“Based on the tremendous interest shown,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later described the announcement as “OUT OF THIS WORLD NEWS” in a post on X. The president’s message came hours after he criticized former President Barack Obama over comments about alien life.
Trump accused Obama of revealing classified information and said he was “not supposed to be doing that.” Speaking to Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy, Trump added that the president does not “know if they’re real or not.”
“I may get him out of trouble by declassifying,” Trump later told Doocy in the interview. Obama has said extraterrestrial life was real but that he has not “seen them.”
Obama later clarified that his remarks were made in the light-hearted spirit of a rapid round of questions. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he said.
Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, said Trump has a prepared speech detailing extraterrestrial life and spaceships. Leavitt later responded to that claim by saying it was “news to me.”
“I’ve heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don’t know when the right time is, he’s going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life,” Lara Trump said on the “Pod Force One” podcast.
The topic of extraterrestrial life and unidentified aerial phenomena has drawn sustained interest from lawmakers and the public. In 2023, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing with former military intelligence officer and whistleblower David Grusch.
Grusch alleged that the Pentagon and other agencies operated a “multi-decade” program to reverse engineer nonhuman technology retrieved from crash sites. He said he was part of one such retrieval program, though the Pentagon has denied his claims.
In 2022, a House Intelligence subcommittee held the first congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years. Lawmakers heard from officials overseeing a Pentagon task force investigating unidentified aerial phenomena.
There is no conclusive evidence regarding whether life exists on other planets.
Source: The Hill.
