Pentagon Releases New UFO Files Describing 'Countless Orange Orbs Swarming' in US

The Pentagon on Friday released a second batch of UFO Files in the United States, publishing documents, audio recordings and videos that describe reported sightings of orbs, discs and fireballs across roughly 80 years, including a 2025 account from a senior US intelligence officer who said he saw 'countless orange orbs swarming in all directions.'

This followed an order earlier this year from US President Donald Trump, after the Pentagon uploaded an initial tranche of 161 files on 8 May and said more material would follow. Friday's release was billed as the next instalment, not the final word, which is an important distinction in a subject that attracts more heat than light.

What the UFO Files Show

The most striking material is not proof of alien life. It is a record of what witnesses said they saw, and in some cases what military cameras captured, with the Pentagon itself stopping well short of any definitive conclusion about extraterrestrial technology.

One of the newly disclosed documents is a 116 page Armed Forces Special Weapons Program report covering 1948 to 1950. It says witnesses recounted 209 sightings of unidentified objects, including orbs and other phenomena now grouped under the government's preferred label of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP.

Some of the older accounts come from Sandia, New Mexico, where witnesses described objects manoeuvring, vanishing and then exploding. That does not settle what they were. It does, however, show that the mystery has been sitting inside official files for decades, long before the modern internet turned every odd light in the sky into a global argument.

The freshest testimony in the release comes from an unnamed senior US intelligence officer who described a military helicopter flight in the western United States in 2025. He said he was investigating 'loud thuds heard in the mountains' on a test range where others had already reported UFOs in the preceding days.

According to that account, the officer saw 'orange orbs flaring up and down' for more than an hour. He described the objects as 'super-hot,' low to the ground and moving at high speed, then said the swarm appeared to form a distinct triangle before vanishing.

Why the UFO Files Still Leave Gaps

That is the frustrating part. The release is sizeable, but it is also hedged with caveats. The Pentagon said many of the videos shown to members of Congress in March lacked a 'substantiated chain of custody,' meaning officials could not rule out the possibility that some material had been tampered with.

Most of the footage disclosed on Friday is grainy infrared video captured by the US military between 2018 and 2023. One clip is described as showing an unidentified object being shot down over Lake Huron in February 2023, around the period when a Chinese surveillance balloon crossing the US pushed unexplained aerial sightings back into the political mainstream.

Another video is said to show a spherical UAP moving over the Yellow Sea in 2022. Yet even here, the official descriptions are doing a lot of the work. The imagery may intrigue, but it does not speak for itself in any neat or cinematic way.

Trump, reacting to the first release, wrote that 'with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?" Have Fun and Enjoy!' It was vintage Trump, punchy and theatrical, though hardly a substitute for forensic clarity.

Where the UFO Files Go Next

If anyone expected a grand revelation, these UFO Files do not provide it. They offer reported sightings, military footage of varying quality and a paper trail showing that officials have been cataloguing unusual incidents for years, while still declining to say they amount to alien contact.

That has not dulled the appetite for more. Congressman Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who has pushed for greater transparency on UFO sightings, responded by writing on X, 'Let keep digging!' After the first tranche, he had already dismissed that material as a 'drop in the bucket' and suggested much more was still to come.

The Pentagon said additional files will be released on a rolling basis. Until then, nothing in these documents confirms extraterrestrial life, and nothing in them proves alien technology, whatever the more excitable corners of the UFO world may want to believe.