Key Takeaways
- On 7 August 2026 the Department of War released a fifth batch of UFO files — 41 documents, images and videos — at war.gov/ufo, from the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, State Department and Executive Office of the President
- An FBI interview describes a silent equilateral triangle, estimated at 500 feet across, blacking out the stars over Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2002
- The same pilot reported strange high-altitude lights on a Boston to Dublin flight in 2023 — and says he has seen them roughly ten times since
- Cellphone footage from a US gunship over the Gulf of Oman in 2021 shows around 25 'cold orbs' the Pentagon's own investigators couldn't resolve
- A 1963 State Department telegram describing a crashed 'balloon' with a dead crewman in a strange spacesuit was withdrawn as fabricated six days later — a useful reminder to read these files carefully
📑 Table of Contents
- What's in the Fifth UFO File Release
- Bagram Triangle 2002: 'The Stars Were Getting Blacked Out'
- UFO Lights on Boston to Dublin Flights
- Gulf of Oman UFO Videos: 25 Orbs Around a US Gunship
- The 1963 'Dead Crewman' Telegram — and Why It Fell Apart
- Ghost Rockets and 'Vehicles From Another Planet': The Oldest Files
- When Is the Next UFO File Release?
On 7 August 2026 the Pentagon — formally the Department of War these days — posted its fifth batch of declassified UFO files to war.gov/ufo. There are 41 of them, and this batch has range: a 500-foot triangle silently blacking out the stars over a wartime airbase, US special forces filming a swarm of orbs from a gunship, and a Cold War telegram about a crashed craft with a dead crewman aboard that turned out to be nonsense within a week.
As with the four earlier batches, I've been through the documents and the footage so you don't have to. Here's what's actually in there, what stands up, and what doesn't.
What's in the Fifth UFO File Release
The fifth Pentagon UFO file release, published on 7 August 2026, contains 41 files: documents, images and videos from the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, State Department and the Executive Office of the President. The oldest material reaches back to the late 1940s and the newest was recorded this year. It's the fifth batch published under PURSUE, the programme set up after President Trump's January executive order, following releases on 8 May, 22 May, 12 June and 10 July. If you're new to the story, my explainer on how the 2026 UFO file releases work has the background, and my rundown of the fourth batch covers last month's files.
Two things make this batch different. First, the FBI takes centre stage: eight of the documents are FD-302s, the bureau's standard witness interview form, and most come paired with digital renderings the FBI drew this year as visual aids. That's new. We're no longer just getting grainy sensor clips; we're getting sit-down interviews with named-but-redacted witnesses, illustrated.
Second, there's a striking amount of triangle. Three separate files describe large, dark, triangular objects: over Afghanistan in 2002, somewhere unnamed in 2011, and twice over Colorado Springs in 2023. The Pentagon's position hasn't budged — nothing in the files is claimed as proof of non-human technology — but several cases again carry the department's own label of "unresolved". Let's start with the one in every headline.
Bagram Triangle 2002: 'The Stars Were Getting Blacked Out'
In June 2002, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan was one of the most heavily defended patches of ground on Earth. According to an FBI interview conducted in 2024 and released on Friday, a military pilot standing on that base at about 4:30am noticed something odd above him. Not an object at first. An absence.
"[He] noticed that the stars were getting blacked out over Bagram," the report reads. "It appeared as if something huge went overhead, from west to east, and was an equilateral triangle shape. The object was moving silently, at a consistent speed and altitude, possibly 150 knots, with no lights visible."
He estimated it at roughly 500 feet across. For scale, that's five times the wingspan of the C-130s parked on the airfield below it. A second pilot watched it pass and asked him, "did you see that?". The FBI produced a rendering of the object this year, and it's about as unnerving as a plain black triangle on a starfield can be.
The sceptical readings are the usual ones. A formation of aircraft with lights off can read as a single dark shape. So can a large surveillance airship or blimp, and 150 knots is airship territory. But Bagram in 2002 was active military airspace where the US controlled everything that flew, and the report records no radar contact and no engine noise. Whatever it was, the two people best placed to recognise an aircraft didn't recognise it.
The Colorado Springs triangles
The Bagram triangle isn't alone in this batch. A former Department of War employee told the FBI he watched a dark, translucent triangle hover over a residential street in Colorado Springs in October 2023, and the bureau's rendering shows two people in a back garden staring up at it. A separate citizen report from the same city and year describes a triangle with red lights at its corners. A third file covers a dark triangle with corner lights seen by military personnel in June or July 2011, location not given. Triangles have been a fixture of UFO reporting since the Belgian wave of 1989-90, and this release won't quieten that thread.
UFO Lights on Boston to Dublin Flights
Here's the part of the release closest to home for UK and Irish readers. The Bagram witness went on to fly commercially, and in the same FBI interview he describes something he first saw in October 2023 on a flight from the Boston area to Ireland: lights above his cruising altitude, far higher than they should have been.
He was at 37,000 feet. The lights, he estimated, sat at 50,000 feet or more — above almost all conventional traffic. They would appear dim, brighten, then fade out over anywhere from ten seconds to a minute, always between midnight and 3am. He told investigators he has seen the same thing roughly ten times since. And he isn't alone: federal agents took several reports from other pilots describing the same phenomenon on the Boston-Dublin corridor in the same month.
That North Atlantic corridor passes close to UK airspace, and thousands of British holidaymakers fly it every week. Pilots do have mundane candidates for high lights at night — Starlink satellite flares, distant aircraft on crossing tracks, even auroral glow. None of those neatly explains lights that sit still, brighten and fade on a repeating schedule between midnight and 3am. The file doesn't resolve it, and for our audience it's a reminder that this story isn't confined to American skies. We looked at the British angle on the wider release programme in what the Pentagon's UFO files mean for the UK.
