Trump’s announcement on Thursday came after he accused Barack Obama of disclosing classified information in remarks about aliens that Obama later clarified he made without evidence of contact.
The president said he was directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and 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,” according to a social media post described in the report. The announcement also cited “tremendous interest,” the Associated Press reported.
Hours earlier, Trump made the comments aboard Air Force One, telling reporters: “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” the report said. He also said of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying,” describing the situation as one in which declassification could resolve the accusation he had raised.
The exchange tied back to what Obama said on a podcast over the weekend, after which Trump said he had accused Obama of revealing “classified information.” In the report, Obama 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.”
The report also described how questions about potential Trump comments on extraterrestrials played out inside the White House. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, suggested this week that he had a speech prepared to deliver on aliens at the “right time,” while press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh when asked about it, telling reporters, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”
Beyond the politics of the latest remarks, the AP report placed Trump’s direction in the context of long-running public interest and U.S. government efforts to account for military sightings. It said public scrutiny resurfaced after former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to The New York Times and Politico in 2017, and that congressional hearings on UFOs took place in May 2022 for the first time in 50 years.
According to the report, the Pentagon said it would increase transparency on the topic and in July 2022 created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, to centralize reports of military UFO encounters, taking over from a prior task force. The report said AARO’s leadership, at the time, told reporters in 2023 that it had “no evidence” of a program aimed at “reverse engineering” extraterrestrial technology.
The AP report also described what later public reporting has indicated about the outcome of UFO reviews, including that the “vast majority” of reports go unsolved but those identified are generally benign. It cited a June 2024 unclassified report submitted to Congress that said service members made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena in the past year and that 118 cases were found to be “prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems,” adding that the report said AARO had discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology.
Associated Press writers Konstantin Toropin and Steve Peoples contributed to this report.