Don’t expect big surprises in the strange government files

“Even some kind of really cool and extraordinary revelation is definitely not going to satisfy the social media world,” says Eghegian. “Is this another trick? Is this another game the government is playing with us? What else are they hiding from us?”

“I don’t see almost any way to resolve this once and for all in terms of the public interest,” he adds.

What’s possibly in the files?

If history is any guide, the new edition will focus on UAP observations and the government programs it tracks and studies. Since the first major UFO craze in 1947, the US government has periodically released documents and reports from internal teams, such as Project Blue Book, which covered the years 1947 to 1969, the 1994 Roswell Report, and the more recent declassification of Pentagon UAP videos, which had previously been leaked. Many of these files contain strange UAP images that defy explanation.

UAP “can be a number of things,” Perea says. “It’s not like they’re all in one bucket. A lot of it has already been removed, over time. Some of it might have been balloons, or planes, or some weather phenomenon that we don’t know about. Then, yes, there’s a small category where it’s still not clear what it is.”

The bewildering mystery surrounding these unexplained sightings excites the imagination, although government releases have repeatedly specified that there is no evidence that these phenomena are extraterrestrial in origin, including recent reports from AARO.

Sometimes, government disclosures about UAP include sensational admissions, such as lies to citizens about the nature of certain sightings. A famous example of this is a CIA report in 1997 that said the Air Force made “misleading and deceptive statements to the general public in order to allay public fears and protect a highly sensitive national security project.”

To this end, the new release may contain information about the government’s approach to internal evaluation of the UAP or records about its general stance on the subject – or, more broadly, government deception campaigns.

It is also possible that the new files contain previously unreleased UAP visuals, or more detailed information about existing UAP sightings, such as radar data. But much of this material will not be eligible for declassification if the Pentagon deems it poses a risk to national security. For example, the government does not disclose sensitive locations of military assets or information about how certain military operations are conducted.

“Categorizing things, oftentimes, is not about the information itself,” says Eghegian. “By disclosing that material, you may be revealing something about the way something was discovered or something was seen. You’re revealing something about the technology, or the processing of information, and often that is the interest in classifying the material.”

“I think in all likelihood, what we will see is what we normally see,” he adds. “There may be some new nuggets in there, but I think a lot of people will come away very dissatisfied.”

What might not be in the files?

In addition to files related to the UAP and UFOs, Trump ordered the release of any files related to alien life. The bad news is that judging by previous releases, there probably won’t be anything new about aliens in these files. The good news is that this is because alien research is already available in countless volumes of monographs and documents, as there is no reason to classify it in the first place.

“There’s a tremendous amount of work done by the government, and it’s all really transparent about studying life in the universe,” Frank says. “There is a lot of documentation that people can find about what the government knows, or thinks it knows, about extraterrestrial life.”