Since President Donald Trump promised much greater transparency on matters shrouded in secrecy and conspiracy theories, the Pentagon has released around 300 documents about unidentified objects that could possibly be from outer space.
On Friday, 72 new documents were released; according to the AP news agency, several of them are intriguing.
But most can also be explained as light phenomena, and nowhere in the new release is there evidence of extraterrestrial life or of a cover-up by authorities.
Officially unsolved
The aforementioned potato-like object was seen one February morning in Colorado Springs in 2022. Five U.S. soldiers observed something hovering over a mountain: an object with clear edges, shaped and colored like a potato, with what appeared to be fish scales.
According to the soldiers, the object remained there for two minutes before it simply disappeared. The soldiers did not have phones with them - and therefore could neither film nor take still photos of the phenomenon.
According to the documents, FBI investigators suspect it was caused by heat radiation from sunlight. The case remains officially unsolved.
Brilliant and beautiful
Several other observations follow similar patterns, with suspected light phenomena that can neither be proven nor completely dismissed, the AP writes.
The oldest cases made public so far date to the 1940s; the most recent was reported in July last year in a town in the northeastern United States. The exact location is classified, but the documents say a person saw an intense light hovering near trees on his property - a “brilliant and beautiful” red light the person had never seen before.
But whether it was another natural phenomenon or something extraterrestrial is not yet clear. The White House, however, has highlighted the possibility of the latter and has published a short video clip of the event on various social media platforms.
