble footage published in earlier disclosures: grainy military-camera recordings showing unexplained objects moving rapidly across the frame. One incident from 2022 depicts a UAP that was reported to travel at speeds ranging from 80 to 180 miles per hour.
According to an accompanying mission report, a crew conducting operations in the Middle East spotted multiple objects at unknown altitudes. The objects were estimated to be 1 to 2 meters in size and were described as flying “spora[d]ically within the target area.”
Another video recorded over the Middle East shows about six objects moving together. The related report identifies them as “six small spherical objects” that appeared agile and frequently changed direction. The event remains unresolved.
Four other videos came from local law enforcement agencies in Colorado, which submitted the footage to the Pentagon office responsible for investigating UAP reports. The department said the partially blurred clips were recorded on cellphone cameras in October 2023.
In notes accompanying one clip, the military said the reporting officer described the phenomenon as “silent,” with “red, blue, and green flashing lights.”
The historical portion of the release features an hour-long audio recording and transcript of a 1952 presentation by Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt. He discussed the service’s investigation of UFO reports and said roughly 20% of the 800 cases examined by the Air Force remained unexplained.
“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.
