Former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo, who investigated unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAPs) for the government, says newly released documents contain evidence that the U.S. has long treated UAPs as a serious national security issue, including claims involving recovered “non-human” materials dating back decades.
These are not the words of a conspiracy theorist or a fringe blogger.
This is a highly credentialed, former senior government official speaking on the record about what he has seen inside classified programs.
“There is an absolute treasure trove of information contained in this second tranche of information,” Elizondo said, pointing to the latest data drop authorized for release.
He marveled at the vast amount of information that stood out to him, including top-secret intelligence dating back to the 1940s that he says “very clearly” suggests the existence of UAPs.
“The reality is that this is a topic that our government has been taking very seriously for a very long time. We’d go to extreme lengths to try to cover it up, and this administration means business,” he said.
The files are published through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), a government website created to release reviewed UAP-related material to the public.
The first release included reports, photographs, videos, witness accounts, military records, astronaut transcripts, and other historical materials connected to unresolved sightings and investigations dating from 1944 and 1945 to recent years.
In February, President Donald Trump announced on social media that he would be directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other relevant departments and 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 May 8, 2026 release was the first PURSUE collection of declassified U.S. government records on unresolved UFO cases, including reports, photographs, videos, and historical documents.
Officials described it as the beginning of a rolling disclosure process, with additional materials to be posted as they were reviewed and declassified.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the goal was to provide “maximum transparency” regarding the government’s knowledge of unexplained aerial phenomena.
On May 8, the Trump administration released pixelated imagery of strange, seemingly out-of-this-world objects and official reports by military pilots and other U.S. personnel about metallic spheres, flying discs, and glowing orbs, via its first trove of interagency declassified “unidentified anomalous phenomena” files.
The images and videos, while not always crystal clear, represent something that has never before been made available to the American public — unfiltered, official government documentation of encounters that the establishment spent generations pretending did not exist.
The collection includes more than 160 files detailing more than 400 incidents from all around the world.
Some of the most recent eyewitness statements were taken just last year, while other cases date back to the 1940s.
Many of the declassified videos consist of grainy U.S. military footage from infrared sensors, and the release included a slew of mostly indiscernible photos showing points of light or dark and unusually shaped objects.
Among the files in the newly unsealed trove are incidents from the Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and Apollo 17 moon missions.
In a 1969 debriefing after the Apollo 11 flight, astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported seeing “little flashes inside the cabin, spaced a couple of minutes apart,” while trying to fall asleep.
That some of America’s most celebrated heroes — men who walked on the moon — had their own unexplained encounters only deepens the intrigue surrounding these revelations.
Elizondo also suggested that Cold War tensions played a decisive role in the decades of secrecy, arguing that concealment may have been driven by fears of revealing sensitive capabilities — or vulnerabilities — to adversaries such as Russia and China.
He noted that those conditions have now changed, making continued secrecy harder to justify.
In other words, the cover-up was not just about hiding aliens from the public — it was a calculated geopolitical decision made by officials who feared what adversaries might do with the information.
The files dating back to the 1940s, Elizondo said, suggest the presence of extraterrestrial material is “very real” and is “certainly a national security issue.”
That phrase — national security issue — is key.
For decades, government officials dismissed UAP reports as weather balloons, swamp gas, or the overactive imaginations of civilians.
Now, one of the government’s own former insiders is on record saying these objects represent a genuine security challenge to the United States.
The Trump administration released declassified UAP files featuring Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 photos and transcripts as part of the president’s transparency initiative.
Under President Trump’s leadership, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence actively coordinated the Intelligence Community’s declassification efforts with the Department of War to ensure a careful, comprehensive, and unprecedented review of its holdings to provide the American people with maximum transparency.
On May 18, 2026, the National Security Agency released hundreds of pages of historical UAP records, following a Freedom of Information Act appeal by the Disclosure Foundation.
