Astronauts on the Apollo 17 lunar mission in 1972 saw three bright spots in the sky, forming an elongated triangle. They photographed it from the lunar surface, and the image had been classified by the US Department of Defense until now.
"Now we have some very bright particles or fragments or something that are gliding past while we are maneuvering," one of the astronauts told the control center on Earth, according to Fox News, which appears to have seen the material in advance.
“Uneven, angled”
"There's a whole bunch of big ones in my window down there. Just bright ones. It looks like the Fourth of July in Ron's window," says another of the astronauts.
The first astronaut replies:
Yes. Now you can see the shape of some of them. They're very jagged, angled fragments that are spinning.
Among the documents are also images that are reminiscent of previously published footage, where pilots have seen hard-to-define objects moving in the air and captured them on film.
In a press release, the Pentagon and several representatives of President Donald Trump's administration announced that the publication of these documents constitutes the most transparent handling of the issue of so-called UFOs and other anomalous phenomena.
Draw your own conclusions
The release says previous governments tried to downplay concerns among American citizens, but that citizens "can ultimately form their own opinion about the information in these files."
Work to declassify the material has been underway for some time, after the US Congress ordered the Department of Defense to be more transparent on this matter.
President Donald Trump has previously promised much greater transparency in matters shrouded in secrecy and hence conspiracy theories. Previous releases of documents regarding the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. did not provide much that was not already known.
