UFO Files Reveal … the Same Old Material

Here we go again.

President Donald Trump and the Department of War have released the long-awaited UFO Files, and they’re about as revelatory as the JFK assassination files were, namely not at all.

In my preliminary review of the files (it will take days or weeks more to read through them all), and following the UFO/UAP community online with endless believers that we are being visited by alien beings (or “non-human intelligence” or “biologics” in the current jargon) digging through the files in search of their long-promised “disclosure” of contact, absolutely nothing stands out beyond the usual blurry photographs, grainy videos, artist reconstructions, and countless stories about weird things in the sky and in space.

As always, I will acknowledge that extraterrestrial intelligences are probably out there somewhere in the cosmos—with a trillion galaxies, each of which having hundreds of billions of stars, each of which having planets it is as close to 100% that some of them somewhere will evolve life and even intelligent life—but very few members of the public are interested in the search for signatures of bacterial-grade life in the atmospheres of exo-planets (as NASA continues to search for life elsewhere).

What nearly everyone cares about is the second question: have they come here?

The answer remains the same: not that we know of. That is, there remains no definitive evidence of alien visitation on Earth, and the UFO Files release has done nothing to change that, which even most of the UFO/UAP proponents acknowledge, promising “just you wait” and “disclosure is still coming” and “the ‘holy crap’ material will be released soon”. So…we shall see. I remain skeptical unless and until my priors are updated with new evidence, which is not in these files.

What is in the files? Here is a brief overview of what I came across as I worked my way through them:

Figure 1. Artist’s “composite sketch” of this object, which an eyewitness described as having been seen in this field, unhelpfully identified by the Department of War as taken somewhere in the United States.

Here is the full caption:

Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously.

How anyone standing in a field could assess the length of an object without some means of measurement by which to compare it is beyond me, or how anyone could possibly know it was made of bronze (obviously meaning “it looked like bronze-colored metal,” or some such).

Figure 2. Document dated October 28-29, 2001, in which the Georgian Foreign Ministry reports a Russian aircraft violated Georgian airspace and bombed areas of the Kodori Gorge. Russia denied it, saying it was a UFO. Georgian response: UFO is a Russian “bold lie”. Recall that this is a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and shortly after Vladamir Putin came to power and launched a military action in Georgia.

Figure 3. In this document, dated September 12, 2023, the Mexican Congress heard testimony on UAP from experts that includes these long debunked fake alien corpses that even all UAP proponents acknowledge as fake. If this is any indication of the quality of the "UFO files" purported to reveal we’ve been visited by aliens, God help us (and I’m an atheist).

Figure 4. This document, dated October, 2023, is emblematic of so many of the UFO Files documents, so heavily redacted as to be difficult to read, much less given proper context. Here is the disclaimer provided by the Department of War attached to all of these documents: “Redactions have been made to protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP.”

Figure 5. These are two of many photographic stills taken from videos shot, again unhelpfully, somewhere in the “Southwestern United States.” The UAP is the little dot that could be almost anything (a balloon, a drone, an aircraft), subsequently being tracked by a helicopter. Given the terrain I immediately thought of one of the many military bases throughout this part of the country where planes and drones and, yes, even balloons, may be found.

Also unhelpful are all the blacked out rectangles, which very likely represent all the information we would need to identify the speed, distance, size, etc. of the object based on where, exactly, this was filmed, and when, etc.

This is another reason why I support Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project at Harvard University because they are building multiple observatories in various locations in order to triangulate whatever objects are detected. Without triangulation, it is extremely difficult to assess size and speed of the various objects identified in these files (and elsewhere) of UAPs.

Figure 6. This UAP is almost surely a drone or small plane, probably moving away from the camera. The caption reads: “U.S. Indo-Pacific Command reported UAP that resembles a football-shaped body near Japan” and appears to be taken in 2024.

Figure 6B is an image of an “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle” (UAV) I found online labeled “The Jetank unmanned aerial vehicle successfully completed its first flight in China, Shaanxi province.” I’m not claiming this accounts for the UAP sighting near Japan, but with a range of 7,000 kilometers, and with all the political concerns about Chinese aerial technology, it’s not completely crazy to think it could be something along these lines.

Figure 7. These light anomalies photographed from the surface of the moon by Apollo 17 astronauts are curious indeed. At first I suspected they were lens flares, as I’ve seen many such images in photographs taken at haunted houses, graveyards, and the like purportedly representing ghosts floating around the facilities, but it is not clear that lens flares explains these images.

I await the government’s own additional investigation, as explained in the file:

While this photo has been previously released and discussed by keen observers, there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly. New preliminary US government analysis suggests the image feature is potentially the result of a physical object in the scene. Additionally, as part of this investigation, the government has obtained the original film from the Apollo 17 mission and the results of the full NASA and DOW analysis will be released when completed.

Similar such images were photographed by Apollo 12 astronauts with no explanation provided.

Figure 8. This video short from the files was posted by UAP investigator Steven Greenstreet on 𝕏 (@MiddleOfMayhem) noting “This ‘alien UFO’ appears to be a parachute and a flare, which is leaving behind a smoke trail”:

Figure 9. This screen shot from a UAP video appears to be a balloon trailing its string or tail.

The following is a comment from the pilot and astronaut Scott Kelly, from a NASA press conference at which he spoke, explaining how difficult it is for pilots to determine what it is they think they saw:

In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30 something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions, so I get why these pilots would look at that Go Fast video and think it was going really really fast. I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach Military operating area and my RIO [Radar Intercept Officer], who sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn’t see it, so we turned around to go look at it. It turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon.

My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was the commander of STS 124; they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the Space Shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt—they couldn’t quite figure it out—and they were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that my brother grabbed the camera and they took a picture of it, and when they blew up the picture they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay; it was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away.

There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought that was their wingman. It’s just a very very challenging environment to work, especially at night.

That’s enough for now. Much more to come as I go through the files, but in general, remember the “residue of anomalies” problem that exists in all science: No hypothesis or theory in any field accounts for 100 percent of the phenomena under investigation.

This residue problem means that no matter how comprehensive a theory is there will always be a residue of anomalies for which it cannot account. The residue problem in UFOlogy was poignantly illustrated in Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, in which the UFOlogist admitted that “roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained” as:

weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!

So the entire extraterrestrial hypothesis for explaining UFOs and UAPs is based on a residue of data left over after the above list has been exhausted.

What’s left? Not much.

But, as always, I remain open to examining new evidence if it is forthcoming. Let’s see what’s in the next tranche.