Pentagon releases UFO files with documents on secretive military program

Washington — The Pentagon on Friday released its sixth batch of files on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP or UFOs, including dozens of documents detailing a military program that commissioned studies of warp drives, wormholes and injuries that researchers linked to possible encounters with unknown craft.

Friday's release includes a total of 71 files — 67 provided by the Defense Department and four from local law enforcement in Colorado. There are 55 PDF files, 15 video files and one audio file. Most of the files — 64 out of 71 — contain redactions. The dates of the documents range from 1952 to 2025.

The most noteworthy documents deal with a secretive military initiative known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. The Defense Intelligence Agency established the program in 2008 to study various aerospace threats decades into the future. The initiative ended in 2012.

One document describes the goals of the program and requirements for contractors who would work on it: "One aspect of the future threat environment involves advanced aerospace weapon system applications. The objective of this program is to understand the physics and engineering of these applications as they apply to the foreign threat out to the far term, i.e., from now through the year 2050. Primary focus is on breakthrough technologies and applications that create discontinuities in currently evolving technology trends."

The release includes 37 "Defense Intelligence Reference Documents," or DIRDs, produced under AAWSAP, dealing with topics like warp drives, wormholes, antigravity, negative mass propulsion and invisibility cloaking. All 37 have been publicly available for years, including through Freedom of Information Act releases by the DIA. But Friday's versions include some details the agency had previously withheld, like the names of the agency offices that produced the documents.

In notes accompanying the documents, the Pentagon says the DIRDs are "best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research" and that they "should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed."

While most of the DIRDs examine ideas that are typically the domain of science fiction, one is a 38-page highly technical study from 2010 analyzing "evidence of unintended injury to human observers by anomalous advanced aerospace systems."

Researchers recounted that "three previous fit and active individuals experienced an anomalous ['irregular, incongruous and inconsistent with their domain'] aerospace-related event" and suffered a range of medical symptoms in the aftermath, including heat and redness on their skin and hair loss.