Washington– President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to aliens and UFOs due to “tremendous interest.”
Trump announced this in a post on social media hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of revealing “classified information” when… Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview That aliens were real.
“I don’t know if it’s real or not,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, and said of Obama: “I might get him out of trouble by lifting the secrecy.”
In a post on his social media platform Thursday evening, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files related to “extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information associated with these very complex, but extremely interesting and important matters.”
Obama, who made his comments in a podcast over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens had “contacted us,” but said: “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good that there is life out there.”
Trump told reporters on Thursday that when it comes to the possibility 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.”
However, Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, indicated this week that he was ready to talk about the matter, when she said on a podcast that the president had a speech ready to give the aliens and that he would deliver it at the “appropriate time.”
That was news to the White House. Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt laughed back when asked about it on Wednesday, telling reporters: “Giving a speech about aliens would be news to me.”
Public interest in UFOs and the possibility of the government hiding the secrets of extraterrestrial life resurfaced in the public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of the UFOs to the New York Times and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold the first UFO hearings in 50 years in May 2022, though officials said the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating on top of a ship Navy, most likely. Drones.
The Pentagon has since promised more transparency on the subject. In July 2022, it established the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to be a central place to collect reports on all military UFO encounters, replacing a departmental task force.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO at the time, told reporters that he had no evidence “that there was any program at all to do any kind of reverse engineering of any kind of extraterrestrial atmospheric phenomena (unidentified atmospheric phenomena).”
Information released shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military are unsolved, but those that are identified are largely benign in nature.
18-page unclassified report The report, which was submitted to Congress in June 2024, said service members made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena last year, but 118 cases were found to be “ordinary objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to stress that, to date, AARO has not discovered any evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activities or technology,” the report stressed.
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Associated Press writers Konstantin Torobin and Steve Peoples contributed to this report.