We describe a few recent microlensing results from the MACHO Collaboration .
The aim of the MACHO Project was the identification and quantitative description of dark and luminous matter in the Milky Way using microlensing toward the Magellanic Clouds ( LMC and SMC ) and the Galactic bulge .
We start with a discussion of the Hubble Space Telescope follow-up observations of the microlensing events toward the LMC detected in the first 5 years of the experiment .
Using color-magnitude diagrams we attempt to distinguish between two possible locations of the microlensing sources toward the LMC : 1 ) in the LMC or 2 ) behind the LMC .
We conclude that unless the extinction is extremely patchy , it is very unlikely that most of the LMC microlensing events have source stars behind the LMC .
During examination of the HST images of the 13 LMC events we found a very red object next to the source star of event LMC-5 .
Based on astrometry , microlensing parallax fit and a spectrum , we argue that in this case we directly image the lens – a low-mass disk star .

Then we focus on the majority of the events observed by the MACHO Project , which are detected toward the Galactic bulge .
We determine the microlensing optical depth , which describes the amount of matter between us and the Galactic center .
We argue that the microlensing optical depth toward the bulge is best measured using only a subclass of the events , namely the ones that have clump giant sources .
They are numerous and belong to the brightest stars in the bulge , which makes them insensitive to blending bias .
Our analysis of those events suggests that the optical depth toward the Galactic bulge is \tau _ { bulge } = ( 1.4 \pm 0.3 ) \times 10 ^ { -6 } , in good agreement with other observational constraints and with theoretical models .
There are many long-duration events among the bulge candidates .
We take advantage of this situation investigating the microlensing parallax effect .
We show that the events with the strongest parallax signal are probably due to massive remnants .
Events MACHO-96-BLG-5 and MACHO-98-BLG-6 might have been caused by the black holes with masses of order of 6 solar masses .