The rolling disclosure process suggests that what has been released so far may only be the tip of the iceberg — and that far more dramatic revelations may yet be coming.
A second set of documents was released on May 22, 2026, following the first release which received mixed reactions from the public.
The new release included 222 new documents, including about 51 audio recordings and over 40 videos requested by lawmakers.
One of the videos showed a UFO being shot down.
The existence of a video depicting a UAP being actively engaged and destroyed by military assets raises profound questions about what the U.S. military has known — and what it has been doing — for decades without public knowledge.
Elizondo argues the burden of action now rests squarely on federal agencies.
“The question is, will people listen? Will people do what he’s asked to do?” he asked, referencing Trump’s directive.
For Elizondo, who spent years on the inside of the government’s secret UAP programs, the current moment is both vindicating and urgent.
He has long maintained that the phenomenon is real, and that the public deserves the truth.
“This administration is the first administration in my memory that’s actually delivering on a promise to be more transparent and open with the American public about this topic,” Elizondo said.
That observation carries special weight coming from someone who operated at the highest levels of the defense establishment and watched successive administrations kick the proverbial can down the road.
The UAP disclosure movement gained major congressional momentum in recent years through the work of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who pushed for declassification legislation.
The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act forced the intelligence community to acknowledge the scope of what it had been holding, and Trump’s executive action transformed that legislative pressure into an actual release of material.
The PURSUE program is the institutional result of that combined political pressure.
The initial PURSUE tranche contained a little more than 160 files, with at least 100 of those including redactions, according to researchers.
Critics note that the heavily redacted nature of many documents means the public is still not seeing the full picture.
But supporters point out that even partial transparency is a massive leap forward compared to the total blackout that characterized previous administrations’ approaches to the topic.
Elizondo’s credibility as a source is difficult to dismiss.
He ran the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a classified program dedicated to investigating UAP reports.
He resigned in protest in 2017, citing what he described as excessive secrecy and obstruction within the bureaucracy.
In the years since, he has been one of the most prominent and credible voices calling for full disclosure, testifying before Congress and conducting interviews that have brought the issue to millions of Americans.
UAP — short for unidentified anomalous phenomena — is the term now used by U.S. authorities in place of the older “UFO” label.
It covers any airborne or space-based objects that cannot be immediately explained through known technology or natural events.
In recent years, Washington has gradually opened up files once treated as tightly held national security material, a shift that has drawn both attention and skepticism from defense analysts and scientists.
The debate over what these files actually mean is vigorous and ongoing.
Skeptics maintain that many of the sightings can be explained by sensor artifacts, atmospheric phenomena, adversary drones, or simple human misidentification.
Scientists and skeptics said many of the files were ambiguous, previously public, or potentially explainable as camera artifacts, balloons, debris, or unreliable eyewitness accounts.
But for believers, the sheer volume and consistency of high-level military reports describing objects exhibiting impossible flight characteristics is far harder to explain away.
The geopolitical dimension of the UAP issue adds another layer of urgency.
Pentagon officials and intelligence analysts have long warned that some of the objects described in UAP reports may represent advanced technology developed by China or Russia — technology so far ahead of anything the U.S. has publicly acknowledged that acknowledging it could itself be destabilizing.
Whether the phenomenon is extraterrestrial, adversarial, or something else entirely, its existence as a national security concern is now a matter of official record.
In February 2026, Trump directed federal agencies to identify and declassify records connected to UFOs and extraterrestrials.
For a president who has made transparency and accountability central themes of his return to the White House, the PURSUE program represents a bold challenge to the deep state secrecy that has governed this issue for nearly eighty years.
Whether or not the full truth has yet been told, the old official line — that these things don’t exist — is no longer sustainable.
What is now undeniable is that the U.S. government has been tracking these objects for the better part of a century, treating them as serious national security matters, and hiding the bulk of that information from the people it serves.
The era of denial is over.
The era of disclosure — however partial and contested — has officially begun.
