Pentagon's Fifth UAP File Dump Includes a Pilot's Account of a Giant Triangle Over Afghanistan

The Pentagon dropped its fifth batch of UFO files, and I went through the CBS News writeup on it. The release includes 41 new files posted on the Pentagon's UFO website, a mix of documents, images and videos. The records came from the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, State Department and the Executive Office of the President, with the oldest dating back to 1950 and the most recent from this year.

The Pentagon's fifth release adds 41 new files dating from 1950 to this year

This is the fifth release under the executive order President Trump signed in January directing the military and other agencies to produce more UAP related documents. A Pentagon spokesman said Friday's document disclosure will not be the last, adding that the department will keep releasing additional files on a rolling basis.

There is more information, more chatter, more talk, but as I went through it, a lot of what is in there is more of what we have already seen. There are some genuinely interesting pieces in this batch, and there are renderings, which I always find fascinating, because it is not just someone saying they saw something. It is military personnel describing what they saw closely enough that the FBI produced an actual drawing of it.

An AC-130J gunship crew watched 25 UAPs maneuver aggressively over the Gulf of Oman

The bulk of Friday's release is the kind of grainy footage that has been the hallmark of past disclosures, objects captured by military sensors and cameras. Six of the clips show different versions of the same incident, an encounter over the Gulf of Oman involving special operations forces on an AC-130J gunship in September 2021. The clips are cell phone recordings of screens on the gunship showing objects picked up by its infrared and other sensors.

An intelligence report accompanying the footage said the forces on board the gunship observed approximately 25 instances of UAPs while conducting a live fire exercise. The objects were described as cold orbs flying at lower altitudes between 250 and 300 mph in different formations, maneuvering aggressively, and appearing to react to the aircraft firing its main cannon. The encounter could not be resolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon's UAP investigative arm.

A separate clip submitted by US Central Command shows footage captured by a military aircraft over a populated area in the Middle East, from a 2025 video showing what appears to be an object zooming across the screen. That incident also remains unresolved. One of the clips drew comments that it was just a balloon, but watching it, I do not understand why it would be included in these files if that is all it was.

A federal agent photographed two black hot objects moving together in the western US

Another video shows footage captured by a US government special agent in the western US this year, featuring two slow moving black hot areas of contrast visible in infrared imaging. According to a heavily redacted report, the agent received a report about a radio frequency being detected and pointed a handheld infrared sensor in its direction, spotting a black object in the sky that was not moving fast.

The agent photographed the object with an optical device, then noticed a second object to the right moving at the same speed. Both objects showed up as black hot in the FBI's report, and the agent lost sight of them when they traveled out of view. Total observation time was approximately 5 to 10 minutes.

Friday's release also includes eight 302 forms, which the FBI uses to record details from witness interviews. All eight include redactions to shield confidential information, and most are paired with artist renderings from the bureau depicting what the witness described. Others were released alongside video footage the interviewees captured themselves, showing what appear to be orbs and other light sources in the sky. I have seen things similar to that in the sky before, moving around and zipping, but that does not necessarily mean it is anything otherworldly.

A pilot told the FBI about a huge triangle that blacked out the stars over Afghanistan in 2002

One of the more notable 302 reports records an interview with a former military pilot in 2024. He told an agent that while serving in Afghanistan in 2002, at approximately 4:30 a.m. local time, he noticed the stars getting blacked out over Bagram. It appeared as if something huge passed overhead from west to east in an equilateral triangle shape.

The object was moving silently at a consistent speed and altitude, possibly around 150 knots, with no lights visible. The pilot estimated it was about 500 feet in size, though he could not fully make out its shape. He said the pilot he was flying with also saw the triangle and, when it passed over, said "Did you see that?" The FBI produced an artist rendering of the object based on his description.

"I had heard something similar to that as well when it comes to the Afghanistan sighting, so I wonder if it's the same," I said.

The same pilot described mysterious lights on flights between Massachusetts and Ireland

The same pilot described another set of encounters to the agent. He said military pilots began seeing strange lights in the sky between midnight and 3 a.m. starting the year before his interview. He first saw the lights during a flight from Massachusetts to Ireland in October 2023, while flying at an elevation of 37,000 feet, and believed the lights were higher than him, probably at 50,000 feet or higher.

The lights were white, would start out dim and get brighter before fading out, with a full cycle ranging from 10 seconds to a minute. The pilot said he saw the lights roughly 10 times after that first encounter.

None of the newly released footage is clear enough to settle anything

Going back through the actual clips themselves, a lot of it looks similar to things we have seen in past releases. There is a light zipping back and forth that is not moving like anything conventional, and the fact that it made it into a government file suggests officials thought it was relevant enough to include. I do not want to hear that it is a balloon, because if it were, why would it be in here at all.

One clip over the Pacific Ocean from 2019 looked a bit more clear than the others, even in the dark, still zipping back and forth at speed. Another clip from the Middle East showed sensors struggling to even keep up with an object before locking onto it, tearing across the frame. It is fascinating, but every one of these needs a much closer look before anyone can say what it actually is.

