On May 22, 2026, CNN reported that the Pentagon had dropped a second wave of UFO files, noting that many of the cases within them remain unexplained. The headline was straightforward enough. What has followed is considerably less so.
The files were released on the Department of War website — a rebranding of the Pentagon that itself arrived with the 2026 National Defense Strategy, a document signed by the Secretary of War and dated January 23, 2026. That strategy is a real, unclassified government document, and its language is worth sitting with. It declares that "President Trump entered office with the nation on the precipice of disastrous wars for which we were unprepared" and asserts that under his leadership the United States now possesses "the most powerful military that this world has ever seen." It names China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as primary threats. It says nothing about UAP, extraterrestrials, or the UFO files that have since been released under the Department's name.
"President Trump entered office with the nation on the precipice of disastrous wars for which we were unprepared"
And yet those files, and the apparatus interpreting them, are now moving through channels that connect official government releases to a world of unverified claims that sits well outside any government document.
The Interpreter and His Source
The most active voice narrating the second wave of releases is Dr. Michael Salla, who runs Exopolitics Today, a podcast and website that covers UAP from an explicitly exopolitical perspective — meaning he treats the existence of extraterrestrial contact as an operating assumption rather than an open question. Salla is not a government official, not a journalist in any traditional sense, and not affiliated with any academic institution in a capacity relevant to these claims. That framing matters when evaluating what follows.
Salla's primary witness in recent episodes is a person identified as JP — described in a May 25 post on the UFOs-Disclosure blog as a "former military insider" whose full name is given as Jorge Pabon. According to that post, which summarizes an Exopolitics Today episode, JP claims firsthand encounters with TR-3B craft, orb formations, and Nordic extraterrestrials. He says he participated in covert missions from Eglin Air Force Base and wore advanced AGI-powered military suits during those operations. He has described cigar-shaped ships observed over Tampa Bay and discussed concepts including anti-gravity technology and wormhole travel.
Every one of these claims is unverified. None is supported by documentary evidence in the public record. The UFOs-Disclosure blog, which aggregates and amplifies Salla's content, is a tier-four source by any editorial standard — meaning it carries no institutional accountability and no established editorial process for fact-checking. The claims attributed to JP should be read with that clearly in mind.
What is verifiable is the connection the blog draws between JP's claims and an actual government document. A video recorded by an aircrew out of Eglin Air Force Base on February 13, 2023 was included in the Pentagon's second wave of releases. The blog frames this as significant "given JP's claims to have witnessed multiple covert antigravity craft out of Eglin." That is an interpretive leap — the existence of a military video from Eglin AFB does not corroborate JP's specific and extraordinary claims about that base. But the rhetorical move is worth noting: a real document is being used to lend credibility to unverified testimony, without the two things actually touching.
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A second video flagged by the same post is described as "DoW video shows UFOs flying in formation over Persian Gulf," with a specific file apparently titled "UAP USO Formation" — described as among the more impressive in the second batch. No independent outlet has yet published detailed analysis of that specific video, and the specific contents of the second wave remain only partially characterized in available reporting.
What the Official Record Actually Says
The 2026 National Defense Strategy does gesture toward the geopolitical conditions that provide the backdrop for these releases. It states that U.S. access to "key terrain like the Panama Canal and Greenland was increasingly in doubt" when Trump took office, and it names the People's Republic of China as the primary pacing threat, with Russia as a secondary concern. It commits to deterring China "through strength, not confrontation" and to increasing burden-sharing with NATO allies — a pointed rebuke, implicit in the document's language, of what it characterizes as prior free-riding by alliance partners.
None of that is directly connected to UAP. But there is a document that does pull NATO into this territory: the so-called "Cosmic Top Secret" UFO study, reportedly from 1964, which has been discussed publicly by the late Sergeant Major Robert Dean. Dean's testimony — that NATO commissioned a classified study of UAP and concluded the objects were real, structured, and not from any known terrestrial nation — has circulated in UAP research circles for decades. It has never been officially confirmed by NATO or any member government. The UFOs-Disclosure blog references Dean's testimony in the same weekly roundup that covers the second Pentagon wave, placing them in implicit proximity without establishing any evidentiary link.
The Debrief, a publication that covers UAP with more editorial rigor than the tier-four sources in this space, reported on May 21 — one day before the CNN report on the second wave — that a new batch of Pentagon UAP videos and records was expected to be released soon by the Department of War. Micah Hanks, writing for The Debrief, framed the story as a factual anticipation of an official release. That framing is distinct from the Exopolitics Today ecosystem, which layers the same releases with claims about Nordic beings and secret space programs.
The divergence between those two information environments — one trying to characterize what is actually in the files, the other treating the files as confirmation of a much larger pre-existing narrative — is itself the story that hasn't been written yet.
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Spielberg, Space Force, and the Signal in the Noise
One claim in the Salla-adjacent material is striking enough to flag even amid the noise. The UFOs-Disclosure blog reports that Steven Spielberg — in connection with what appears to be a forthcoming film — said: "Isn't it going to be wonderful when people realize after seeing this movie that everything is true, and has been true?" If that quote is accurate and in context, it is a remarkable statement from one of Hollywood's most commercially careful directors. But the source is a tier-four aggregator, no publication or interviewer is named, and the quote cannot be independently verified from anything in the available record. It sits here as an open question, not a fact.
The same roundup claims that President Trump has signaled that the US Space Force is "preparing for future space battles, some of which will involve alien life" — and that Trump is signaling "physical contact with extraterrestrials has happened at the highest level of government." These claims are attributed to Trump's public statements but are characterized through Salla's interpretive lens. What Trump has actually said in any specific statement, and what he meant by it, is not established by any primary source document available here.
What is established is that the Department of War — not the Department of Defense, a distinction that is not trivial — is releasing UAP files under the banner of a national security strategy that foregrounds American strength and hemispheric dominance. Whether that context shapes what gets released, when, and how it is framed is a question that the official record does not answer.
The specific gap that would most change this picture is an independent, document-level analysis of the second wave of Pentagon files — not a summary from an advocacy outlet, but a systematic accounting of what the files contain, what they omit, which cases have been characterized and which have not, and what the chain of custody for each document looks like. The Debrief has done this kind of work before. So has The War Zone. Neither has yet published that analysis for the second wave.
Until that exists, the interpretation of these files will continue to flow primarily through channels that have a strong prior commitment to a particular conclusion. That is not how the public record should be built. And it is precisely the space in which the most consequential distortions tend to take root.