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The US government has opened another drawer of its UFO archive. On Friday, October 23, the Pentagon posted the seventh batch of declassified UAP files to its disclosure portal, war.gov/UFO — part of the rolling release programme ordered by President Donald Trump earlier this year. The new files contain two stories that immediately jumped out: two FBI agents reporting a silent black triangle over a canyon near a secret military site, and a signed account of the 1947 Roswell incident claiming its author saw a spacecraft and the bodies of its crew. Within days, the Pentagon's former UFO chief publicly pushed back. Here is what the new UFO files actually contain — and what they do not prove.
The black triangle over the canyon
The most discussed case in the release is recent. In June 2026, two FBI special agents on a surveillance assignment near a sensitive national security site in the western United States watched a dark, non-reflective triangular object through a thermal camera, as USA Today's account of the files describes. The agents estimated the object's wingspan at roughly nine to 15 feet, its depth at six to nine feet and its thickness at one to two feet, with no visible engines, exhaust or propulsion. An accompanying Pentagon memorandum describes the object climbing some 200 to 300 feet above a mountain ridgeline, hovering for about 20 seconds, then accelerating almost instantly and vanishing into a canyon. The release includes nine images — among them an artist's rendering of what the witnesses believe they saw — but the exact location is redacted, and the two documents do not agree on every detail, including the timing of the sighting. USA Today also notes that two senior military officials have separately claimed to have seen mysterious black triangles over sensitive sites earlier in 2026.
The Roswell account
The second headline item reaches back to the most famous case of all. The batch includes a statement signed in 2002 by an unnamed officer — believed to be Walter Haut, who was the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947 — saying that he saw a spacecraft and the bodies of its alleged crew after the Roswell incident, according to Times Now's report on the release. The account also repeats a long-standing claim attributed to Major Jesse Marcel that genuine debris flown to Carswell Army Air Field in Texas was swapped for weather-balloon and radar-kite material. Two cautions belong with this item: the claims have never been independently verified, and the US government maintains that no physical evidence proving extraterrestrial life has ever been recovered. The documents also contain military discussions of debris found near Roswell and sighting reports from the 1950s and 1960s in the US, Canada, Italy, Sweden and Germany.
What the PURSUE releases are
The October 23 batch is the seventh under PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — which began on May 8, 2026 with 162 files drawn from the FBI, NASA, the State Department and the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), spanning reports from 1947 to today. The portal has reportedly been visited more than a billion times, and further batches are expected on a rolling basis. The files are raw records — witness statements, memos and sensor clips — published without an official verdict on what any of them show. AARO, the office charged with investigating such reports, has repeatedly emphasised that it has never found evidence that extraterrestrials are behind them. The wider release programme has also surfaced Apollo-era material, including astronaut transcripts describing flashes and drifting objects on Moon missions — observations officials say were recorded at the time without conclusions attached.
The pushback: "authority bias"
On November 1, the man who used to run that office said the black-triangle story proves far less than its headlines suggest. Sean Kirkpatrick, AARO's founding director, told Fox News Digital that the FBI account rests on witness testimony with no hard sensor data behind it, calling the weight placed on the witnesses' credentials a "classic case of authority bias", as reported by MEAWW. He stressed that "unresolved" in a government UAP file usually means there is not enough data to analyse — not that investigators met something beyond explanation — and said none of the data his office reviewed matched an alien hypothesis. Kirkpatrick also made a sharper claim: that Pentagon leadership had directed AARO to strip resolution language from some cases before they were released publicly as "unresolved". The Pentagon has not publicly confirmed that allegation, and the Department of War says it is deliberately offering no assessment of the released records, leaving the public to draw its own conclusions.
What the new files do — and do not — show
Read carefully, Release 7 changes the record less than the reaction to it suggests. It confirms that trained federal agents filed a detailed, still-unexplained report of an object over a sensitive site in 2026, and that the Roswell story now sits in the official archive in a named officer's own words. It does not contain recovered craft, verified non-human remains, or sensor data that settles what the triangle was — and the government's own former chief investigator argues the way the files are being released lets speculation fill the gaps the data leaves. For readers following the science side of the sky, our coverage of whether comets delivered life's building blocks to Earth and of Hubble's challenge to supernova theory shows the same pattern from the other direction: extraordinary claims live or die on the quality of the underlying measurements. The next PURSUE batches will add more paper. Whether they add evidence is the question that matters.