The Trump administration is taking another crack at the issue, to see if it can find a different answer.
President Trump said this past week that he would direct the defense secretary and relevant departments to begin the process of releasing government files related to aliens, unidentified flying objects “and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
Dozens of grainy infrared videos, captured by military aircraft, have surfaced over the years purporting to show unexplainable—possibly extraterrestrial—phenomena. Internet headlines have often described vehicles traveling at speeds beyond any known technology, or breaking the laws of physics.
Military officials have dismissed many of the incidents as birds, balloons or drones. Pilots often experience an optical illusion of a passing object that can make it appear to be traveling at great speed even if it is barely moving, officials have said. Quirks of infrared cameras can make a balloon or piece of trash seem to disappear and reappear as it gets close to water, giving the impression of a flying craft dipping into the ocean and flying back out, former military officials have said.
A few of those sightings have continued to vex military investigators. We don’t believe “every object is a bird, a balloon or a UAV,” the director of the Pentagon office tasked with digging into the cases, Jon Kosloski, told lawmakers in 2024.
“We do have some very anomalous objects,” he said, adding that the office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, hasn’t yet discovered verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology.
Trump’s latest directive came after former President Barack Obama responded to a question about aliens on a recent podcast, saying: “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them.” Obama later clarified that he meant that other forms of life are likely to exist somewhere in the vastness of the universe, but didn’t think any had visited Earth.
No matter, many took his comments to be an inadvertent slip of the greatest secret in history.
Trump soon upstaged him, saying first that Obama had revealed classified secrets, and then issuing his own order to declassify the documents.
The number of files that could be at issue will depend on how the Pentagon ultimately defines the parameters, and could range from a narrow review of sightings captured on video, to millions of claims made over four generations.
Perhaps the most likely reveal of any new probe into Washington’s UFO files will be that many people at the Pentagon are just as fascinated by the prospect of aliens as the rest of America.
And perhaps even more fascinated.
Congress directed the Pentagon to create the AARO office in 2022 to search for whether the government had any secret alien program. Some of the findings were bizarre. AARO discovered no proof that the military was reverse-engineering caches of fallen UFOs, as some former officials had alleged. But the agency did discover that a network of UFO believers within the Defense Department had created a program that investigated accounts of interdimensional creatures and werewolves on a ranch in Utah. (The AARO office determined that contact wasn’t made with said creatures.)
When the agency released its findings in 2024, the UFO community criticized its first director, Sean Kirkpatrick, claiming the report was a smokescreen to conceal the secrets of Washington’s real alien encounters.
“People have built up this story in their minds, with an expectation that there’s some stockpile of documents that detail alien landings and reverse engineering, and there isn’t,” Kirkpatrick said in an interview.
Much of the present-day fascination with UFOs traces back to a 1947 crash outside Roswell, N.M. A former Army helicopter pilot, Kevin Randle, spent much of his life tracking down witnesses who had spotted crash debris and even what looked like alien bodies being hauled away from the remote area. His decades of painstaking research helped lead to a push in the 1990s for the Air Force to come clean on what it had been doing: testing spy balloons and recovering crash dummies.
Rather than take credit for the disclosure, Randle, who is 76, said the story didn’t add up. “They wanted to stop the interest in the Roswell case because it was leading into areas they didn’t want us to look at,” he said in an interview.
The CIA inquiry in the 1990s, too, didn’t satisfy the UFO community.
The agency admitted that, for decades, the government had lied and said the sightings of the mysterious, high-altitude silver crafts were just weather anomalies. The “deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories,” the CIA study said.
Steven Greer, a UFO researcher who had pushed the CIA to investigate what the agency knew, said he believed that study was a whitewash, and that military and intelligence officials had kept secrets of retrieved alien crafts from the CIA director and then-President Bill Clinton.
Greer said he believes Trump’s inquiry might well be similarly stymied. “The very fact that the president ordered this and the secretary of defense looks into it doesn’t mean anything or that it will go anywhere, unless they go around those blockades,” he said.
Write to Joel Schectman at joel.schectman@wsj.com