Here's all you need to know about the new UFO document release

After the 5 minutes it will take you to read this, you'll know as much as anyone.

Wow!!!

As you probably know if you follow my work, I spend as little time as possible engaging with UFO stories and those who tell them. The reason is simple: There are many talented people who spend a lot of time engaging with it, and checking in with their analysis is a far more efficient use of my time.

I had zero excitement when it was announced the UFO files would be released, because one thing we already know about these files is that they’ve already been studied, and found to be either uninteresting or lacking enough information to make any determination. The vast majority of the UFO reports included in the release are from the time before Sean Kirkpatrick left AARO (the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) and he has told us that explicitly on multiple occasions — and has since been openly critical of the UFOlogists in the US government and their “religious” conviction that alien spaceships visit the Earth (or, in the case of JD Vance, spaceships flown by literal demons).

In addition, if aliens did visit the Earth, neither the government nor the military would be likely to hear about it first:

• Commercial pilots worldwide far outnumber active duty military pilots (by a factor of 3, or a factor of 12 if you include civil pilots), and each spends far more time in the air (75 hours/month vs 15 hours/month). If seeing something from your plane is how a flying saucer is first discovered, the chances that it would be a military pilot are tiny. (We also have data showing that pilots are among the very worst observers when it comes to misidentifying things in the sky.)

• If evidence came from a space telescope, nobody in the government is even close to the top of the list of who would see it first. That data appears real-time in MAST where the researchers for that observation are all checking it out, and sharing it with their team (I did a whole piece on this here).

I’m also aware that “alien spaceship” is a possible explanation that has been found to be true exactly zero times, and so it’s the least likely one we should be considering. We also know that aircraft, astronomical objects, balloons, light phenomena, birds, and perceptual effects explain nearly all UFOs that have been identified, and that’s where we should be concentrating first.

If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

So my excitement level was minimal, but maybe yours was greater, and certainly you’ve run into people for whom it was greater still. And so, as promised, here’s all you need to know about this document release. This is a condensation of all I’ve read from half a dozen experts whose work is trustworthy and worth my time to read:

• There are 162 files total. They say they’ll release more later. No explanation has been offered for the delay.

  • There are a couple dozen videos. Most appear to be thermal footage taken from MQ-9 Reaper type drones from 2020-2026. Some are not new and have been seen before. All have any useful information on the screens blacked out, making it far more difficult to do useful analysis. All that I have seen or read analyses about depict tiny targets at a distance consistent with balloons or distant aircraft, with any apparent movement caused by parallax and the drone’s own maneuvers. Nothing to see here.

  • There are some photographs; none that I’ve seen or read about have sufficient detail to even tell what they’re supposed to be of — except one that is an FBI rendering of something someone told a story about! This has no place in a file of evidence.

  • There is audio from one of the Apollo missions when Buzz Aldrin reported seeing a light source — it omits the fact that this was soon identified. There is also audio of Frank Borman seeing lights (similar to John Glenn’s “fireflies”), which has also been public since it happened.

  • There are scores of ancient typewritten accounts going back to the days of Project Blue Book. Many of these are weirdly redacted, since the unredacted versions have been public for a long time. They are anecdotal descriptions of people claiming to have seen a flying saucer, containing no empirical, testable information that can be studied.

  • There are some photos taken on the Moon. None shows anything that lacks a explanation that has long been public.

I could go on, but the short explanation is the files are shit. Nothing that any analyst I follow has reported on is both new and interesting. It is a clown show of a document release, par for the course from a clown show of an administration.

Move on with your day, as I have.