The U.S. Pentagon has just released its fifth tranche of files related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The trove includes video footage from a military plane that shows jittery blips of light bouncing around in the sky.
The footage was recorded on a cellular device in September 2021 and shows the infrared display of a U.S. Special Operations Forces AC-130J gunship flying over the Gulf of Oman during a training exercise.
In an accompanying incident report, the blips are described as “Multiple Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Observed Maneuvering Erratically and In Formation.” The report states that the objects appeared to be flying at lower altitudes and to vary in speed between 250 and 1,300 miles per hour with no detected means of propulsion.
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The orbs were first spotted after the AC-130J dropped a water-activated flare that was meant to act as a mock target for the exercise. A crew member tried to observe the flare using the gunship’s infrared cameras, and they saw two “approximately four-foot diameter cold orbs” hovering some 20 feet above the flare. The plane’s cannon fired, and the UAP appeared to rapidly fly away, out of the sensor’s feed, without changing altitude.
The report described the pattern in which the orbs seemingly flew off as “similar to how dolphins playfully swim in a pod.”
The latest release includes several other descriptions of UAP incidents. It is the fifth material drop from the Pentagon since May. The agency began the releases after President Donald Trump announced in February that he would direct federal agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
The earliest document is from 1953 and describes video footage, taken a year earlier, of blue-white objects that were of a “construction and material not commonly known.”
Another heavily redacted report that was included in this release and came from the FBI describes several incidents during 2023 and 2024 in which pilots saw mysterious lights over an undisclosed location. One pilot saw the lights on about 11 separate occasions, according to the document. While the FBI report describes the pilot using his cell phone to film one of those sightings near Minneapolis, the footage was not included in the latest release.
The latest release also doesn’t include any new direct photos of UAP. The only new images are artists’ re-creations of incidents recounted in some of the reports.
More UAP material remains in the Pentagon vault. In a statement, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the Department of Defense was “actively working on the next release of UAP files.”