Pilots and astronauts detail unexplained aerial encounters in declassified UFO files

WASHINGTON — Late last year, a senior U.S. intelligence officer on a helicopter mission to investigate “thuds” near a mountain range encountered a mysterious orange orb — an object that split in two and changed direction.

“The ground team suddenly radioed that the object had risen from the ground, approached within ten feet of the helicopter, dropped below us and sped away,” the officer detailed in a memo from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence after the strange encounter.

The document was included in a second batch of declassified documents released Friday on unidentified anomalous phenomena — previously and more infamously known unidentified flying objects, or UFOs — released this year by the Trump administration. The U.S. government has been holding onto the files for decades.

Questions about whether humans are alone in the universe and whether alien life has ever visited Earth have captivated Americans since at least the late 1800s, buoyed by science fiction and urban myths of strange sightings and even purported alien abductions.

Those ideas, once given little widespread credibility, have in more recent years taken on more serious scrutiny as video footage — some of it legitimately difficult to explain — has emerged from trusted sources including the U.S. military.

Yet once again, the government on Friday didn’t draw any conclusions about the origins of the UFOs or offer any evidence of government communication with extra terrestrials. The documents do include a disclaimer that readers should not interpret anything “as reflecting an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination regarding the described event’s validity, nature, or significance.”

The release comes during a week in which President Donald Trump has said he would delay another strike on Iran and the continued conflict has driven gas prices to nearly four-year highs ahead of the holiday weekend.

The U.S. this week also announced the indictment of the brother of Fidel Castro, 94-year-old Raul Castro, in a 1996 downing of two planes that were on a humanitarian mission to Cuba. Additionally, Trump faced rare criticism from Republicans over the announcement of a $1.8 billion fund for those who claim they were the victims of government overreach, including possibly the defendants in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.

The latest batch of UFO-related documents comes mostly from the Defense Department, and is largely made up of footage from military aircraft as well as audio and notes. There are also seven files from NASA and one from the CIA. The government said the files are redacted to protect witnesses, locations and sensitive information. They date from the 1940s through six months ago.

In the helicopter account by the intelligence officer, fighter jets were called in and, according to the officer’s notes, the orbs were able to match “the jets speed and flight path” and appeared to “chase” the fighter jets.

“We were virtually speechless after these observations,” according to the officer.

There are no conclusions in the memo about what the orbs were or any follow-up described. The senior official who witnessed it wrote at the end of the memo that after the incident he filed a debrief that night before driving home.

Other files detail similarly strange encounters. In 1970, in a handwritten letter, a Los Alamos scientist describes regularly seeing green lights between the hours of 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. between 1948 and 1951 in the mountains, one time moving in some kind of formation.

In 1972, a CIA officer in the United Soviet Socialist Republics stepped outside after watching a sports competition between Canada and the USSR and saw a green circle that widened and concentric circles appeared.

A series of videos released Friday include sightings of spherical, oblong and cigar-shaped objects that pass through frames over land, lake and sea. The grainy footage tracks the objects as they zip through skies around the world. In a November 2020 video, a circular-shaped object glides in and out of clouds over the central part of the U.S. Roughly five months later, another video shows circular shaped object barrels across the skies above the U.S.

Objects were also recorded in Kabul, Syria, Kazakhstan and Europe. In one clip near Kazakhstan’s Karaganda International Airport, the night sky is broken with a burst of oval-shaped white light. One object captured in Europe appears to stop and start, like it’s being operated by an unseen video game controller.

Unidentified objects are also seen over water, floating near a surfaced submarine. Another object begins to seemingly pulse with sunburst-looking rays, and one fast-moving object was downed over Lake Huron in 2023. It’s not clear from the footage whether the object was recovered.

Audio files capture NASA pilots from the 1960s and 1970s, including the Apollo 12 crew from 1969, describing odd things they saw aboard spacecraft.

In 1962, as NASA pilot Scott Carpenter manned a spacecraft through three revolutions of the Earth during Project Mercury, he describes as the audio crackles what he says are particles that move in and out of his view.

“Their motion is random. They look exactly like snowflakes to me,” he says.

“Roger, have you tried to return?” ground control asks.

“Negative,” Carpenter responds calmly as he says he has to adjust and sees particles again.

“They definitely look like snowflakes,” he says.