Trump’s UFO dump is pure distraction tactics, but the Apollo 17 sightings are still giving us the creeps

Per Donald Trump’s orders, the Department of War has just released a batch of classified files relating to UFOs, and despite our accumulated cynicism over what this administration considers transparency, some of what’s in there genuinely manages to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

When a president whose approval rating is in the basement, and whose war with Iran is grinding into its third month with no positive outcome, suddenly decides this is the perfect moment to rediscover his enthusiasm for declassifying the government’s UFO files, the only mystery is who he thinks he’s fooling.

On Friday, the Pentagon — sorry, the rebranded “Department of War” — dropped the first 162 declassified files involving unidentified flying objects. Even his Truth Social caption read: “Have fun and enjoy!” So you know this is a man who treats even the gravitas of searching for extraterrestrial life as media content opportunity.

There’s no question why Trump did it, and yet, tucked inside the document dump is an Apollo 17 photograph from December 1972 showing three dots arranged in a triangle above the lunar horizon. The Pentagon admits it has “no consensus about the nature of the anomaly,” though preliminary analysis suggests the feature could be a “physical object.”

The last men to walk on the moon also reported “very bright particles” tumbling and rotating in the distance, with astronaut Harrison Schmitt comparing the scene to “the Fourth of July.” Apollo 12’s Alan Bean had already described “flashes of light” that looked like “some of those things are escaping the Moon.”

Then there’s Buzz Aldrin’s 1969 debriefing, which somehow nobody bothered to fully unseal until now. The second man on the moon described an object with “sizable dimension” near the lunar approach, prompting the crew to break out the monocular. 

Officially, they speculated it was the Saturn V’s spent S-IVB stage. Aldrin also reported “little flashes inside the cabin” while trying to sleep, plus “a fairly bright light source which we tentatively ascribed to a possible laser.” Uh, a laser. In 1969. On a spacecraft. Tentatively.

What separates this new evidence from the rest of the UFO conspiracy maelstrom is that it happened in the vacuum of space. Earth’s atmosphere is a special-effects department in its own right, with refraction through shifting temperature layers producing mirages, ice crystals throwing halos, lenticular clouds forming shapes that look engineered, and all sorts of other natural or artificial phenomena that can explain the encounters. The vacuum offers none of those alibis.

So yes, while Trump is doing another episode of the “art of the pivot” just to distract us from ruinous results of tariffs, the improvised domestic policy dividing the country, the needless war with Iran raising prices everywhere, and last but not least, the little headache called the Epstein Files, the administration was smart enough to include at least some of its legitimately compelling holdings. 

And lo and behold, they’re not redacted this time.