Washington, 20 Feb 

US President Donald Trump said Thursday that he's directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs because of “tremendous interest.”

Trump announced in a social media post hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of disclosing “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 may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”

In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, 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 connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

Obama, who made his comments in a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” but said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's 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.”

Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, suggested this week that he was ready to speak about it; however, when she said on a podcast that the president had a speech prepared to deliver on 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 she was asked about it Wednesday and told reporters, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”

Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility of the government hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life reemerged 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 renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, though officials said that the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating above a Navy ship, were likely drones.

Since then, the Pentagon has promised more transparency on the topic. In July 2022, it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to be a central place to collect reports of all military UFO encounters, taking over from a department task force.

In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO at the time, told reporters he didn't have any evidence “of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).”

The information that has been made public shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military go unsolved, but the ones 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 in the past 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 underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the report stressed.