The United States Department of Defense has released a second tranche of previously classified documents, audio recordings, and videos related to UFO sightings, following an executive order by President Donald Trump. The release, published on Friday, includes 222 files — among them a half-dozen documents, several audio recordings, and 51 videos — covering reported sightings that span eight decades, from 1948 to the present day.

At the heart of the new release is a 116-page Armed Forces Special Weapons Program report from 1948 to 1950, detailing 209 documented sightings near Sandia, New Mexico, a site that housed top-secret military facilities. Witnesses at the time described objects manoeuvring erratically before disappearing or exploding. The files also include a striking first-hand account from a senior US intelligence officer who reported seeing "countless orange orbs swarming in all directions" from a military helicopter in 2025, at an unspecified location in the western United States. Investigating "loud thuds heard in the mountains," the officer described oval-shaped, intensely hot objects moving at high speed and low altitude for more than an hour, at one point "forming a distinct triangle before vanishing." He said he did not photograph the objects because he was focused on determining whether they posed a threat.

Among the videos — most of them grainy infrared footage captured by US military cameras between 2018 and 2023 — one purportedly shows a US fighter jet shooting down an unidentified object over Lake Huron in February 2023, around the time a Chinese surveillance balloon traversed American airspace. Another appears to show a spherical object moving at speed over the Yellow Sea in 2022. The Pentagon noted that many of the videos lack a verified chain of custody, meaning they could potentially have been altered.

This is the second set of files released since Trump ordered their declassification earlier this year; the first batch of 161 files was made public on 8 May. The Pentagon has promised further releases on a rolling basis. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth framed the disclosures as a matter of public transparency, stating: "It's time the American people see it for themselves." Trump struck a more playful tone, urging the public to decide for themselves "what the hell is going on."

Despite the breadth of material, neither batch has provided definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life or alien technology — a point experts were quick to note after the first release. Congressman Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee who has long pushed for greater government transparency on the subject, called the latest release encouraging but suggested more significant disclosures could still follow. The process of officially releasing UAP-related records is not new — it began in the late 1970s — but the current administration's disclosures represent a significant acceleration of that effort, raising expectations among researchers and the public alike that more consequential material may yet emerge.