Every month I sit down with a cup of tea and a stack of tabs, and try to work out what actually happened in the sky this month and what merely got shouted about. This month had both. A 74-year-old film reel, a very confident journalist, and a planet so young it has barely learned to walk. Let’s go through it, calmly, like grown-ups. Mostly.
The UFO files keep coming
On 18 September the US Department of War put out its sixth batch of declassified UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) files. According to the running tallies kept by Wikipedia and UAP.Global, it’s somewhere around 71 to 75 records: dozens of PDFs, around fifteen videos and one audio recording, spanning 1952 to 2025. The two trackers don’t quite agree on the count, which feels very on-brand for this whole subject.
My favourite item is a copy of the famous Tremonton film, shot over Utah in July 1952. It shows a cluster of bright shapes drifting across the sky. Back in 1953 a government panel, the Robertson Panel, looked at it and concluded it most likely showed a group of birds. Seventy-odd years on, it’s back in a shiny new release, which is a bit like a gull getting a career retrospective.
The batch also reportedly includes material from local law enforcement in Colorado, a 1952 Project Blue Book recording, and 37 reference papers from an old Pentagon research programme on things like warp drives and antigravity. UAP.Global points out that most of those papers were already public.
The important bit, and I’ll keep saying it: the Pentagon describes these as unresolved cases. Not solved, not confirmed, not aliens. Just “we don’t know yet”. Most of the videos are, in Wikipedia’s words, grainy images recorded by military cameras. Grainy is the house style of the unexplained.
Wait, there was a fifth batch?
There was, back in August, and Newsweek covered it in detail. It included FBI records of 2026 sightings: two special agents’ accounts, one with thermal-camera video of two slow-moving “black-hot” infrared shapes, and a civilian who reported three sightings in five hours, including red lights estimated about 500 feet above a car. Those are witness accounts sitting in government files, not government conclusions. Many dates and places were redacted. The department says more files will be released on a rolling basis, so Earth Desk will keep its kettle on.
A big claim (unverified)
This one landed today, 21 October. Journalist Ross Coulthart said on NewsNation that President Trump is “fully in the loop” on UFO disclosure, and that he knows about what Coulthart calls a “legacy retrieval and reverse engineering program”. He also said disclosure is “more likely than not”.
Cybernews, which reported the interview, was careful to say the claims remain unverified, and pointed out that Coulthart has made similar claims before, in May. No official source has confirmed any such programme, or any such briefing. So file this under alleged, in pencil, with a question mark the size of a mothership.
Derek, our tired Grey from the zine, has a standing policy on secret programmes: if it were real, someone in accounts would have lost the paperwork by now. Kevin denies everything.
Meanwhile, in actual space
The real universe had a cracking month, and none of it needed blurry footage.
A planetary toddler
On 15 October the NASA Exoplanet Archive added six planets, including Elias 2-24 b, a world under a million years old. That may make it the youngest known exoplanet. For scale, a million years is nothing to a planet. It’s still in the cosmic equivalent of nappies.
One thousand TESS planets
A week earlier, on 8 October, the archive celebrated a milestone: more than 1,000 planets found using data from NASA’s TESS space telescope. The archive’s confirmed total stood at 6,445 planets that week, with nearly 5,000 more TESS candidates still waiting to be confirmed. Thirty-odd years ago, the number of known planets around Sun-like stars was roughly none. Now there’s a queue.
A planet that matches its star
Astronomers using the Gemini South telescope in Chile looked at WASP-189b, a scorching gas giant about 320 light-years away. For the first time they measured magnesium and silicon together in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, and found the ratio matches its host star. That’s the first direct support for an idea scientists have long assumed: planets are built from the same rocky ingredients as the stars they orbit. Lead researcher Jorge Antonio Sanchez called it “a much-needed observational anchor” for understanding how rocky planets form. The study was published in Nature Communications.
Off to Mars’s moon
And Japan’s space agency JAXA has launched its Martian Moons eXploration mission, MMX. According to Universe Today it should reach Mars in about six months, with the aim of bringing a sample of the moon Phobos back to Earth by 2031. A sample from a potato-shaped moon. I’m properly excited about it.
What I take from all this
The files are worth reading, and I’m glad they’re being released. But this month the most extraordinary things I read about were confirmed: a baby planet, a thousand worlds from one telescope, and a gas giant with its star’s fingerprints. The universe doesn’t need exaggerating. It’s already weirder than any of us.
If you like this sort of thing, served with a side of nonsense, my free pixel-art zine The Extra-Terrestrial Guide to the Galaxy mixes real UFO and space news (with sources) with Derek, Kevin from accounts and Lord Vexx the Draconian. All four issues are free when you sign up to The Signal. Grab them here. A Christmas special is on the way.
Keep looking up. And check the source.
– TJ
Sources
- Wikipedia: United States UFO files
- UAP.Global: 2026 U.S. UAP file releases timeline
- Newsweek: New UFO files detail FBI records of 2026 sightings
- Cybernews: Trump briefed on secret UFO program, Ross Coulthart claims
- NASA Exoplanet Archive: 2026 news
- ScienceDaily / NOIRLab: A planet 320 light-years away confirms what scientists long suspected
- Universe Today: JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration mission is on its way
