President Donald Trump said Thursday he is directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs, citing “tremendous interest.”
Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after accusing former President Barack Obama of disclosing “classified information” when Obama suggested in a recent podcast interview that alien life could exist.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said, “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and added of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, Trump said he was directing agencies to release files related “to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
Obama, who made his comments during a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” but said “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
Trump told reporters Thursday that regarding the prospect of extraterrestrial visitors, “I don’t have an 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 on a podcast that the president had prepared a speech about aliens that he would deliver at the “right time.” The White House appeared unaware of such plans. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt laughed when asked about it Wednesday and said, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”
Public interest in UFOs and the possibility of government secrecy resurfaced in 2017 after former Pentagon and government officials provided Navy videos of unidentified objects to The New York Times and Politico. The renewed scrutiny led Congress to hold its first UFO hearings in 50 years in May 2022. Officials later said the objects, which appeared as green triangles above a Navy ship, were likely drones.
Since then, the Pentagon has pledged greater transparency. In July 2022, it established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, to centralize reports of military encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, replacing an earlier task force.
In 2023, then-AARO director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick told reporters he had seen no evidence “of any program having ever existed to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Public reports show that while many military UFO sightings remain unexplained, identified cases are largely benign.
An 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024 said service members filed 485 reports of unidentified phenomena over the previous year. Of those, 118 were determined to involve “prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the report said.