Volunteers remove rivets from an Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar, a Cold War-era experimental aircraft resembling a flying saucer, at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, Dec. 7, 2017. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’s instructing the Pentagon to identify and begin releasing files related to extraterrestrials and unidentified flying objects. (U.S. Air Force)
Documents detailing what the U.S. government knows about whether intelligent life exists beyond Earth may not be under wraps for much longer.
Citing “tremendous interest” in the subject, President Donald Trump on Thursday said he’s instructing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and begin releasing files related to extraterrestrials and unidentified flying objects.
Trump made the announcement in a post on Truth Social, saying his order applies to all “information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
Trump’s order came on the heels of former President Barack Obama’s remarks about aliens several days earlier.
Asked about aliens in an interview with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen that was released Saturday, Obama said “they’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept … in Area 51.”
The place Obama referred to is a classified Air Force installation in southern Nevada initially built as a test facility for the Lockheed U-2 spy plane.
In recent decades, it’s become the topic of various conspiracy theories about whether the government is using the secretive site to hide alien bodies and recovered UFOs.
On Sunday, Obama made a clarifying post on Instagram saying he had not seen any evidence during his presidency “that extraterrestrials have made contact with us.”
Trump’s post did not give a timeline for the release of the files. He told reporters Thursday on Air Force One that he doesn’t have an opinion on whether aliens exist, according to The Associated Press.
The Pentagon in recent years has stepped up efforts to investigate unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena, the government’s term for UFO-type sightings.
An intelligence report released in 2023 revealed that there were hundreds of new reports of these sightings and many of them were unexplained.
Most of the new sightings came from Navy and Air Force aviators and operators who had witnessed such objects while flying.
In a 2024 report, the Pentagon said there was no indication suggesting that what observers had reported seeing was extraterrestrial.