The UFO Files Went Public And Distrust Hit A New High | #WeirdDarkNEWS
Five batches of declassified UAP records have gone up on a Department of War website since May, and two national surveys fielded in the same July stretch came back eighteen points apart on whether Americans think officials are still holding something back.
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Speaker 1: Five batches of declassified UAP records have gone up on
a Department of War website since May, and two national
surveys fielded in the same July stretch came back 18
points apart on whether Americans think officials are still holding
something back. I'm Darren Marlar. and this is Weird Dark News.
The latest stories of true crime, the paranormal, and all
things strange and macabre. You can find more of these
stories at WeirdDarkness.com slash news. This episode is voiced by RoboDarin,
because RealDarin has a massive sinus infection and is probably
in bed, zoinked out from the cough syrup. I may
not be as smooth-talking as the RealDarin, but I'm here
for you, and he's not, so what does that say?
A government webpage that went live in May has been
publishing declassified UFO records on a rolling schedule ever since.
Two polling firms spent the first weeks of July asking
Americans about UFOs, and the answers they got do not
line up. On May 8th, 2026, the Department of War
posted its first tranche of declassified records to war.gov slash UFO,
under a program called the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System
for UAP Encounters, shortened to PURSUE. The department describes it
as a government-wide effort, run with support from the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence, to locate and review
UAP-related records the government has never been able to resolve,
then declassify them and put them where the public can
read them. Secretary of War Pete Hegseff said the department
was moving to bring unprecedented transparency to the subject, and
that the classifications those records sat behind had long fueled
justified speculation. The effort traces back to a directive from
President Donald Trump. Four more tranches followed on May 22,
June 12, July 10, and August 7, each posted as
downloadable bundles of documents and video. The department's own announcements
never say how many files are in any given batch.
The landing page lists each release as a pair of downloads,
one of documents and one of video, sized anywhere from
about 70 megabytes to 5.6 gigabytes. Counting has been left
to outside trackers, and the cataloging site UAP Global puts
the July batch at 40 files with 19 of them video,
and the August batch at 41 files. No government source
confirms either total. The records going up are unresolved cases,
files where, in the department's own framing, the government cannot
make a definitive determination about what was observed. The department
has also said that many of the released materials have
not yet been analyzed for resolution of any anomalies. Between
July 1 and July 6, 2026, the survey firm Talker
Research a questionnaire in front of 2,000 members of the
American general public. Rather than asking whether aliens exist, it
went after trust and reaction— what people think officials know,
whether news coverage had moved them, and how they would
respond if extraterrestrial life were confirmed. Sixty percent said governments
already know more about UFOs than they have publicly shared.
Talker Research does not draw that sample at random. The
firm builds from online opt-in panels where people volunteer in
exchange for points redeemable for cash or rewards, and from
programmatic surveys served up during other online activity. Instead of
statistically weighting the results to match the census, it fills
demographic quotas as it goes and analyzes only groups with
at least 80 respondents. It screens out speeders and bots,
along with duplicate entries and nonsense answers to open-ended questions.
No margin of error is published for a poll of
this kind, and the firm's own methodology page acknowledges unmeasured
error and the plain fact that an online survey reaches
only people who are online and willing to take one.
37% of respondents said recent UFO and UAP coverage has
made them believe in aliens more than they used to.
A slim majority, 54%, said their opinion has not shifted
at all, and 10 percent said the coverage pushed them
the other direction, toward believing less. Age split the results
harder than anything else in the survey. Among Gen Z respondents,
54 percent said the coverage nudged them toward belief. That
figure fell to 45 percent among Millennials, 36 percent among
Gen X, and 23 percent among Baby Boomers, a 31-point
spread from the youngest group to the oldest. The survey
does not say why. Gender opened a smaller gap in
the same direction, with 43% of men saying the coverage
moved them toward belief against 33% of women. Respondents also
pointed at entertainment, though the question put to them was
about everybody else. Asked whether movies and television shows about
aliens make Americans more likely to believe intelligent extraterrestrial life exists,
54% agreed. which measures what people think screens are doing
to the public, rather than anything screens have measurably done
to the person answering. Another 27% saw no connection, and
8% said such content makes people less likely to believe.
