WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced Thursday his intention to have the Pentagon and federal agencies identify and make public all documentation concerning extraterrestrial beings and unidentified flying objects, citing widespread public fascination.
The president’s announcement came through social media just hours after he criticized former President Barack Obama for revealing what Trump called “classified information” during Obama’s recent podcast discussion about the possibility of alien life.
Speaking to journalists on Air Force One, Trump stated, “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and regarding Obama’s comments added, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
In his Thursday evening social media statement, Trump explained he was instructing federal departments to make public all documentation concerning “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’s weekend podcast remarks, which sparked Trump’s response, were later clarified by the former president, who explained he hadn’t witnessed proof that aliens “have made contact with us,” but noted, “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
When questioned about potential extraterrestrial visitors, Trump told reporters Thursday: “I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
However, Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, indicated this week on a podcast that he was prepared to address the subject, claiming the president had prepared remarks about aliens that he would deliver at the “right time.”
This revelation surprised White House staff. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt chuckled when reporters asked about it Wednesday, telling them, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”
Widespread curiosity about UFOs and potential government concealment of alien evidence returned to mainstream attention following 2017 leaks to The New York Times and Politico by former Pentagon and government personnel, who shared Navy footage of unexplained objects. This renewed attention led Congress to conduct its first UFO hearings in five decades during May 2022, though officials determined the objects, appearing as green triangles above a Navy vessel, were probably drones.
The Pentagon has since committed to greater openness on this subject. In July 2022, it established the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) as a centralized hub for collecting military UFO encounter reports, replacing a previous departmental task force.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who led AARO at that time, informed reporters he possessed no proof “of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).”
Released information indicates most military UFO reports remain unexplained, though identified cases typically involve ordinary objects.
An 18-page unclassified congressional report from June 2024 revealed service members submitted 485 reports of unexplained phenomena over the previous year, with 118 cases determined to be “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 emphasized.
