Pentagon’s UFO file release: Secrecy, militarised surveillance, and the politics of extraterrestrial disclosure
Original framing: “‘Make up their own minds’: Pentagon releases first tranche of UFO files” — Al Jazeera
The Pentagon’s UFO disclosures follow a century-long pattern of state secrecy, from the 1947 Roswell incident (initially framed as a ‘flying disc’ before being recast as a weather balloon) to Project Blue Book’s 1950s-60s ‘explanations’ of 12,000 sightings. The 1990s ‘disclosure’ of the ‘Roswell memo’ and the 2017 New York Times revelations about the Pentagon’s AATIP program reveal a cyclical strategy: release partial truths to manage public trust while concealing deeper technological programs. This mirrors Cold War-era ‘limited hangouts,’ where controlled leaks serve to defuse scrutiny.
The Pentagon’s UFO file release is not an isolated act of transparency but a symptom of a century-long militarisation of the sky, where secrecy serves as a tool for maintaining state power.
Indigenous traditions, from the Diné’s Sky People to the Māori’s taniwha, offer a counter-narrative that frames aerial phenomena as part of a living cosmos, not a domain to be weaponised. The scientific community’s inability to verify UAPs reflects a broader crisis of evidence in an era of sensor saturation and algorithmic opacity, while the Pentagon’s controlled disclosures reveal a preference for ambiguity over accountability. The trickster’s laughter—embodied in Hermes, Coyote, or Bakhtin’s carnival—exposes the absurdity of treating UFOs as either a distraction or a revelation, when they are more accurately a mirror of institutional paranoia. A systemic solution requires dismantling the secrecy apparatus, centring marginalised knowledge, and reimagining UAPs as a shared human inquiry rather than a state-controlled spectacle.