A senior U.S. intelligence officer spotted “glowing orbs” while investigating reports of loud thuds last year at a test range in an unidentified “sensitive U.S. military facility.”
During the incident, ground teams spotted an unidentified anomalous phenomenon, or UAP, the official term used by the government to describe UFOs.
The intelligence officer flew to the scene to investigate when the object suddenly rose from the ground and approached within 10 feet of the helicopter. The pilot was watching the object through night-vision goggles when it suddenly split in two and raced away.
“We briefly pursued but broke off, unable to match its speed,” the intelligence officer wrote in the report, part of a batch of once-classified UFO-related documents that the Pentagon released Friday.
The earliest files include more than 200 sightings of “green orbs,” “discs,” and “fireballs” reported in Sandia, New Mexico, from 1948 to 1950 by the Air Force and the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program, the post-World War II successor to the Manhattan Project.
“The materials archived here are unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena,” Pentagon officials said. “This can occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of sufficient data.”
Defense Department officials said they would “welcome the application of private sector analysis, information, and expertise.”
The reports were part of a rolling release of formerly classified UFO documents. Pentagon officials said war.gov/ufo, the collection point for the released files, has received more than 1 billion hits since it was launched on May 8 at President Trump’s direction.
“These files, hidden by 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.
Washington officials didn’t draw any conclusions about the now-declassified UFO reports. The documents come from several government agencies, including the military, the State Department and NASA.
“Many of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody,” the Pentagon noted.
In 1973, the Central Intelligence Agency learned that a Soviet intelligence source at the Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range in Kazakhstan reported seeing a luminous, bright-green unidentified object in the sky.
“The source described concentric circles forming around the phenomenon over a period of several minutes, before it dissipated,” according to the CIA document. “The source also stated that no sound attended the observation.”
Pentagon officials called the records release a historic undertaking that requires coordination between dozens of federal agencies and the review of tens of millions of records, some existing only on paper.
“The Department of [Defense] will be releasing new materials on a rolling basis as they are discovered and declassified, with tranches posted every few weeks,” Pentagon officials said.
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