(Washington) President Donald Trump said Thursday he is directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release records related to aliens and UFOs because of the “tremendous interest” in them.
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Donald Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after accusing former President Barack Obama of leaking “classified information” when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens do exist.
Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he doesn’t know “whether they really exist or not.”
“Perhaps I will save him trouble by declassifying this information,” he added, referring to Mr. Obama’s remarks.
In a post Thursday evening on his social media platform, Trump said he was asking government agencies to release records related to “extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), as well as any other information related to these very complex, but extremely interesting and important, issues.”
Mr. Obama, who made the comments during a podcast this weekend, later clarified that he had not seen any evidence that extraterrestrials “have made contact with us” but said that “statistically, the universe is so vast that there is a good chance that there is life elsewhere.”
President Trump told reporters Thursday about the prospect of extraterrestrial visitors that he had “no opinion on it.”
“I never talk about it. A lot of people are talking about it. A lot of people believe in it,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, however, hinted this week that he was ready to speak on the subject, when she said in another podcast that the president had prepared a speech on aliens that he would deliver “at the appropriate time.”
This was news to the White House. Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh when asked Wednesday and told reporters: “A talk about aliens would be news to me. »
Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility that the government is hiding secrets about extraterrestrial life has resurfaced in the collective consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos showing unknown objects to the New York Times and to Politico in 2017.
The renewed interest prompted Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, although officials said the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating above a Navy ship, were likely drones.
Since then, the Pentagon has promised more transparency on the subject. In July 2022, he established the All-Area Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), intended to become the hub for collecting all reports on military UFO encounters, replacing a department task force.
In 2023, the Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, then director of the AARO, told reporters that he had no evidence “that a program existed to reverse engineer any (unidentified) extraterrestrial aerial phenomenon.”
Publicly released information shows that the vast majority of UFO reports filed by the military remain unsolved, but those that are identified are mostly benign in nature.
An 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024 said the military reported 485 unidentified phenomena over the past year, but that 118 cases turned out to be “prosaic objects, such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to emphasize that to date, AARO has not discovered any evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial beings, activities, or technologies,” the report notes.
