Trump orders US government to release UFO files on ‘alien life’ | World | News

Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon and other US agencies to release “government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life.” Trump said he directed the release of files on aliens and UFOs due to “tremendous interest” in the subject.

Mr Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after the former US president accused Barack Obama of revealing “classified information” when he suggested aliens were real in a recent podcast interview. “I don’t know if these are real,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. And he said of Mr. Obama: “I can get him out of trouble by declassifying it.” In a post on the social media platform on Thursday night, Mr. Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files on “alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any other information related to these extremely complex but extremely interesting and important topics.”

Obama, who made his comments in a podcast broadcast over the weekend, later clarified that he had seen no evidence that aliens had “contacted us”, but said “statistically, the universe is so vast that the probability of life there is very high.”

When it comes to the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors, Mr. Trump told reporters: “I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”

Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, said this week that she was ready to talk about the issue. But when he said on a podcast that the president was preparing a speech about aliens that he would give “at the right time.”

This made news to the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt laughed when asked about it on Wednesday and told reporters: “A conversation about aliens would be news to me.”

Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility that the government is hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life resurfaced in the public eye after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to the public.

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New York Times and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny has led the US congress to hold its first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022; but officials said objects that appeared to be green triangles hovering over a Navy ship were likely drones.

The Pentagon has since promised more transparency on the issue. In July 2022, it established the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which is intended to be a central location to collect reports on all military UFO encounters, taking over the task from a department task force.

In 2023, then-AARO president Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick told reporters there was no evidence “that any program exists to reverse engineer any extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomenon).”

Publicly released information indicates that the vast majority of UFO reports prepared by the military remain undeciphered, but those detected are largely harmless in nature.

An 18-page unclassified report submitted to the US Congress in June 2024 stated that service members filed 485 reports of unidentified incidents last year, but 118 cases were found to be “ordinary objects such as various types of balloons, birds and unmanned aerial systems.”

“It is important to underline that AARO has not discovered any evidence of extraterrestrial entities, activity or technology to date,” the report emphasized.