Key Takeaways
- The Department of War, formerly the Pentagon, published a sixth batch of declassified UAP files on September 18, 2026 — 71 records dated from 1952 to 2025, including video, audio and technical studies.
- Thirty-seven of the files are previously known "reference documents" exploring warp drives, wormholes and antigravity, produced by a defense research program that shut down in 2012 and was never meant to confirm the technology is real.
- Investigators still say no reviewed case shows verifiable evidence of alien technology, even as a long-sought 1952 audio recording and new video from the Middle East and the East China Sea keep several files open.
What Landed in the Sixth Release
Seventy-one records now make up the government's newest UAP disclosure, according to CBS News, which reviewed the batch made public on Friday, September 18. The tranche breaks down into 55 PDFs, 15 videos and a single audio file, spanning material dated from 1952 through 2025. Sixty-seven of the records came directly from the Department of War; the remaining four videos were submitted by local police in Colorado, filed after officers reported unexplained aerial activity in October 2023. One responding officer described a silent object with flashing red, blue and green lights, according to WJLA. Redactions appear in 64 of the 71 records, mostly to shield witness identities or sensitive military locations.
The release arrived just days after the department issued a waiver letting current and former personnel discuss UAP matters without breaching old nondisclosure agreements, a move widely read as an effort to speed up disclosure before the year ends.
Inside AAWSAP: The Program That Studied Warp Drives
The most talked-about material traces back to the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, a Defense Intelligence Agency initiative launched in 2008 and shuttered in 2012. Thirty-seven reference documents produced under that program cover subjects including traversable wormholes, invisibility cloaking and negative-mass propulsion, work the department describes as an attempt to anticipate aerospace threats through the year 2050 rather than validate any existing technology.
None of these studies are new to the public — researchers have obtained most of them for years through federal records requests — but Friday's versions add details that had previously been withheld, including the internal offices that authored each report. One unusual entry, a 2010 paper running 38 pages, examined claims of physical injury that some researchers have tied to encounters with unexplained aircraft. Officials have repeatedly cautioned that these documents function as reference summaries, not confirmed findings.
The 965-G Mystery and Blue Book's Unfinished Business
A second thread of the release looks backward more than seventy years. It includes a long-sought audio recording of a March 1952 briefing given by Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt, the officer credited with coining the term "UFO" and who went on to lead Project Blue Book. In it, Ruppelt discusses the Air Force's work with the Battelle Memorial Institute and says nearly one-fifth of roughly 800 early sightings reviewed at the time came from witnesses he considered credible and were never resolved — a review that predates Blue Book's formal launch that same month.
The batch also contains a report on an unidentified object spotted off Okinawa in November 1950, a 1952 memo dismissing any attempt to recover it as impractical, and a previously known 1953 document estimating that an object accelerated at 965 times the force of gravity, a figure no outlet has independently confirmed.
The Ruppelt recording has its own backstory: Republican Rep. Eric Burlison had spent months pressing MIT's Lincoln Laboratory to locate and hand over the tape, according to NewsNation. Friday's release suggests that campaign paid off — the recording is now public record rather than still pending.
New Video: From a 1952 Utah Swarm to 2025 Orbs Over the Middle East
Visually, the standout is Kodachrome footage filmed near Tremonton, Utah, showing a cluster of objects moving in formation, according to LiveNOW from FOX. More recent material includes a brief infrared clip, just 59 seconds long, filmed over the East China Sea during 2023 and passed to investigators by the Indo-Pacific Command, along with footage of small metallic spheres moving in formation at roughly 480 miles per hour — about 770 kilometers per hour — over the Middle East in 2025.
What Investigators Say They Haven't Found
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office maintains that small metallic orbs remain the most frequently reported type of UAP and that no case it has reviewed shows verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology, though the agency says many files remain open. Friday's batch is the sixth published under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE, following earlier releases on May 8, May 22, June 12, July 10 and August 7, drawing on material from the Department of War, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and the White House, per the department's own official release.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the effort is "in lockstep with President Trump to bring unprecedented transparency" and framed decades of classification as fuel for public speculation.
What Comes Next
Officials say additional batches will keep arriving on a rolling basis. With the Ruppelt tape now out, Burlison and other lawmakers are shifting pressure toward other contractor-held recordings and historical files they say remain locked away.
