President Trump has ordered his administration to release intelligence on aliens and unidentified flying objects.
Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social account on Thursday night, and said that he had instructed his war secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “begin the process of identifying and releasing” any relevant government files.
They will pertain to UFOs, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), extraterrestrial life and “any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important matters”, he wrote.
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Trump visited Georgia on Thursday
MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/AP
The scope of the files ordered for release and a possible timeline are unclear. Trump said his decision was based on the “tremendous interest shown”.
His order comes just days after the former president Barack Obama said in a podcast interview that aliens “are real, but I haven’t seen them”.
Obama’s remarks generated online discussion and fuelled conspiracies that the US government was aware of extraterrestrial life and was hiding aliens from the public.
Michelle and Barack Obama in Los Angeles last weekend
“And they’re not being kept in Area 51,” Obama told the podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen over the weekend, referencing the government’s secluded and secretive base in Nevada. “There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
Obama later released a statement saying that he was trying to “stick with the spirit of the speed round” during a round of “lightning” questions.
“Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he explained. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens are low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Obama has previously declined to rule out the existence of extraterrestrial life. In 2021 he told the talk show host James Corden he had asked if aliens were being studied in a secret lab and was told the answer was no.
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“When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air,” he said, adding: “But what is true — and I’m actually being serious here — is that there’s footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.
“We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. So I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is. But I have nothing to report to you today.”
Trump scolded the former president earlier on Thursday. “He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake,” he said.
Trump claims Obama revealed classified information when he said aliens are real
Trump added that Obama had shared “classified information”. He said that he did not know whether or not aliens were real.
The Pentagon said in a 2024 report that government investigations into UAPs had not confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life. It has been tracking reports of UAPs for decades.
A YouGov poll published in November found that 56 per cent of Americans think aliens definitely or probably exist. This included 61 per cent of Democrats, who were more likely to hold this belief than Republicans, 46 per cent of whom said the same.