{"id":1537,"date":"2026-05-13T11:21:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T11:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/05\/13\/pentagon-do-better-your-ufo-videos-look-terrible\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T11:21:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T11:21:00","slug":"pentagon-do-better-your-ufo-videos-look-terrible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/05\/13\/pentagon-do-better-your-ufo-videos-look-terrible\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon, Do Better. Your UFO Videos Look Terrible"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\tOn Friday, we covered the Pentagon\u2019s UFO file drop<\/a> because a filmmaker first showed the world a spaceship in 1902 (Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019 A Trip to the Moon<\/em>) and, ever since, Hollywood has created thousands of movies and TV shows depicting an endless array of UFOs<\/a> and aliens. The entertainment industry helped invent this genre; we made it huge, we f\u2013king own it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tNow, suddenly, the U.S. government wants in. The Pentagon has gone from denying UFOs are a thing to dumping documents, photos and video concerning \u201canomalous\u201d phenomena. The Department of Defense has promised more files to come on a \u201crolling\u201d basis. This follows Donald Trump teasing \u201cvery interesting\u201d UFO revelations, and members of Congress suggesting proof of alien life is right around the corner if only they can convince nefarious deep state bureaucrats to let them release it.\u00a0 \t<\/p>\n

\tBut if the Pentagon expects to play on Hollywood\u2019s turf, it needs to raise its game. Last week\u2019s UFO series premiere was a major disappointment; a vague, grainy, redacted mess. There wasn\u2019t a coherent plot, there weren\u2019t any characters to root for and the effects were dreadful. This release would get an even lower Rotten Tomatoes score than Prime Video\u2019s notorious, pandemic-shot<\/a> War of the Worlds<\/em> remake, where Ice Cube spent 90 minutes reacting to an alien invasion while on Zoom calls. <\/p>\n

\tAt best, those 162 files provide enough material for a season of Ancient Aliens<\/em>. For the less gullible among us, we\u2019re not impressed by watching a single pixel<\/a>, looking like an escapee from an Atari 2600, float across the screen (and this was described as one of the best clips).\u00a0 \t<\/p>\n

\tSuch videos were often recorded by U.S. Navy fighter jets using an AN\/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pod. This is impressively described as \u201ca multi-sensor electro-optical device\u201d that includes a \u201chigh-powered (thermal\/infrared) camera, a low-light television camera and a laser rangefinder.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tBut another way to describe this device \u2014 which surely cost taxpayers a fortune \u2014 is a camera that utterly sucks at being a camera. Every video looks like a 1940s TV broadcast that somebody recorded with a Super 8 camera and then left in their attic for 70 years. We\u2019ve grown accustomed to new Jurassic Park<\/em> and Star Wars<\/em> movies somehow magically looking worse than they were decades ago, but even NASA footage from the first moon walk in 1969 is somehow clearer than the government UFO videos today. So let\u2019s get Christopher Nolan to mount some Imax cameras on those F\/A 18 Super Hornets and then maybe we\u2019ll get out of bed to look at these zig-zagging blobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tIf the government really is hiding quality video of visitors from another world, let me reassure on this point. There\u2019s something that nobody seems to get about so-called disclosure: Our entire concept of what might happen next if the government were to confirm alien life is based on an era of government trust that no longer exists. If Trump announces aliens are real, who is going to believe him? Not Democrats. Not half of Republicans, at this point. Everything Trump has said about tariffs is wrong \u2014 nobody is believing him about aliens.\u00a0The Pentagon could put out a 4K video of a massive Close Encounters<\/em>-style mothership hovering over a Chick-fil-A and Americans would go, \u201cPfft, fake news, AI slop, distraction.\u201d \t<\/p>\n

\tOne wonders if all this age of disclosure hype might end up actually hurting Steven Spielberg\u2019s Disclosure Day<\/a><\/em> more than helping. The real-life disclosure buzz out there, combined with Universal\u2019s \u201cwe\u2019re hiding a bunch of this movie from trailers\u201d campaign, is getting to the point where UFO buffs are starting to think the movie is going to end with Spielberg and Barack Obama walking into Area 51 and revealing a cryogenically frozen E.T. or something. <\/p>\n

\tIn the meantime, documentarian Jeremy Corbell has a new documentary out this week, Sleeping Dog<\/em>, touting new previously unreleased UFO videos (Blurry orbs? You bet!). And front-line disclosure advocate Rep. Tim Burchett (whose comforting aw-shucks Tennessee drawl could be used for a sleep aid app) promises last week\u2019s file drop is \u201cjust a drop in the bucket\u201d and that something<\/em> is coming soon<\/em> that will be a true \u201choly crap\u201d moment.<\/p>\n

\tMaybe, just maybe \u2026 it will be an orb in color.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday, we covered the Pentagon\u2019s UFO file drop because a filmmaker first showed the world a spaceship in 1902 (Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019 A Trip to the Moon) and, ever since, Hollywood has created thousands of movies and TV shows depicting an endless array of UFOs and aliens. The entertainment industry helped invent this genre; we made it huge, we f\u2013king own it.\u00a0 Now, suddenly, the U.S. government wants in. The Pentagon has gone from denying UFOs are a thing to dumping documents, photos and video concerning \u201canomalous\u201d phenomena. The Department of Defense has promised more files to come on a \u201crolling\u201d basis. This follows Donald Trump teasing \u201cvery interesting\u201d UFO […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[991,2,27,60,796],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-disclosure-day","category-hollywood","category-movie-news","category-movies","category-ufos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}