An AC-130J gunship crew over the Gulf of Oman spotted 25 cold orbs flying between 250 and 1,300 miles per hour in shifting formations during a live-fire exercise in September 2021. When the crew fired its main cannon, the objects appeared to react.
That footage sat in a classified file for five years. Now it's on the Pentagon's website for anyone to watch.
The Department of Defense on Friday released its fifth batch of declassified UAP records — 41 new files including documents, images, and videos pulled from the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, State Department, and the Executive Office of the President. The oldest document dates back to 1950. The most recent is from this year. The release was ordered under an executive order President Trump signed in January 2026 directing the military and intelligence agencies to produce documents related to unidentified anomalous phenomena on a rolling basis, and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has been coordinating the disclosures.
The Gulf of Oman footage is the headliner, but it's not alone. Six separate videos captured the same encounter, with an intelligence report noting the UAPs "were observed as cold orbs flying at lower altitudes between 250 to 1300 MPH in different formations as well as maneuvering aggressively." A U.S. Central Command crew watched 25 of them. The objects appeared to respond to weapons fire. Nobody has explained what they were.
Then there's Afghanistan, 2002. A military pilot recalled being airborne over Bagram at 4:30 AM when he "noticed that the stars were getting blacked out." What he described was an equilateral triangle — silent, no lights visible, an estimated 500 feet across, moving at roughly 150 knots. His co-pilot turned to him afterward with the only reasonable question: "Did you see that?"
The batch also includes eight FBI 302 interview forms — the standard witness debriefing documents used in federal investigations. One describes a transatlantic flight from Massachusetts to Ireland in October 2023 where a pilot at 37,000 feet observed white lights at an estimated altitude above 50,000 feet, cycling in intervals of 10 seconds to one minute. The pilot reported seeing the lights approximately 10 more times after the initial sighting. Another FBI report documents two slow-moving "black hot" objects captured on infrared imaging over the western United States in 2026, observed for five to 10 minutes. A 2025 file shows an object "zooming across the screen" over a populated area in the Middle East.
The Pentagon said it "will release additional files on a rolling basis," per Newsmax.
None of this would be public without the executive order. That's worth sitting with for a second. These aren't fringe YouTube videos or blurry phone captures from a guy in Nevada. These are military sensor systems, FBI debriefs, intelligence agency files — material generated by the same institutions that spent decades telling anyone who asked about this stuff that there was nothing to see. The records existed. The encounters were documented. The files were stamped and stored. They just weren't shared.
The usual objection is that disclosure feeds conspiracy thinking. Which is an interesting position to hold about classified military footage of objects performing maneuvers that no known aircraft can replicate, captured on government sensor platforms, and documented in formal intelligence reports. If anything feeds conspiracy thinking, it's 70 years of bureaucratic silence about encounters your own pilots reported through official channels.