The US confirms: UFOs are real - critical summary review

For a long time, talking about flying saucers was a guaranteed way to get the look. The same look people give anyone who still believes Paul McCartney died in sixty-six and was replaced by a lookalike. But early this year, something changed... and the tinfoil hat crowd, the ones who always said the government was hiding something, are now staring back at us saying I TOLD YOU SO.

In the two thousand and two film Signs, the entire family sits in the living room wearing aluminum foil hats to stop aliens from reading their minds. Director M. Night Shyamalan meant for audiences to laugh at that scene. Today it is just a little harder to do that.

On the morning of May eighth, the American government launched the website war.gov/ufo and released one hundred and sixty-two declassified files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, the official term for what everyone else just calls UFOs. One hundred and twenty PDF documents, twenty-eight videos and fourteen images. No security clearance required. No forms. Anyone with internet access could open them and look.

The program goes by the name PURSUE. Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. Behind that acronym sits a coordinated effort between the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI, NASA, the Department of Energy and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The truth, in some form, was out there. And now it was also on a government website.

Some of what was released is hard to brush off. Photos from the Apollo twelve and Apollo seventeen missions, taken in nineteen sixty-nine and nineteen seventy-two, show strangely shaped objects captured in space. One Apollo seventeen image shows three dots in a triangular formation. The Pentagon attached a note saying there is no consensus on the nature of what appears there, but that a preliminary analysis suggests it could be a physical object. Audio transcripts from the same mission show astronauts describing bright objects surrounding the spacecraft as jagged, angular fragments tumbling through space, something they compared to a fireworks display seen from the window of the ship. Fifty years in a filing cabinet. Now public.

There are also FBI photographs taken on New Year's Eve of nineteen ninety-nine, showing unidentified flying objects sharing airspace with United States military aircraft. Military reports from Iraq in twenty twenty-two describe what may have been a small UAP. Observations of flashes of unknown origin were recorded in Syria in twenty twenty-four. The Department of War notes that these cases remain unresolved due to a lack of definitive data at the time of the sightings.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman welcomed the release and said the agency will remain candid about what it knows, what it does not yet understand, and everything that remains to be discovered. It is a statement that reads as both an open door and a fair warning: there is a great deal that nobody knows yet.

And here is the part worth keeping in mind before calling whoever in your life always believed in this stuff to tell them they were right. The released documents do not confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life. They do not confirm the existence of alien technology. The Pentagon's own two thousand and twenty-four report, produced by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, already concluded that no American government investigation had ever confirmed either of those things. What exists are objects that nobody has been able to identify. An unidentified object is exactly that: something that was not identified. It could be classified military technology, a weather phenomenon, a sensor error or, yes, something else entirely. But the files say they do not know. Experts warn that UAP footage is frequently misread by people unfamiliar with advanced military equipment. And forty-six additional videos are still being withheld, expected in a future Pentagon release.

Trump closed his Truth Social post on the subject with a line that works equally well as a headline and as an open question: "Decide for yourselves. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"

What to do with this information

Don't panic.

That is the phrase printed on the cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it fits here better than any three-paragraph analysis could. The United States government has opened a file containing more than six decades of records on objects it could not explain. That is real and it matters. What is not real, at least not yet, is confirmation that intelligent life exists beyond Earth or that any alien craft has ever landed on American soil, whatever the men in black may or may not have covered up.

There are three ways to read what happened. The first is that this is just the beginning. Forty-six videos are still being held back. The Pentagon has promised rolling releases. Those who believe the disclosure is genuine will argue that what came out now is just the appetizer, and the main course is still coming. The second reading is more skeptical: the files show little beyond what was already circulating in heavily redacted form. Grainy photos from Apollo missions half a century ago and military reports describing lights in the sky that nobody could identify. Historically significant, scientifically inconclusive. The third reading, perhaps the most honest one, is that the right question is not "do aliens exist?" but "what exactly was seen, by whom, and why has nobody been able to explain it until now?" That question has value regardless of the answer.

What you can actually do: follow future document releases through the official NASA and AARO pages, which carry the most technical credibility in this process. Read the files for what they say, not for what you want them to say. And resist the urge to turn uncertainty into certainty, in either direction.

Earlier this year, Obama said on a podcast that aliens are real, but that he never saw them and that they are not being kept in Area 51. It is exactly the kind of statement that confirms nothing and still manages to feed everything.

And as for whether extraterrestrial beings actually exist out there... well, that is where the team at 12min runs out of answers too.