Are we alone in the universe? It is one of the oldest questions humanity has ever asked.
We have pointed radio telescopes at distant stars, sent golden records into deep space, and landed rovers on Mars and stared hopefully at the soil. Nothing. No little green men. No signal. No reply.
And yet. There are those who believe that alien life not only exists but has already been to Earth. That craft of non-human origin have been buzzing around our restricted military airspace for decades. That governments around the world know this and have been sitting on the evidence. It is a belief that has sustained an entire genre of film and television. I grew up watching The X Files. I wanted to believe.
So when the US government announced earlier in February 2026 that it was releasing its UFO files – the actual classified files, the ones they have been sitting on since the 1940s – I felt something. Not quite excitement. More like anxiety.
Were we about to find out that little green men with large eyes and no pants (they are more advanced than us, they don’t need pants) had been running a secret base on the dark side of the moon? Were the UFO files about to change everything?
On May 8, 2026, the release happened: 162 declassified files, photos, videos, military reports, Nasa (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) transcripts, witness accounts. Everything. Hosted magnificently at a website called war.gov/ufo, written in a typewriter font that looked like someone had asked an intern to make it feel as X Files as legally possible. The truth was in here!
But the truth was, well, underwhelming. And nothing changed.
Among UFO researchers the reaction was a resounding meh. The people at the Mutual UFO Network – these are the guys who have dedicated their professional lives to this moment – called it “extremely disappointing”. An astrophysicist who reviewed the materials described the contents as “optical artefacts, fuzzy blobs, and light smears. Some obviously balloons”.
A UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena, a broader category than unidentified flying objects) researcher with access to the documents noted that at least 100 of the 162 files contained redactions, and that much of the material had been circulating in paranormal books and online forums for years.
The Pentagon’s official position is that these are “unresolved cases for which no definitive determination could be made based on available evidence”.
But buried in the underwhelming blobs and the obvious balloons are a few interesting things.
In a 1969 debriefing after the Apollo 11 moon mission, astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported seeing little flashes inside the spacecraft’s cabin while trying to fall asleep, and described what appeared to be a fairly bright light source the crew ascribed to a possible laser.
During the Apollo 12 mission later the same year, astronaut Alan Bean reported flashes of light moving far off into space. In 1972, the Apollo 17 crew described very bright particles tumbling and rotating in the distance – astronaut Harrison Schmitt said it looked like American independence day fireworks.
A separate report describes an object making multiple 90° turns at speed over Kazakhstan. A drone pilot interviewed by the FBI in 2023 described a linear object with a light so bright you could see bands within it, visible for five to 10 seconds before it vanished completely.
None of this is proof of aliens. But it is the US government formally acknowledging that trained military personnel and astronauts are seeing things in the sky that cannot be explained. That is not nothing. It is just not the press conference with the little green man at the podium that some of us were quietly dreading/hoping for.
Which brings me to the obvious question. Was this first release a warm-up? A gently lobbed softball before the main event? There is a second file dump coming in June 2026. Maybe the US government is playing a long game, giving us the balloons and the blurry dots first, letting us adjust to the idea of official uncertainty, before they drop the part where it turns out the G7 leaders are all reptilians from the planet Reptilia and have been for decades.
Probably not. But the thing about a mystery this old is that it refuses to die quietly. The UFO files were underwhelming but you can bet your pants (you may not need them if aliens exist, they are pantsless and therefore have a more elegant solution for pants) I’ll be reading the next release of the UFO files wide-eyed and ready to believe. Yet again.
