WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Friday dropped its sixth batch of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP / UFO) files under the Trump-era unsealing push — including AAWSAP papers that talk warp drives, wormholes, and alleged injuries tied to unknown aerospace systems.

CBS News reported the package at about 11:21 a.m. ET: 71 files total (67 from the Defense Department, four from Colorado local law enforcement), spanning 1952–2025 — 55 PDFs, 15 videos, one audio file. Most (64 of 71) carry redactions.

AAWSAP, DIRDs, and the sci-fi stack

The headline material comes from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), stood up in 2008 to study far-term aerospace threats through about 2050 and shuttered in 2012. Friday’s dump includes 37 “Defense Intelligence Reference Documents” (DIRDs) on topics like warp drives, wormholes, antigravity, negative-mass propulsion, and invisibility cloaking.

CBS notes those 37 DIRDs have been public for years via DIA FOIA releases; Friday’s versions restore some previously withheld details such as producing-office names. Pentagon notes accompanying the files say the DIRDs are “best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research” and “should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed.”

One 2010 technical DIRD examines “evidence of unintended injury to human observers by anomalous advanced aerospace systems,” describing three “antennae engineers” who reported heat, redness, hair loss, and — in one case — signs of radiation illness and later “malignant transformations.” The author hypothesized that some advanced systems may already be deployed and poorly understood by the U.S.

Videos, Blue Book history, and PURSUE

Most videos look like prior dumps: grainy military camera tracks of fast, unexplained objects. CBS highlights a 2022 Middle East mission report of objects moving 80–180 mph and another of “six small spherical objects” that seemed agile and frequently changed direction — still unexplained. Four cellphone clips from Colorado law enforcement (October 2023) describe a “silent” phenomenon with red, blue, and green flashing lights.

Historical material includes a 1952 audio/transcript from Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt — later of Project Blue Book — saying roughly 20% of ~800 investigated UFO reports remained unexplained. Anadolu Agency separately quoted Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell saying the release is part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), with more files promised on a rolling basis.

On Monday the Pentagon also announced a legal waiver path for current and former employees bound by nondisclosure agreements to share UAP-related information with the government, CBS reported.

Why it matters

Another Friday document dump will not settle whether anyone has antigravity in a hangar. It does keep pressure on the bureaucracy to publish what it already paid for — and it puts the government’s own caveats next to the wildest paper titles. Transparency without validation is still better than sealed sci-fi.

Dated Friday, Sept. 18, 2026: sixth PURSUE UAP release — 71 files, 37 AAWSAP DIRDs, Colorado LE videos — CBS News; Anadolu Agency on Parnell/PURSUE framing.

Sources