There’s no telling why aliens decided to descend on the community outside Stockton, Calif. on Feb. 18, 1947—and no telling, truth be told, that they actually did. But Leland Sammers, a farmer who lived 14 miles west of Stockton, is certain he had visitors.
“I was standing near my hog pen about 100 ft. east of my house, when I heard the pheasants raising a disturbance and the chickens all rushed into the chicken house,” he said in a statement he filed with the government shortly after. “I looked toward the house to see what was causing it and saw something hovering just above the house. I ran toward the house and it lowered over the north end of the house…[It] just wobbled around for an instant, fire belching out of it and sucking back in…Suddenly there was a lot of sparks showered from it…and it took off in a northwesterly direction, gaining altitude as it went.”
Neither Sammers nor the government ever figured out just what the object—if it even existed—was, and there was no one but Sammers himself along with his wife and the frightened pheasants to witness its passing. But the report was filed all the same in a repository of hundreds of similar sightings the military had already begun maintaining and has continued to gather for 80 years. And until last week, these sightings remained classified.
On May 8, President Donald Trump ordered the release of more than 170 files on a Department of War website—some dating back to the 1940s. The accounts are made available just as they were originally reported, with neither clarification nor explanation by the government. Some of them are from farmers and other layfolk like Sammers, some are from commercial pilots, and some from Navy pilots who have captured videos through their windshield of what appear to be alien craft bobbing and hovering and darting and weaving in ways no known aircraft can manage.
The release is an effort to make good on a promise the president made on April 17, 2026, that those eyewitness accounts—of what used to be called unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, and are now known by the more decorous label “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs—would be released soon.
“As you remember, I recently directed the Secretary of War … to begin releasing government files relating to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomenon,” he told a gathering at a Turning Point USA event. “This process is well underway, and we found many very interesting documents, I must say, and the first releases will begin very, very soon.”
What UFO files have been released?
A number of UAP accounts had already been widely reported—and were even the subjects of Congressional hearings in 2022 and 2023. But the ones just spilled by the Department of War were previously unknown—many going back generations. On August 9, 1952, for example, in a teletype labeled “URGENT,” addressed to then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, two employees of the DuPont Chemical plant in Savannah River, S.C., reported seeing “a blue light with an orange fringe shaped like a saucer.” It made its appearance at 9:30 p.m., “flying at a high rate of speed and traveling in a northeastern direction.”
The message did reach Hoover, and two days later, he responded—with a not-my-department demurral. “Inasmuch as the matter of the flying saucers is being investigated by the United States Air Force,” he wrote, “I am taking the liberty of forwarding a copy of your letter to the Director of Special Investigations, Department of the Air Force…If you have any further observations along this line, I would suggest that you may wish to communicate directly with him.”
Other incidents were a bit more intimate. On Sept. 27, 1950, two officers with the Philadelphia Police Department were patrolling in their squad car when they saw an object descending toward the ground that at first appeared to be a parachute but, according to the officers’ account, decidedly wasn’t. Measuring about 6 ft. in diameter, it landed in a nearby field.
“The officers, upon examining it, noted that it gave off a purplish glow, which was almost a mist,” according to the report. “The officers summoned two other police officers. After looking at the object for some time, they attempted to pick it up. The object broke, leaving a slight odorless residue. Over a period of about 25 minutes, which the officers spent watching the object, it completely disintegrated.”
Not every observation cleared the tin-foil-hat bar. One March 19, 1950 report, directed to the “President of the Commission of Scientific Investigation of the United States of North America”—which did not and does not exist—blamed the government for the appearance of UFOs. “This is to greet you and at the same time bring to your knowledge the STUDIES which I permit myself to send to the Honorable Commission,” the correspondent wrote. “This deals with stratospheric aerostats (?)* or **Flying saucers as people commonly call them, and which I believe your great nation, making use of ATOMIC force, possesses.”
Who reports UFOs? Have astronauts seen UFOs in space?
Like Navy fliers, commercial airline pilots have filed sightings too. On August 4, 1947, a Pan American airliner traveling the route between Gander, Newfoundland and LaGuardia Field in New York City came upon what appeared to be a flying, gold-colored cylinder, about 15 ft. long and 3 ft. in diameter. One of the pilots “estimated the speed of the object at about 175 miles per hour, and that it was traveling in an easterly direction,” according to the file. The other pilot then spotted a similar object on the other side of the plane. The sightings continued for about 90 seconds before both UAPs vanished from view.
