At a White House event celebrating NASA astronauts on 3 May 2026, President Trump said the Pentagon is preparing to release UFO files uncovered by his administration. “We’re going to be releasing a lot of things that we haven’t,” he told those present, adding that “some of it’s going to be very interesting to people.”
The same day, the Department of War’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office issued a statement reported by Fortune confirming it is working with the White House to release “never-before-seen UAP information” and welcomed “the president’s initiative to supercharge these efforts and make more UAP information available to the public as soon as possible.”
Five days later, that pledge would materialise as the PURSUE programme’s first 162-file tranche.
The pattern of escalation
The 3 May remarks follow a consistent pattern from the Trump administration. On 11 February 2026, the President directed relevant departments to begin identifying and releasing government files on alien life, UAP, and UFOs. On 18 March, the White House registered the aliens.gov domain. On 20 April, Trump told a Phoenix rally that releases would begin “very, very soon.” Each statement ratcheted the rhetoric without specifying a date, a scope, or a platform. The 3 May event followed the same formula, with the AARO statement adding institutional weight.
The sceptical position
Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist and former career intelligence officer who served as AARO’s first director until 2023, told the Washington Post that he has seen the government’s UAP records and does not expect the announced release to contain the kind of disclosures public anticipation has built around. “Readers should not get their hopes up that there’s going to be some document with photos, interviewing the aliens when they came down,” he said.
Greg Eghigian, a Pennsylvania State University professor and author of a history of UFO sightings, told the same publication that for people who follow the topic closely, “promises of big revelations have never lived up to the hype.”
Congressional pressure
Per The Hill, Rep. Tim Burchett continued to press the Pentagon on the disclosure of military UAP videos following Trump’s remarks. The 46 Pentagon UAP videos at the centre of Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s House Oversight Task Force remained unreleased at the time, with the 14 April production deadline having passed without compliance.
What was not said
No release schedule, document inventory, or scope for the announced UFO files was published on whitehouse.gov, war.gov, or aaro.mil on 3 May. AARO’s full statement was not located on aaro.mil; the text is reproduced in the Fortune article from the office’s communication with the publication.
