The US government just dumped another massive batch of declassified files on what it calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs. If you were hoping for a definitive photo of a grey alien or a signed peace treaty with an interstellar empire, I've got bad news. You aren't getting it. Instead, the latest documents from the Pentagon offer something else entirely. They give us a bizarre, highly detailed look at military and civilian encounters with things like glowing red plasma spheres and an object explicitly described as an angular, non-symmetrical potato.
This third tranche of declassified files dropped on June 12, 2026. It follows two previous releases in May, all part of a transparency push ordered by the Trump administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the move shows a commitment to letting the public see what's hidden behind classifications. But transparency doesn't equal answers. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, known as AARO, paired these releases with a familiar disclaimer. They can't make a definitive determination on the nature of these observed phenomena. They are unresolved cases. Meanwhile, you can read related developments here: The Three Billion Dollar Denial Why Official Denials in Middle East Finance Mean the Exact Opposite.
So what's actually inside these 72 new files from the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon? Let's get past the headlines and look at what witnesses actually reported.
Glowing Orbs and High Altitude Potatoes
The descriptions in these files read like classic science fiction, but they come from official government interview logs and military reports. One of the most striking accounts comes from an FBI document detailing a February incident in the northeastern United States. An eyewitness returned home from work around 9:00 PM, parked their car, and spotted an intense, brilliant red sphere hovering in their backyard. To understand the bigger picture, check out the detailed report by The Washington Post.
According to the report, the witness described the color as a shade of red they had never seen before. Even stranger, this one-meter-wide red sphere contained a basketball-sized "white plasma sun" right in its center. Soon after, a second orb appeared, and the two looked tethered together as they moved away. Weeks later, the same witness saw multiple white orbs flying over their house at a much higher altitude. The FBI document notes this occurred within 25 miles of an area already notorious for incidents nicknamed the "Triangle Orbs" and "Orbs Over the Pond."
Then there's the potato.
In 2022, military personnel stationed near Colorado Springs reported an object in the sky that looked like an "angular, non-symmetrical potato." Government analysts tried to write it off. An early evaluation suggested it was just sunlight reflecting from mountain snow cover, which then illuminated the underside of low-altitude clouds. AARO later stepped in and downgraded that explanation to a "low-confidence assessment." The potato remains unresolved.
If you look further back into the historical documents included in the release, the scale gets even wider. A CIA document from the summer of 2008 reveals serious concern over an unidentified disc-like object hovering at high altitude over Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe. The object had a series of rotating lights on its underside and shot out visible beams of light. The CIA report surmised it could be an advanced reconnaissance device from a foreign government or an object of extraterrestrial origin. They never figured out which one it was.
The Problem with the Self Licking Ice Cream Cone
Why do we keep getting these massive data dumps that lead absolutely nowhere? Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of AARO, didn't mince words when talking to Scientific American recently. He called the government's ongoing public analysis of UAPs a "self-licking ice cream cone."
Kirkpatrick argues that these releases serve almost no scientific purpose because there's nothing genuinely unexpected in them. The government is essentially collecting reports, failing to identify them due to poor data or lack of sensor calibration, and then releasing them to satisfy a public hunger that they created in the first place.
Look at how AARO actually processes these files. When they get high-quality data, the anomalies usually vanish. In a series of recent case evaluations, AARO assessed with "high confidence" that various infrared videos captured by military platforms depicted nothing remarkable. One video showed objects maintaining relative positioning for energy conservation during flight with a pulsating infrared return. Sounds alien? It was a flock of birds. Another video showed a physical object drifting precisely at wind speed and direction. It was a weather balloon.
The unresolved cases, like the backyard plasma orb or the Colorado Springs potato, stick around because the data is fundamentally flawed. You have vivid, sincere eyewitness testimony, but you don't have hard radar data, satellite telemetry, or high-resolution material analysis to back it up.
What the Data Really Tells Us
If you look at the broader picture across all three recent document dumps, a distinct pattern emerges about what people are actually seeing. The Pentagon's historical trend data shows that the vast majority of reported UAPs share specific characteristics:
- Shape: Most are described as round, spherical, or orbs. Ellipsoids and irregular shapes (like our friend the potato) make up a smaller fraction.
- Altitude: Sightings typically cluster between 10,000 and 40,000 feet, right where military and commercial aviation operate.
- Behavior: Most objects appear to drift or move at speeds consistent with local wind currents, though a handful of reports describe erratic behavior like 90-degree turns or corkscrew maneuvers.
The problem is that the public interprets "unresolved" as proof of something supernatural or extraterrestrial. Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, points out that including ambiguous testimony from military personnel and NASA astronauts gives the issue an undeserved level of credence. He notes that historical sightings from Apollo missions, which some point to as proof of long-term alien surveillance, are easily explained by experts as sunlight reflecting through the thick, multi-paned windows of the space capsules.
Where to Focus Your Attention Next
Stop refreshing the Pentagon's UAP website expecting a smoking gun. If you want to understand what's actually happening in our skies, you need to change how you look at the data.
First, look at drone proliferation. A huge percentage of modern civilian and military reports involve linear objects with intense light bands or small, fast-moving crafts making sharp turns. In many cases, these are commercial drones or classified reconnaissance platforms being tested by foreign or domestic agencies.
Second, pay attention to sensor artifacts. Many military UAP videos show dark or light spots on infrared screens. If you don't understand how a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) system handles heat signatures or glare, a distant commercial jet or a hot air balloon can easily look like a glowing capsule defying the laws of physics.
The US government will likely continue dropping these files to fulfill its transparency mandate. Read them for the fascinating historical glimpses and the wild stories of backyard plasma spheres. Just don't expect the Pentagon to find aliens for you. They're too busy trying to figure out if that flying potato was a cloud or a drone.
