The United States Government has released a new trove of documents on various cases of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (UAPs) – many of which would have been described in the past as Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs – including photos, videos and reports of unexplained events sighted in the sky and in space.

The files detail “unresolved cases” where “the government is unable to make a definitive determination on the nature of the observed phenomena”.

As a researcher of military strategy, national security, and weapons and technology capabilities, I find several examples of UAPs intriguing in what they reveal and the questions they raise.

Taking this new release together with other reports from the past few years, a picture of what might be behind UAPs – and the current state of our understanding – begins to emerge.

The easy ones

Not everything in the new release seems inexplicable. Some images, like those that appear to show unidentified lights recorded by astronauts from the surface of the Moon, are most likely just visual noise or other image artefacts.

Astronauts have also reported seeing bright lights with the naked eye. These may be flashes from high-energy cosmic rays, which are more prevalent outside Earth’s protective magnetic field.

Likewise, video recordings showing bright lights zipping may be explained by insects flying by the camera at close proximity – they would be out of focus, and appear to move at high speeds.

Something is happening

Other cases are more difficult to immediately dismiss. Some recent examples demonstrate that something is occurring, even if we do not know what.

In 2020, the US Navy declassified three videos recorded by F/A-18 Super Hornets, showing mysterious “Tic Tac” objects flying in ways that defy current understanding of technology, without any obvious propulsion. The US Navy stated it did not know what the objects were.

Advanced sensors on fighter aircraft detected and tracked these phenomena, which suggests they were some kind of real objects rather than due to equipment errors or erroneous noise.

One of the most intriguing recordings was shared in a US congressional hearing in 2025. It appeared to be recorded by an MQ-9 Reaper drone, which was tracking a UAP.

The drone fired a Hellfire missile at the object and appeared to have successfully hit it. The object seemed to be deflected from its direction of travel momentarily, suggesting it was a real physical thing, but it appeared to suffer no damage and continued on its course.

Drone swarms and mystery objects

Over the past decade, there have also been multiple reports of unidentified groups of UAPs around US and European military bases.

In several cases, US Navy Destroyers apparently met mysterious “drone swarms”. While these may have been conventional drones, there were no apparent launch vessels nearby which could have allowed these relatively small drones (with presumably short range) to be where they were.

We also know that in 2023, the US used an F-22 fighter to shoot down a Chinese high-altitude spy balloon over the continental US. Another similar incident occurred over Hawaii the same year, although the US reportedly did not consider this one to be from China.

Also in 2023, the US engaged several other objects over North America, but both the US and Canadian governments have refused to provide any information on what they were.

So what exactly are these objects?

There is no easy explanation for these incidents.

Some leap to the idea that non-human intelligences are at work. However, there is no evidence for this. It may be fun to think of aliens or interdimensional beings, but this is not really a satisfying answer to the UAP question.

Perhaps the “best” explanation we have is drones, or other known technologies. This still seems partial, as some phenomena seem to exceed current technological capabilities, and it leaves open the question of who is behind the phenomena.

New technologies could be responsible. Perhaps operated by “friendly” forces – within the US military or allied defence manufacturers – testing their products against unknowing military operators to see how they respond. Similarly, the incidents may be tests carried out by adversaries such as China.

But still, some incidents are hard to explain given what we know about physics. The object in the “Tic Tac” videos don’t seem to behave how any kind of aircraft should, showing no signs of propulsion.

Alternatively, some UAPs could be as simple as malfunctions in sensor systems. However, this too seems partial – there are multiple cases of warplanes and warships detecting these objects with multiple sensors operating on different frequencies, both actively and passively.

Not aliens, but what?

The most recent release from the US does little to answer the questions about what UAPs are. This lack of answers is perhaps the most intriguing part.

Given the wide range of cases, there is likely no single explanation for all of them. Some seem likely to be drones and others likely image artefacts, but there is a real group of genuinely hard-to-identify phenomena.

Of the available explanations, non-human intelligence is perhaps the most entertaining – but also by far the least probable. It is far more likely that the cause of these incidents will eventually be identified much closer to home.

What does seem clear is that governments are watching closely, and with significant concern.

James Dwyer is lecturer, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania. This article is republished from The Conversation.

Published – May 30, 2026 08:00 am IST

Aliens are real. Or maybe not.

The possibility of mystical beings watching over us or even walking among us is not just the ramblings of the fringe and Reddit users, but a key political and societal debate in the U.S.

President Donald Trump, on Thursday, February 19, 2026, announced that he was directing the Pentagon to review and release all government files related to “alien and extra-terrestrial life,” and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), earlier known as UFOs or Unidentified Flying Objects. 