Asked how they would react if intelligent alien life were
revealed tomorrow, 38% said they would feel curious, and 17%
said they would feel fearful. Men were nearly twice as
likely as women to describe the reaction as excitement, at
20% against 11%. 45% said the country is prepared to
handle definitive proof that alien life exists. The other 55%
said it is not. Gallup's interviewers, working through the research
firm ReconMR, reached a random sample of 1,200 US adults
by telephone between July 1 and July 19, 2026, with
a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.0
percentage points. Those results went public on August 26, 2026.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the U.S. government knows more
about UFOs than it is telling the public, which is
the highest Gallup has recorded. The question has only been
put to the country three times. 71% agreed in 1996,
68% in 2019, and 78% now. 18 points separate Gallup's
78% from Talker Research's 60% on what sounds like the
same question. The wording is not identical. Gallup asked about
the U.S. government specifically, while the Talker questionnaire asked about
governments generally. And the methods sit further apart still. One
is a random telephone sample with a published error margin.
The other is an opt-in online panel with quotas and none.
The two also covered different stretches of July, with Gallup's
window running nearly two weeks longer. Neither poll can show
which of those differences accounts for the gap. 37 percent
told Gallup that at least some UFO sightings have been
alien spacecraft, while 49% attributed all of them to human
activity or natural phenomena, and 13% had no opinion. That
37% sits four points below the 41% Gallup recorded in 2021,
though it stays above the 33% measured in 2019, which
cuts against the drift the Talker survey describes. Both findings
can hold at once, because the two firms were not
measuring the same thing. Talker Research asked people whether coverage
had changed their minds, which produces a self-report about movement.
Gallup asked what they believe now and got a snapshot.
Someone can tell one pollster the news made them more
open to the idea and still tell the other that
human activity or nature explains all of them. Arrow The
All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which sits under the Department of War,
covered June 2, 2024 through May 30, 2025 in its
fiscal 2025 report, logging 319 new reports, 284 from inside
the window and 35 carried over from earlier years. It
resolved 114 of the new cases and closed 256 older ones.
for 370 resolutions in total. Another 191 incoming cases went
into an active archive because the evidence was too thin
to work with, and nine were referred for further technical analysis.
As of the May 30th cutoff, AARO's holdings stood at 1,870 reports.
Every case Arrow closed was attributed to a prosaic object.
balloons and satellites, birds and aircraft, drones, and none of
them by the office's own assessment, indicated advanced foreign adversarial
capabilities or breakthrough technology in any domain. The Black Vault,
which archives government UAP documents, noted that the report arrived
months past its statutory deadline. One case from the fiscal
2025 file has not closed. The Navy reported roughly 100
airborne objects and two likely uncrewed surface systems operating off
the coast of Virginia, the only maritime domain case Arrow
received during the reporting period. The office told Defense Scoop
in July that it is actively investigating the event alongside
the reporting unit, that a shortage of timely and actionable
sensor data continues to limit what it can resolve, and
that if the report is validated, the phenomena may represent
a currently unmitigated threat vector. On July 31, 2026, the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued preliminary guidance
implementing a waiver of the nondisclosure agreements covering UAP information.
Congressman Eric Burleson of Missouri's 7th District made the memorandum
public the following day. The authority behind it comes from
the Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, codified at Title
50 of the U.S. Code, Section 3373B, Subsection B, Paragraph 1,
which created a secure channel for people inside the government
to report what they know about UAP. According to a
summary published by the law firm DLA Piper, the guidance
directs intelligence community elements to to name Pursue Task Force
designees within 30 days, to notify their workforces that NDAs
barring disclosure to the President or to Pursue Representatives are
no longer enforceable, and to route personnel holding UAP information
to AERO or an authorized Pursue Representative. The waiver opens
a government channel and nothing wider. It does not authorize
anyone to release classified information to the public. On June 17th, 2026,
a UAP Science Advisory Council was announced, chaired by Harvard
theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, and reporting to a UAP governance
board established by the administration. Its members work in fields
ranging from oceanography and molecular biology to psychology and instrumentation,
and include retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Galladet. Everything shared
with the council is unclassified. Department of War says the
files will keep coming on a rolling basis. The August
7th batch is the most recent, and no date has
been announced for a sixth. Each intelligence community element has
30 days from receiving that guidance to name its Pursue designees,
and the Department has not published when each of them
received it. And the roughly 100 objects the Navy reported
off the Virginia coast remain as of Arrow's last public
word on them, an open case. You can read this
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