Trump said Thursday that he is directing the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs, pointing to public curiosity about the topic. He made the announcement hours after raising concerns about former President Barack Obama’s remarks about aliens on a podcast.
Trump also told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One that he does not know whether extraterrestrial visitors are real. Asked about the possibility, he said he “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and he added that he may be able to “get him out of trouble by declassifying,” referring to Obama.
In a social media post Thursday night, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files covering “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.”
The Trump order also drew attention to recent remarks by Obama, who appeared in a podcast interview over the weekend and later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made contact with us.” Obama also said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” according to the reporting.
Trump’s comments came after he accused Obama of disclosing “classified information” in connection with the podcast discussion, a claim that Trump later framed through the idea of declassification. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, meanwhile, laughed when asked about whether Trump had a speech prepared on the subject, saying a speech on aliens would be “news to me.”
Trump’s move also sits within a broader recent U.S. push to scrutinize unidentified aerial phenomena. Public interest in the topic resurfaced after the 2017 leak of Navy videos of unidentified objects to media outlets, which helped lead Congress to hold its first UFO hearings in 50 years in May 2022.
Since then, the Pentagon has described efforts to improve transparency and centralize reporting. In July 2022, it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, to collect reports of military encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, and it later broadened its role in response to congressional attention.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who was head of AARO at the time, told reporters he had “not have any evidence ‘of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).’” More recently, an 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024 said service members submitted 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.”
The report also stressed that, to date, AARO had discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology, according to the text provided in the wire story.