Department of War sets up UFO website, but there isn't much to see

Source: Engadget

Background

The Department of War has announced that it has published “never‑before‑seen files” of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) on a new government webpage, with plans to add material on a “rolling basis.” Some Pentagon UAP footage was declassified during President Donald Trump’s first term, but this new page appears to be the result of a February Truth Social post from Trump calling on the DOW and related agencies “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”

New UFO Webpage

The webpage — war.gov/UFO — includes a carousel of images and files from the DOW, FBI, NASA, and more, presented in a way that leans into the conspiratorial nature of UFO fandom. While the site contains numerous PDFs and images, there is little concrete evidence of extraterrestrials. The release may serve to divert attention from other projects of the second Trump administration, such as the ongoing conflict with Iran (Al Jazeera).

Historical Context

Suspicion that the U.S. government knows more about unidentified anomalous phenomena than it admits has existed for decades. Formal research was not made official until the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was revealed in 2017 (Politico). AATIP was formed in 2007 to study UAP and was disbanded in 2012, but its work has continued in other government groups, most recently the All‑domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which operates inside the DOW and contributed to the new release of files.

Implications

The videos of UAP shared during the first Trump administration were unexplained but were ruled by a government report not to be alien spacecraft (NY Times, 2021). It remains unclear whether the newly released files will change that assessment, but they provide an interesting glimpse into how a bureaucracy processes and catalogs unexplained phenomena.