[Frame taken from the "GIMBAL" Pentagon UFO Video, U.S.Navy 2015]
The UAPTF—later succeeded by AARO—is a recently formed organization, established on short notice following decades of apparent (public) inaction by the U.S. Armed Forces and the intelligence community regarding anomalous aerial phenomena. On August 4, 2020, Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist approved the creation of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) under the direct control of the U.S. Department of the Navy and the supervision of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
Nearly eighty years after the phenomenon began, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to have taken note of the “enormous interest shown”—without specifying whether by the public or by American military and civilian institutions—and has officially ordered the Secretary of War to
“initiate the process of identifying and releasing government documents related to alien and extraterrestrial life, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) and Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO), as well as any other information connected to matters that are highly complex yet extremely interesting and important.”
What changed between 2023 and 2026? First and foremost, the presidency: Trump took office at the White House for a second time and sought to keep the promise he had made years earlier—namely, to shed light on the subject of aliens.
[Release Poster of "Disclosure Day" Movie, by Universal Pictures, 2026]
But the most unsettling difference lies in the institutional platform used for the "Disclosure": while the timeline I described earlier highlighted how the US Navy—along with the Air Force—had always managed the phenomenon (culminating in 2023 with the activation of two operational offices for UAP cataloging), the "Disclosure" is taking place on the website WAR.GOV/UFO. Not UAP, but UFO. Has the term "UFO" been cleansed by 2026 of the taint of past cover-ups and the ocean of disinformation, denials, threats, and discrediting campaigns? Does the entire 2020–2025 maneuver (including the billions of dollars spent building a propaganda machine) regarding the UFO-to-UAP transition no longer make sense? And what are we to make of the decision to use WAR.GOV instead of, say, the AARO website—the very agency established for this purpose? Or perhaps—if one wanted to go all out—the much-touted new US military branch, the Space Force? A simple search on the official spaceforce.mil website confirms that neither "UFO" nor "UAP" appears there (whereas "War" yields 224 results). In my view, the reason lies in the targeted, deliberate communication strategy that has always characterized the mindset of the American military-industrial complex: AARO and the Space Force belong to the Department of Defense. UAPs/UFOs have been assigned to the Department of War. A vast difference, both in terms of underlying motives and consequences.
Moreover, American history is replete with examples where the line separating reality from fiction is so fine that, at times, it is nonexistent. Is it merely a coincidence, then, that Steven Spielberg’s "Disclosure Day" hit worlwide theaters last June? Judging by the initial reports, and the subsequent reviews, this involves yet another scenario of the kind we have come to expect when the subject is Aliens: invasion, conspiracy, cover-up, and war.
Perhaps, then, instead of being distracted by the game of acronyms—UFO vs. UAP—we should focus on the same three letters that have defined human history on Earth from the very beginning. For that is what is constantly imposed upon us—not in the skies, but right here on the ground: WAR.