Donald Trump (file photo)
President of the United States Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he ordered the release of classified documents about UFOs and aliens, while blaming the former president barack obama Release of Confidential Information.“Based on the overwhelming interest shown, I will direct the Secretary of War and other appropriate departments and agencies to begin identifying and releasing government documents related to aliens and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), as well as any and all other information related to these highly complex but extremely interesting and important matters. God bless America! ” Trump said on TruthSocial.
Trump’s comments came hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of leaking “classified information” over comments that suggested aliens might be real. “I don’t know if they’re true or false,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding, of Obama, “I would probably get him out of trouble by declassifying them.”Former President Barack Obama made the comments during a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarifying that he had seen no evidence that aliens had “made contact with us.” However, he added, “Statistically, the universe is so huge that the likelihood of life being there is very high.”Trump also addressed the topic on Thursday, telling reporters: “I have no problem with it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, said this week that he might speak out more directly. She said on the podcast that the president has prepared a speech about aliens and that he will deliver it at the “right time.”The claim prompted an interesting response from the White House. Press secretary Carolyn Leavitt laughed when asked about it on Wednesday, saying: “The alien speech was news to me.”Public interest in UFOs resurfaced in 2017 after former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy footage of UFOs to The New York Times and Politico. This new concern prompted Congress to hold its first UFO hearings in 50 years in May 2022. Officials later said the object seen in the widely discussed footage, a green triangle hovering over the Navy ship, was likely a drone.The Pentagon has pledged greater transparency amid growing scrutiny. In July 2022, it established the All-Area Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to centralize reports of unidentified aerial phenomena.In 2023, AARO’s then-director Sean Kirkpatrick said he found no evidence “that any program ever existed” to reverse engineer alien technology.Available public data indicates that while many military UFO sightings remain unsolved, the majority of discovered cases involve conventional objects. An 18-page unclassified report to Congress in June 2024 noted that there were 485 reports of unidentified phenomena last year, 118 of which were attributed to “common objects such as various balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
