Cases and themes
Photographs, films and videos, from the 1950s to the Navy infrared footage. 185 events, newest first.
Select any year above to see what happened that year.
Open Photos and video as a timeline
Media12 Jun 2026
Universal released Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day in U.S. theaters. Emily Blunt plays a weather forecaster drawn into a federal cover-up of decades of UFO sightings and alien contact, a plot built on the government-disclosure theme of post-2017 UFO news.
Photo: Raph_PH, CC BY 4.0
Government8 May 2026
The Department of War posted a first tranche of declassified UAP videos, photos and documents on war.gov/UFO under the interagency Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), saying more would follow on a rolling basis. It noted many items had not been analyzed.
Government31 Mar 2026
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who chairs a House Oversight task force on declassification, wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listing 46 UAP video files, citing whistleblowers who said AARO held more footage. She asked for delivery by April 14, 2026.
Photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government2 Dec 2025
Asked on Fox News about The Age of Disclosure, Rubio said his interview was filmed years earlier as a senator and relayed what witnesses had told him, not firsthand knowledge. He said his main worry was an adversary's surveillance capability over restricted airspace.
Photo: U.S. Department of State, Public domain
Media21 Nov 2025
Dan Farah's documentary The Age of Disclosure went worldwide on Prime Video with a limited run in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. It features 34 current and former U.S. officials asserting a decades-long cover-up of non-human intelligence; those claims have not been confirmed.
Government9 Sep 2025
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna's House Oversight task force heard sworn testimony from Navy and Air Force witnesses and journalist George Knapp. Rep. Eric Burlison showed a video he said was filmed off Yemen in October 2024 of a Hellfire missile apparently failing to down an object.
Photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government9 May 2025
AARO posted military infrared videos from the Middle East in 2023 and 2024 that it lists as unresolved. It says each shows an apparent thermal contrast but that without other sensor data it cannot tell whether it is a physical object or a sensor artifact.
Photo: U.S. Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Public domain
Government29 Apr 2025
AARO published its case resolution and video of an object filmed in October 2017 by an aerostat infrared sensor above Al Taqaddum Air Base, Iraq. It assessed with high confidence that the object was a cluster of inflated balloons with no anomalous performance.
Photo: Cpl. John Baker, Public domain
Sightings24 Mar 2025
A large glowing spiral was seen and filmed across the UK and much of Europe on the evening of March 24, 2025, prompting UFO speculation. The Met Office and astronomers attributed it to the frozen exhaust plume of a Falcon 9 launched from Florida that day.
Sightings6 Mar 2025
SpaceX lost its Starship upper stage minutes into its eighth test flight. Glowing debris was filmed from Florida, the Bahamas, Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos, and the FAA briefly halted departures at several Florida airports, citing space launch debris.
Photo: NASA/JSC/Don Pettit, Public domain
Government19 Nov 2024
At a Senate hearing, AARO released December 2018 infrared drone video that seemed to show an object passing through Mount Etna's eruption plume. AARO said atmospheric distortion caused the effect and assessed with moderate confidence the object was a balloon drifting with the wind.
Photo: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, Public domain
Military30 Oct 2024
At a September 2025 House Oversight hearing, Rep. Eric Burlison played a video he said was taken on October 30, 2024 by an MQ-9 tracking an orb off Yemen as another MQ-9 fired a Hellfire missile that appeared to strike it. The video's source was not officially authenticated at the hearing.
Photo: House Creative Services, Public domain
Government3 Sep 2024
Asked on the Lex Fridman Podcast whether he would help push the Pentagon to release more UFO footage, presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would and would love to, then turned to the pressure he faced over the JFK files.
Photo: lexfridman, CC0
Military9 May 2024
Japan's Defense Ministry concluded that footage of the warship Izumo at Yokosuka, posted on Chinese social media in March 2024, was most likely shot by a drone that went undetected. Minister Minoru Kihara pledged faster counter-drone purchases.
Photo: Kurushima Kaikyo Ohashi (Wikimedia Commons user), CC0
Government1 Dec 2023
AARO added its first case resolution reports to aaro.mil, covering cases labeled Atmospheric Wake, Southeast Asia Triangles and Western United States, with imagery. Later reports found no anomalous behavior in other cases, including the GoFast video and a 2013 Puerto Rico infrared video.
Photo: U. S. Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Public domain
Whistleblowers17 Nov 2023
The Sol Foundation, a UAP research and policy group led by Stanford's Garry Nolan, held an invitation-only two-day symposium at Stanford. Speakers included former NOAA official Tim Gallaudet and Army Col. Karl Nell, and David Grusch appeared remotely. Lecture videos were later posted.
Photo: King of Hearts, CC BY-SA 3.0
SightingsNov 2023
Harvard's Galileo Project began continuous recording with an eight-camera infrared array at its first observatory in Massachusetts. Over five months it tracked about 500,000 objects; 144 trajectories stayed ambiguous, which the team said were likely mundane.
Photo: Abraham Loeb and Frank H. Laukien (Galileo Project), CC BY 4.0
Media22 Sep 2023
Hulu released Brian Duffield's nearly wordless thriller No One Will Save You, starring Kaitlyn Dever as a young woman defending her home from alien invaders. Reviews were mixed, with praise for Dever and the creature design.
Photo: DannyB Photos, CC BY 2.0
Government31 Aug 2023
The Defense Department launched aaro.mil, a public site for its UAP office meant to carry declassified photos and videos of resolved cases, reports and FAQs. A secure reporting form for government personnel was promised for later.
Photo: U. S. Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Public domain
SightingsMay 2023
Sky360, a volunteer open-source project, built low-cost stations pairing an all-sky camera with a tracking camera and software to flag unusual aerial motion. By May 2023 it reported about 20 stations worldwide.
Government19 Apr 2023
AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick testified in open session to the Senate Armed Services emerging threats subcommittee and showed two declassified MQ-9 videos, including a spherical object over the Middle East that he said could not be identified from the available data.
Photo: Defense.gov, Public domain
Sightings15 Apr 2023
A swirling light photographed amid the northern lights over Alaska was explained by University of Alaska Fairbanks physicist Don Hampton as fuel vented by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage about three hours after a California launch, freezing into ice that caught sunlight.
Photo: United States Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang, Public domain
Sightings13 Feb 2023
Astronomer Krisztian Sarneczky in Hungary spotted a small asteroid hours before it hit, only the seventh found before impact. It entered the atmosphere at 02:59 UTC over the English Channel as forecast, fireball cameras recorded it, and meteorites were later recovered in Normandy.
Photo: Wokege, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings18 Jan 2023
A livestream camera at the Subaru Telescope recorded a glowing spiral over Maunakea before dawn. Japan's national observatory linked it to the deployment of a satellite SpaceX had launched that day, sunlit high above; a similar spiral was seen in April 2022.
Photo: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Matsopoulos, CC BY 4.0
Military2023
At the July 2023 House Oversight UAP hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz said a member of an Eglin AFB flight crew showed him a photo of an orb a pilot saw near four craft in a diamond formation over the Gulf of Mexico. He asked that the image and radar data be given to the committee.
Photo: Ike Hayman, U.S. House Office of Photography/House Creative Services, Public domain
