(TNND) — President Donald Trump said he’s directing the Pentagon and other federal agencies to identify and release files related to UFOs and extraterrestrial life, days after former President Barack Obama told a podcaster that aliens are real.
What ultimately gets released may shed new light on the mysteries in our skies, even if it doesn’t offer a revelation about alien life.
Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, said he’s sure the government is sitting on information it hasn’t released out of national security concerns.
“Stuff gets released, and stuff doesn’t get released, and you never know what the totality of it is,” Impey said.
So, a new wave of disclosures stemming from Trump’s directive could shed new light on UFOs, or UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena, as they’re officially called these days.
In recent years, Congress has taken up an interest in uncovering the mysteries of UAPs with a handful of hearings.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in 2022. And NASA commissioned an independent study on UAPs.
Ryan Graves, a former Navy fighter pilot and the founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace, testified at a congressional hearing on UAPs in the summer of 2023. Friday, he expressed cautious excitement for what the release of government documents could bring.
“I wonder if we’re not going to see what people have been suggesting the government has been working on for many decades,” Graves said. “I think we need to be perhaps a bit cautious in our expectations. There was no discussion of declassifying any information, just releasing (it). So, I wonder if this will remain only a release of information that is really hard for us to even make out what’s happening. So, are we really going to get the goods or not? I think that’s what everyone’s wondering. I’m wondering that, too.”
Graves called Trump’s announcement a big moment. And he said it could go a long way in destigmatizing UAP reporting.
Graves started Americans for Safe Aerospace to raise awareness about UAPs as a matter of national security, aerospace safety and scientific inquiry.
“There’s been an incredible swell of reports from pilots on this issue, (but) they still don’t feel comfortable reporting,” he said. “And if the United States government, the president himself, has validated this as an issue, I think the market has no choice but to react and start to integrate this information. And I think we’re going to learn a lot about what’s been happening up there.”
The congressional hearings have only touched on a “tiny sliver of what’s going on,” Graves said.
The latest AARO report on UAPs, which was released in late 2024, touched on hundreds of cases, including some the Pentagon couldn’t explain.
But the report said there was no evidence of extraterrestrial life, activity or technology on Earth. And the cases that were resolved involved commonplace objects such as balloons, birds, drones, satellites and aircraft.
“As the airspace gets more complicated, it’s going to be harder for us to maintain authority over our airspace, and we need to have the systems in place to be able to not just quickly detect something but identify what it is and make a decision on how to act,” Graves said.
Trump cited the “tremendous interest” in aliens and UAPs as a reason he was ordering the release of government files.
But Trump himself doesn’t proclaim to be a believer in alien visitors.
“Well, I don’t know if they’re real or not,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday.
“I don’t have an opinion on it,” he continued. “I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
Trump was asked about Obama’s recent comments to podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, in which the former president said aliens are real, but he hasn’t seen them.
Obama was asked about the existence of aliens during a rapid-fire question segment toward the end of the podcast.
Obama later clarified that the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there somewhere. But he said he saw no evidence during his presidency that extraterrestrials made contact with us.
Impey said Obama’s answer to the podcaster was similar to what a scientist would say.
“We’ve found thousands of exoplanets and hundreds of Earth-like exoplanets, and it projects to maybe 10 billion habitable worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy,” Impey said. “That’s all potential biological experiments and billions of years of time for life to evolve.”
The odds tell us that alien life likely exists on other planets, Impey said. But even if microbial life is fairly common in the universe, intelligent life could be much rarer, he said.
And the nearest extraterrestrial civilization could be thousands of light-years away. That’s an enormous amount of space to cover, even for the most technologically advanced civilizations.
Impey said there’s no evidence we’ve been visited by aliens, and “it may just be implausible” that we ever will be.