WASHINGTON — The Pentagon made good on President Donald Trump’s promise to start releasing hundreds more declassified files linked to decades of UFO sightings, saying Americans can study the “new, never-before-seen” material and decide for themselves if aliens are real.

Among the 162 photos, videos and documents released Friday is an account from U.S. astronauts describing unidentified “particles” seen outside their spacecraft in the 1960s. More recent footage taken by military pilots shows firefly-like orbs zig-zagging across the screen.

Another image features a government rendering of eyewitness accounts from 2023 that described an “ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky.” The object then disappeared “instantaneously,” according to the description.

“While past administrations sought to discredit or dissuade the American people, President Trump is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public, who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files,” the Pentagon said.

The Trump administration cast the move as a new push toward greater openness, but Friday’s release is a continuation of a trend dating back several years to treat unexplained encounters more seriously and entertain the possibility of alien life rather than dismissing it as the stuff of science fiction.

That prompted the Pentagon under former President Joe Biden to establish a new bureau, the All‑domain Anomaly Resolution Office, to study such sightings. Its website, www.aaro.mil, has periodically released documents and images similar to that distributed Friday, most recently in January.

Recent interest in UFOs surged in 2020 after the government released mysterious videos taken by naval aviators that showed objects flying at high speed and in ways that seemed to defy physics. Analysts later said the sightings were probably a combination of optical illusions, drones, litter and advanced technology being tested by other nations.

The images distributed Friday offer no fresh conclusions on any of the encounters or the possible existence of alien life. The Pentagon described the material as “unresolved cases” and said more files will be released every few weeks. It also welcomed analysis and expertise from regular Americans.

In a social media post, Trump said that after studying the files, “the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”

Trump’s decision leading up to Friday’s release also has roots in a political spat with former President Barack Obama, who touched off fresh accusations of a cover-up — and claims that he’d divulged classified information — after he told a podcast that aliens are real “but I haven’t seen them.”

The former president later clarified that he saw “no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”

The release Friday didn’t mention a Pentagon report released under Biden in 2024 that combed through many purported encounters and concluded there was no evidence to support any of them were actual sightings of extraterrestrials.

The 2024 report offered what the Pentagon saw at the time as the definitive attempt to debunk everything from the 1947 Roswell crash — actually a downed military balloon — to early reports of flying saucers, which were probably the V-173 “flying pancake,” a program discontinued in 1948.

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