Preliminary Assessment by Avi Loeb of the Second Release of UFO Files by the U.S. Department of War

A spherical UAP going through the clouds in a video labeled DOW-UAP-PR067 in the second release of UFO files by the U.S. government. (Image credit: Department of War)

The U.S. Department of War has just released here its second batch of new public files on Unidentified Objects (UFO/UAP). These are objects that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies cannot identify. If they are real and not spurious, there are two possible interpretations: either these are familiar human-made or natural objects or these are non-human-made objects. Either way, the matter is of great importance for national security or for basic science.

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This second release contains 50 videos, 7 audio files with NASA logo, and 6 documents from 1949 to late 2025 that cover CIA, DOE, DOD/ODNI, and national laboratory sources.

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UAP activity was unambiguously documented near nuclear or weapons facilities like Sandia, Los Alamos, Pantex and more. One document contains 116 pages related to a series of reported sightings in a top-secret facility in Sandia, New Mexico, from 1948 to 1950. This includes 209 sightings of green orbs, discs and fireballs reported near a military base. Another document describes a senior U.S. Intelligence Community officer sharing a firsthand helicopter mission to investigate UAP activity on a military test range in late 2025. The detailed narrative is operationally specific, indicating that we are dealing with a serious matter that should not be dismissed by policy makers or by scientists. The report states that an object approached within 10 feet of the helicopter, split in two, and accelerated beyond pursuit speed. Reports on clusters of orbs could be associated with swarms of drones if they are human made and used for military purposes by adversarial nations.

Some of the released reports have a mundane explanation. For example, the astronaut of the Mercury-Atlas 7 mission reported on May 24, 1962, the fascinating phenomenon of “fireflies” or “snowflakes” floating outside his spacecraft window. The phenomenon was not alien, but rather ice particles or frost that had condensed from the spacecraft cooling system onto the exterior of the capsule.

Among the videos, there is one (labeled DOW-UAP-PR067) which shows a startling spherical UAP going through the clouds. Another video (labeled DOW-UAP-PR051) from 2021 shows apparent instantaneous acceleration where a UAP moves sideways abruptly. Other videos show unusual motions, but it is difficult to ascertain whether we are witnessing parallax by the motion of the camera rather than the UAP. One of the videos shows a crash site of a UAP. It would be interesting to study the material remains from that crash. It looks like the crash site in a notable video when a fighter jet shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron in 2023, a high-profile incident. Later reports indicated that the object might have been a balloon operated by a hobbyist group.

After scrolling through the data from the two releases so far, there is no doubt that UAP are a serious concern for national security and that one of the reasons for them to be classified is to avoid exposing the vulnerability of the U.S. Defense system and intelligence infrastructure. If UAPs represent drones, balloons or aircraft manufactured by adversarial nations, then the Chinese spy balloon incident from 2023 is just the tip of a giant iceberg of national security malfunction. However, if any of the UAP was not produced by humans, then it represents the biggest discovery ever made by humans.

Given that astronomers train their telescopes on small portions of the sky at any given time and that the defense budget for 2026 — nearly a trillion dollars, is two orders of magnitude larger than the national science budget, the U.S. government is likely to be the first to notice rare and unusual objects of extraterrestrial origin. Whether it did or not find alien technologies remains to be demonstrated with better quality data. The U.S. government has higher-resolution data with a few inches per pixel resolution from the fleet of reconnaissance satellites it operates, but we have not seen UAP from such data so far. Former intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, noted in 2021 that satellite imagery picked up UAP (as reported here), but such data may not be released because it was obtained by highly classified sensors.

Instead of waiting for the U.S. Government to tell us whether objects from outside the Solar system are visiting Earth, we can simply look up. The Galileo Project under my leadership operates three new observatories, where we analyze data on millions of objects with AI algorithms in search for outliers which move beyond the performance envelope of human made technologies. Here’s hoping that we will know more in the coming months, either from additional UAP releases from the U.S. Government or from the Galileo Observatories data.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “*Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “[Life in the Cosmos](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987579)”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “[Interstellar](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/interstellar-avi-loeb-1?variant=40982888415266)*”, was published in August 2024.

Professional website:

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

Social media:

*https://avi-loeb.medium.com/ [https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb](https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb)*

*https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd [https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb](https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb)*