A different clip shows an object zigzagging and moving at real speed before shooting off in a straight line, and that is the one I would point to against the balloon argument, because it is not floating, it is maneuvering. Another clip shows something zipping past near the water, which feeds into the idea some people have that there could be bases underwater given how often these things are spotted right above the surface. Same problem every time though, it is just not clear enough to know what it is.

My own approach is to stay in the middle ground on this topic

There is a lot in these files I did not even get into, deeper documentation that people who follow accounts like Skywatch Signal or other accounts on X have been going through for hours. I think it is all fascinating, and I try to approach this subject from a middle ground.

"You can't be on the full believe everything you hear thing," because there are people trying to profit off this or push others toward believing something that is not really there. At the same time, I do not think you can be a full on skeptic either, because if that is someone's whole approach, I do not take them that seriously. I would rather see people ask genuine skeptical questions than dismiss everything outright.

Where I personally land is that I believe there is stuff out there. "I believe that there's stuff out there. I believe it is extraterrestrial stuff. I believe that it is interdimensional and all those types of things." I think that is because we do not fully understand how quantum physics works, or how time and space work, no matter how advanced we think we are.

My own interest traces back to a 2018 article and the Grusch hearings

My interest in this goes back a while. When I was hosting a show, a 2018 article came out that made me think, wait a minute, maybe this actually happened, maybe this is real.

Then in 2023 I watched a six part documentary on the subject, and randomly about a week or two later the David Grusch interview with Ross Coulthart dropped, followed by the congressional hearing. I have been locked in ever since, and more people have been asking questions about this since then too. I do feel there should be even more coverage than there is, but there has been a lot more of it in the mass media over the last year compared to before.

A Time magazine piece links today's disclosure push to a 1948 sighting in Mississippi

A friend sent me a Time magazine article, and I saw others tweeting it out too, titled "America Is Finally Taking Extraterrestrials Seriously." It opens with a story from Hamilton, Mississippi on August 11, 1948, when two boys, ages 10 and 8, were playing in their yard at noon and saw a dull gray circular object, about a foot thick and two feet in diameter, descending roughly 12 feet above them.

The object settled on the ground with a sound like metal hitting metal, then began emitting a high pitched whistle the boys compared to a teakettle. It spun in place, shot 20 feet into the air, hovered, climbed to 30 feet, maneuvered around tree branches and telephone wires, and then flew out of sight. The boys ran inside and told their parents, whose father contacted the local postmaster, R.R. Sheridan, who in turn called the FBI field office in St. Paul. An agent was sent to interview the boys and inspect the yard, and the official report noted a dented spot about two feet in diameter where protruding rocks had been leveled, as though a heavy object had touched down.

The article notes that in May 2026 Trump began a serial release of files, now five batches covering more than 450 documents dating back to the middle of the last century, ordered to be posted on a Department of Defense website. Congressional hearings into the origins of the sightings were held in 2022 and 2023 at AARO, and in December 2023 Joe Biden signed the UAP Disclosure Act into law, requiring the collection, review and public disclosure of all sightings and encounters. The White House also established the UAP Science Advisory Council, run by Avi Loeb.

The article also mentions that Barack Obama, in a February interview, was asked whether extraterrestrial life exists. He said he believes it is likely real based on the statistical vastness of the universe, but that he personally has not seen it, and that nothing is being hidden at Area 51 in some underground facility as part of a conspiracy kept even from the president.

Polling shows bipartisan appetite for more transparency

The Time piece cites a poll from the Disclosure Foundation conducted weeks before a Capitol Hill forum: 84 percent of respondents want more information from the government on UAPs, 69 percent believe UAPs are real, 59 percent support hearings and transparency, and just 20 percent trust the federal government to be telling the complete truth.

The responses were bipartisan, with 89 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats saying they want more information on UAPs, a gap the article calls statistically meaningless. That made me think you could run as a single issue candidate on UAP transparency alone and get elected, unlike other single issues like taxation, immigration or climate that unfold indefinitely over decades. UAP transparency has a fixed endpoint according to the article: eventually the government will say what it knows, and the sightings will be found to be terrestrial, highly advanced military or other assets, or extraterrestrial.

Avi Loeb's null hypothesis points to adversarial nations, not aliens

The article quotes Avi Loeb saying, "My null hypothesis would be that these are human-made objects being operated by adversarial nations near strategic assets of the US." He added that if they are not, and if they do come from somewhere else, "that would be the biggest discovery ever made by humanity."

I found that a little surprising given that Loeb is usually the one talking about believing he has found alien artifacts in the ocean. I am not sure I buy the adversarial nation explanation either, because these same kinds of sightings go back to the 1940s and 50s around nuclear sites, and other countries would have had this technology for that long without it ever really being used for anything beyond zipping around and showing lights. It is also happening in multiple countries, not just the US, in China, Australia and Russia, and that part does not add up to me.

Do you think this footage is the best of what is out there, or is there something more revealing still waiting in a future release?