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Gulf of Oman UFO Videos: 25 Orbs Around a US Gunship
The most substantial footage in the release comes from September 2021, over the Gulf of Oman. Crew aboard an AC-130J gunship — the heavily armed special operations aircraft — used their phones to film what their onboard sensors were tracking during a live-fire exercise. Six of those clips are now public.
The accompanying intelligence report is blunt. The crew "observed approximately 25 instances of UAPs" during the exercise. "The UAPs were observed as cold orbs flying at lower altitudes between 250 to 1300 MPH in different formations as well as maneuvering aggressively. UAPs also appeared to react to the aircraft firing its main cannon."
Read that again. Twenty-five objects, showing cold on infrared where an engine should show hot, spanning speeds from light-aircraft slow to well past the sound barrier, and apparently responding when a gunship opened fire. AARO, the Pentagon office whose job is to explain these cases, couldn't. The file is marked unresolved.
The honest caveats: cellphone video of a sensor screen is about the lowest-fidelity evidence there is, and infrared "orbs" have a history of turning out to be birds, balloons or camera artefacts once the raw data appears. But the speed estimates and the reaction to cannon fire come from the crew's own report, not from internet speculation. This one belongs on the short list of genuinely puzzling military cases, alongside the ones we covered in what the DoD's UAP videos actually show.
Smaller items round out the modern material: a 2021 clip of a single orb crossing the Gulf of Oman, a 2022 video described as a rotating red orb over the north-eastern US, a 2025 clip from US Central Command of an object passing over a populated area in the Middle East, infrared footage from this year of two slow "black-hot" objects tracked by a US government special agent in the western United States, and a declassified 1996 photograph from Space Shuttle Columbia showing an unidentified object in low Earth orbit.
The 1963 'Dead Crewman' Telegram — and Why It Fell Apart
The strangest document in the batch is also the best lesson in how to read these files. On 14 November 1963, a US embassy cabled the Secretary of State in Washington about a report from Brazil: a "large metal manned balloon" had come down, dug a crater four metres deep, and was found with a "dead crewman aboard wearing [a] uniform or spacesuit with strange markings".
A dead crewman in a strange spacesuit, in an official State Department cable. It's the kind of line that launches a thousand documentaries. Except the release includes the follow-up telegram too, dated 20 November 1963: the whole story was fabricated. Six days from sensation to retraction.
That's why the "fabricated" cable might be the most valuable document in the batch. It shows wild claims entering official channels and being knocked down, which is exactly the context you need when reading everything else here. Brazil has real, stubbornly unresolved cases — Congress is still demanding the Varginha files — but this wasn't one of them. It's also a curious footnote of timing: the cable landed in Washington just eight days before President Kennedy was assassinated, the same month as the disputed memo we examined in our JFK UFO memo fact-check.
Ghost Rockets and 'Vehicles From Another Planet': The Oldest Files
The historical documents are the ones I'd read first. A January 1947 intelligence review — written months before the word "flying saucer" existed — covers the "ghost rockets" seen over Finland and Denmark in 1946: shiny, cigar-shaped objects like balls of fire with tails, moving "lightning fast". The suspicion at the time was a secret Soviet missile programme, and Swedish officials were reluctant to say anything publicly. Eighty years on, the ghost rockets have never been fully explained.
Better still is a US Air Force document dated 3 November 1948, sent to the commanding general at Wright-Patterson. "The conclusion appears inescapable that some type of flying object has been observed," it states. And then, from Colonel Howard McCoy, chief of the intelligence department: "The possibility that the reported objects are vehicles from another planet has not been ignored."
That sentence was written by serving Air Force intelligence officers in 1948, and it stayed out of public view for decades. A 1953 document in the same vein describes filmed objects over Montana and Utah whose behaviour was "inconsistent with those of natural phenomena" — descriptions that match the famous Mariana and Tremonton films, two of the earliest UFO recordings ever made. If those files get their own release later in the programme, we'll cover them properly.
When Is the Next UFO File Release?
No date has been announced, but the pattern so far is a batch every four to five weeks, and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed on Friday that the department and its agency partners are "actively working on the next release of UAP files". Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says the effort spans "tens of millions of records", many still on paper. Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer chairing the White House's UAP advisory council, put the public mood well: "There are two subjects that everyone in the US seems to agree on; one seems to be national security, the second is, are we alone?"
Loeb is also careful to say the files don't prove extraterrestrial activity, and on the evidence of this batch that's right. A fabricated telegram is a fabrication. An infrared orb may live inside the camera. But a 500-foot silent triangle over a wartime airbase, seen by two pilots, and 25 objects reacting to cannon fire off a gunship — those files are labelled unresolved by the people paid to resolve them, and that label was chosen carefully.
Coming soon on WatchTheStars: we're downloading the complete Release 05 bundle — every document and all the footage — and will be publishing dedicated pages on the standout cases, the way we have for Pantex and the green fireballs. They'll join our searchable UAP document archive, so you can read the primary sources for yourself. In the meantime the whole official archive is free at war.gov/ufo, and my write-ups of the first, second, third and fourth batches tell the story from the start.
Sources:
- Pentagon releases 5th batch of UFO files, with 41 more documents and videos — CBS News
- Fifth Batch of UFO Files Features Triangle-Shaped Craft, 'Dead Crewman' Report — The Epoch Times
- Pentagon drops fifth batch of UFO files — The National Desk
- Pentagon releases fifth batch of UFO files — CNN
- Department of War UAP file release (PURSUE), Release 05
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