President Donald Trump waves after stepping off Air Force One, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, upon returning from a trip to Georgia.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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Mark Schiefelbein/AP
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to aliens and UFOs because of their “tremendous interest.”
Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after accusing former President Barack Obama of revealing “classified information” when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and said of Obama, “I can get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
In a post on his social media platform Thursday evening, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files related “to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any other information related to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important matters.”
Obama, who made his comments on a podcast over the weekend, later clarified that he had seen no evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” but said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that there is a good chance that there is life out there.”
Trump told reporters Thursday that when it came to the prospect of extraterrestrial visitors: “I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
However, Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, suggested this week that he was ready to talk about it when she said on a podcast that the president had a speech prepared about aliens that he would give at the “right time.”
That was news to the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh when asked about it Wednesday, telling reporters, “A speech about aliens would be news to me.”
Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility that the government is hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life resurfaced in the public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to The New York Times and Politico in 2017. The new scrutiny led Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, although officials said the objects, which appeared to be triangles, greens hovering over a Navy ship, probably drones.
The Pentagon has since promised more transparency on the issue. In July 2022 it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to be a central place for collecting reports of all military UFO encounters, replacing a department task force.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of AARO at the time, told reporters that he had no evidence “that there had been any program to do any kind of reverse engineering or any kind of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomenon).”
Information that has been made public shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military remain unresolved, but those that are identified are largely benign in nature.
An 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024 said service members had made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena last year, but 118 cases were found to be “prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to emphasize that, to date, AARO has not discovered evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology,” the report emphasizes.