Trump says he doesn’t know if aliens are real but directs govt to release files on UFOs, more
Trump made the announcement just hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of revealing “classified information” after Obama suggested aliens were real in a recent podcast interview.
“I don’t know if these are real,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, and said of Obama, “I can get him out of trouble by declassifying him.”
In a post on the social media platform on Thursday night, Trump said he had directed government agencies to release files related to “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, Trump told reporters on Thursday: “I have no opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, said this week that she was ready to talk about the issue, but said in 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 re-emerged in the public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of the unknown objects to The New York Times and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny has prompted Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022; but officials said the objects appeared to be green triangles floating above a Navy ship. They were probably drones.
The Pentagon has since promised more transparency on the issue. In July 2022, he established the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which is intended to be a central place 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 type of 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 Congress in June 2024 said 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.