This was triggered after former President Barack Obama said on a podcast that “aliens are real,” then clarified that he only meant the odds of there being aliens out there is very real — just as the distances between worlds are vast, which could be why they have yet to make contact with earth.

Mr Trump accused Mr Obama of revealing “classified information” and said that he would get him out of trouble by “declassifying” documents.

Old wine, new bottle

Questions about the existence of aliens (not non-citizens and illegal migrants, who are also called “aliens” in the U.S.) are not new. It has been part of the American political debate for decades, with at least two Presidents claiming to have seen UFOs themselves.

Critics have called Mr. Trump’s and his predecessors’ claims as being more political than scientific and have hinted at the possibility of aliens being used as cover-ups for domestic issues. 

The history of America’s obsession with “little green men” is almost as interesting as finding extra-terrestrial beings. Let’s take a look. 

Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter

President Jimmy Carter is the first and only U.S. president to officially report a UFO sighting. On January 6, 1969, while waiting for a Lions Club meeting in Georgia, he and others allegedly witnessed a bright, self-illuminated object in the sky. 

In 1973, he submitted a report to the International UFO Bureau and said that “he would never again ridicule anyone who says they’ve seen unidentified objects.”

During his 1976 campaign to be President, Carter vowed to release every piece of information that the U.S. government had on UFOs, a promise he later broke, citing ‘national security.’ 

Ronald Reagan also expressed interest in the study of extra-terrestrial life and reportedly saw a strange light accelerating at high speed while flying near Bakersfield.

Famously, during the 1985 Geneva Summit, Mr. Reagan asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev if the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would unite to fight an alien invasion. Gorbachev agreed, and this is said to have contributed to nuclear disarmament talks during the Cold War era. 

“Flying Saucer” and Kenneth Arnold’s sighting 

On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier, Washington, allegedly spotted nine shimmering objects flying in a diagonal chain. Arnold described the objects as moving “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” Headlines later changed this term into “flying saucer”, setting the tone for UFO sightings and alien studies till date. 

Project Sign

Following the alleged saucer sighting by Arnold, the US government started Project Sign, the first attempt to determine if “flying saucers” were real. In 1948, an official document authored by the project’s staff concluded that the UFOs were likely interplanetary in origin.

But the Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg rejected the report and ordered the burning of the document, citing lack of physical evidence. 

Project Grudge 

During 1949-1951, the U.S. government undertook a project with only one goal in mind: to debunk and explain away every theory about aliens. The project concluded that all sightings were either a result of misrepresentation of conventional entities like balloons, mass hysteria or hoaxes. 

This project’s opinion led to the most famous project to examine extra-terrestrial life. 

Project Blue Book

This project, run from 1952 to 1969, was the most rigorous examination of UFO sighting claims yet and was the first time that IBM computers and mathematical modelling were used to examine such data.

The project appointed a dedicated Blue Book Officer at every U.S. Air Force base who collected data about UFO sightings for the project to examine. The results, though still non-committal, were the first time the country became serious about these sightings.

Influence of movies, music, and literature 

Aliens have always fascinated filmmakers, authors and even songwriters. Be it H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds or Katy Perry’s song E.T., extra-terrestrial beings have long been used as allegories to warn citizens of external threats like nuclear bombs, social apathy or even a lack of communal cohesion. 

Objects in the sky: Distractions or a real issue? 

The U.S. leads the world in reporting UFO sightings. According to the National UFO Reporting Centre, a non-profit organisation, the country has reported over 100,000 such incidents since 1947. This is vastly different from other countries, where such sightings are few and far between. Do aliens only visit America?

Critics have argued that the political heft extra-terrestrial life gets in the U.S. may be just to distract the electorate from ‘real issues.’ 

Federica Bianco, an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware, told Scientific American that “the timing (of Mr. Trump’s announcement) convinces me that this is but a move to distract the people in the United States from multiple ongoing political and societal crises and the failures of this administration.”

In February 2026, Congressman Thomas Massie criticised President Trump’s order to release ‘alien files’ as a “weapon of mass destruction” to take away attention from the ‘Epstein files.’

But a 2019 Gallup poll found that four in 10 Americans believe that some UFOs that people had spotted were indeed alien spacecraft. Conversely, half believe that all such sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena. 

Are we alone, or do we have company? 

Just like Mr Obama, many scientists believe that there is a statistical likelihood of extra-terrestrial life existing in the universe. They may not be the anthropomorphised, green beings of the movies, but microorganisms or other similar life.  

The other possibility is that humans are totally alone in a universe that is constantly expanding. 

Whatever the case may be, aliens and UFOs are back in American polity, and they are here to stay, seemingly as tools of distraction and hopefully also of real, rigorous scientific inquiry.

(With inputs from Reuters)