New Pentagon UFO files include reports from moon landings

The Defense Department publicly released more than 150 new files on Friday, about phenomena formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, including several reports from NASA astronauts who reported seeing unidentified objects in space and on the moon.

A total of 162 documents, which range from 1942 to 2025 and include audio clips and photographs, were posted on a new Department of Defense website.

The Pentagon now uses the term Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs, for such objects (although “UFO” remains in the web address and is used throughout the website), and the new collection includes documents from several government agencies.

“The latest UAP videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entire United States government are all in one place – no clearance required,” according to the news release, which also said that the Defense Department will release additional information “on a rolling basis.”

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Many of the documents are FBI and Department of Defense files from the 1940s to 1960s documenting reports of objects from both the public and military members, many of which are already available from public sources.

The files also include reports from current combat zones, including two dozen one- or two-page reports from U.S. military pilots flying missions from Jordan, Djibouti, Iraq and other bases in and around the Middle East between 2020 to 2024.

The value of some may be minimal, including one report that contains a single cryptic sentence — “2X round white white hot UAPS dynamic south” — at the end of six entirely blacked-out pages.

Sightings on the moon and ‘bogeys’ in space

By far the highest profile documents are NASA-produced transcripts, photos, and audio clips from Space Race-era missions in which astronauts reported sighting while orbitting the earth and even while on the moon.

In a transcript from Apollo 17, the final U.S. mission to the moon in 1972, Mission Commander Eugene Cernan describes a “flashing” object that all three members of the crew can see several miles from their capsule.

“It’s way out in the distance, as I say, because there are particles that are close by and it’s obviously not one of those. It’s apparently rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the lashes come round almost – almost on time,” Cernan tells mission control.

Cernan speculates in the transcript that the object is a falling, rotating panel from the mission’s own Saturn rocket.

The object and Cernan’s description have been well known for decades among UFO enthusiasts, with the audio from the mission available online since at least 2010, but the original NASA transcript and memos on the sighting appear to be new.

Also in the files is the original audio of astronaut Frank Borman reporting a “bogey” from the window of his Gemini VII capsule in December 1965.

“We have a bogey at 10 o’clock high,” Borman says. “…This is an actual sighting… very many A – it looks like hundreds of little particles…”

Astronaut Jim Lovell then adds that he can see the mission’s rocket booster out the window, surrounded by particles.

“I have the booster on my side. It’s a brilliant body in the sun against a black background with trillions of particles on it,” Lovell says.

Both Borman and Lovell, who both died in recent years, maintained that they were reporting debris, but Borman’s description of a “bogey” has remained a point of interest in UFO circles.

Latest in line of releases

The website contains other documents, images and other material tied to UAPs, sourced from NASA, the FBI and the Department of Defense. The website includes some images of unidentified objects that are almost completely blacked out, and one image that includes what the Pentagon describes as “composite sketch: that includes an “FBI lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports.”

Over the past decade, the U.S. military has made a concerted effort to detect and analyze unidentified aircraft amid concerns from lawmakers that such sightings could be evidence of advanced technologies from a foreign adversary.

The most recent incarnation of the military’s effort to investigate UAP sightings is the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was established in July 2022.

“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation — and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in Friday’s Pentagon news release.