A report was even filed by the Gemini 7 mission on Dec. 4, 1965, after the two-man spacecraft had reached orbit, separated from its upper stage booster, and turned around to face that spent segment of rocket. The astronauts, commander Frank Borman and pilot Jim Lovell, saw not just the upper stage but a spangle of debris particles around it and another, larger object they could not explain.
“We have a bogey at 10:00 o’clock high,” called down Borman.
“This is Houston,” the ground responded. “Say again, Seven.”
“I said we have a bogey at 10:00 o’clock high,” Borman said. “We also have very many, it looks like hundreds of little particles going by to the left.”
“Gemini 7, [are] these particles in addition to the booster and the bogey at 10:00 o’clock high?”
“Roger,” Borman responded.
In a scribbled note that is also part of the recent document dump, a NASA official wrote the words “UFO sighting by Borman,” above an official statement which he read to the press. “The master tape is here in the control room and we are now prepared to play it for you,” he said. “It contains references to sighting not only some particles [but] an unidentified object, plus the booster.”
What UFO video footage did the Pentagon release?
More than the sightings by civilians on the ground, and commercial pilots in the skies, or even the astronauts, it’s the naval aviator encounters that are generating the most buzz—both because they are recent and because they have video evidence to back them up. In 2013, according to a sighting that was reported earlier and was not in the new document release, a squadron of F/A-18 fighter jets headed out for aerial maneuvers off of the coast of Virginia Beach. During the course of the exercise, as TIME reported later, the routine drill turned much less routine when the jets’ radars picked up a cluster of half a dozen objects flying along with them—moving acrobatically. At some moments they ripped along side-to-side at 350 knots—or 402 mph. Then, suddenly, they would stand utterly still in winds that themselves were moving at 150 knots (172 mph)—gusts that had the jets struggling to maintain position. The objects had no visible exhaust, no discernible means of propulsion, and looked nothing like any aircraft in the nation’s civilian or military arsenal.
Measuring five to 15 ft. across, they were a “dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere,” former Navy Lieutenant Ryan Graves, who was aloft that day, told TIME. “We almost hit one of the objects; they came within 50 ft. of the lead aircraft, and that’s really when we knew we were dealing with something a bit abnormal here.”
There was, too, the never-before-reported Jan. 1, 2020 encounter—with video footage included in the new document tranche—of a bright, dancing point moving similarly erratically, spotted by the pilot of an aircraft patrolling the skies over the Middle East. The object was picked up by infrared sensors, and lingered in sight for one minute and three seconds before it disappeared.
More striking was the newly-revealed sighting exactly four years later, on New Years Day 2024, of a football-shaped body with three fin-like projections, one pointing vertically and two pointing downward at matching 45° angles. That hovering object, also detected by infrared sensors, remained visible for just nine seconds before disappearing.
Perhaps most sensational of all however were the fresh details about a one-minute and 46 second appearance in 2013 of an eight-pointed starlike body swerving and maneuvering in front of a Naval jet, leaving a fine contrail of exhaust behind it.
Are UFOs confirmed?
All of the reports in the files remain objects of speculation and mystery, and all too will be followed by more such files, which the Department of War promises will be forthcoming “on a rolling basis.”
In the long history of UAP observations, perhaps only one has a clear explanation—and indeed, one that revealed itself within moments of its occurrence. That one too happened in the course of the Gemini 7 mission—on Dec. 16, 1965, when Gemini 6 flew up to join the ship already in orbit. The twin spacecraft moved to within a nose-to-nose meter of each other, achieving the world’s first rendezvous in orbit.
After several hours of station-keeping, Gemini 6—commanded by Wally Schirra, alongside rookie astronaut Tom Stafford—backed away, and began easing down to a lower orbit, preparing to reenter. Then, when the two ships were no longer in sight of each other, Schirra radioed a final transmission.
“Gemini 7, this is Gemini 6. We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in a polar orbit,” Schirra reported. “He has a very low trajectory and a very high climbing ratio. Looks like he might be going to reenter soon. Stand by, just let me try to pick up that thing.”
And then, crackling across the radio in both Gemini 7 and Mission Control, just nine days before Christmas of 1965, came a tiny, tinny chorus of Jingle Bells, performed live, on a small harmonica and small set of bells—contraband Schirra had smuggled aboard his ship. The polar bogey the commander spotted that day was Santa Claus.
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