Pentagon Releases Fourth Batch of UFO Files, Including 1970s Manhattan Project Scientist Transcript

Fourth Release, Same Redaction Problem

Since President Donald Trump's executive order pushed federal agencies to start declassifying unidentified anomalous phenomena records, the Pentagon has now put out four separate batches of files. The latest, released July 10, 2026, adds 40 new records to the pile: 19 videos, 14 documents, four audio clips, and three images, according to The Epoch Times.

The files come from a mix of agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, NASA, and the Department of Energy. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said this batch is not the final one, meaning the disclosure process ordered by Trump is still ongoing.

The Rectangle Nobody Could Identify

One report describes an incident from 2019 in the eastern United States, where five U.S. military-affiliated personnel witnessed an object neither they nor anyone else on the mission could explain.

"I noticed an object with flight characteristics unlike anything I had seen in my 28 years of performing [REDACTED] for the [Army] and Navy," one observer wrote, according to the released report cited by The Epoch Times. "A small object was below us and appeared to be traveling in a straight line opposite our direction at high speed."

The witness tracked the object for roughly 10 to 15 seconds before starting to record, then lost it entirely once it accelerated out of the camera's field of view even at lower zoom. The observer described it as rectangular. Others on the mission "with equal or more experience" also could not identify it.

The accompanying 20-second video shows the object moving quickly across the frame before disappearing. The document is what's known as a "range fouler debrief," a standardized Navy reporting form used when an unauthorized object intrudes on controlled airspace during military operations, per the Pentagon's own description.

A Possible Balloon Over the Atlantic

A second range fouler debrief in the same release covers a 2020 sighting over the Atlantic. That report is heavily redacted, but the observer suggested the object could have been an unidentified balloon.

Balloons, drones, and conventional aircraft account for the overwhelming majority of UAP reports once analyzed, according to prior Pentagon assessments. The Atlantic sighting is a reminder that not every unexplained blip in a report is exotic. Some are just unresolved because the observing platform couldn't get close enough to confirm.

Manhattan Project Connection

The batch also includes a transcript from a historical conference attended by scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the atomic bomb. The Epoch Times did not detail the transcript's specific content beyond noting its inclusion, but its presence signals the Pentagon is reaching well back into Cold War-era archives as part of this disclosure effort, not just recent incidents.

The Fair Fight Over What This Proves

Skeptics of the disclosure push have a reasonable point: heavily redacted debriefs with blacked-out job titles, unidentified units, and missing context don't let outside researchers or journalists independently verify much of anything. A rectangular object that outruns a camera's zoom is a genuine anomaly on paper, but without raw sensor data, radar tracks, or corroborating instruments, it remains an eyewitness account, not proof of an exotic technology.

On the other side, transparency advocates and members of Congress who pushed for this executive order argue that partial disclosure with redactions is still better than the decades of near-total silence that preceded it. No investigation, prosecution, or formal government finding of extraterrestrial or foreign-adversary origin has been announced regarding any of these specific cases. The files are raw incident reports, not conclusions.

Parnell's confirmation that further batches are coming means this is a running story, not a one-time document dump. The open question is whether future releases will include the underlying sensor data and radar logs that would let independent analysts actually test these accounts, rather than just read redacted first-person narratives.