President Donald Trump has announced he is directing the US government to declassify a wealth of reports and files concerning UFOs and extraterrestrial life. This big move comes after the president publicly criticized former President Barack Obama for comments he made suggesting aliens might be real.
According to Politico, Trump shared his decision on social media, stating he would instruct the Department of Defense and other relevant agencies to start releasing this material. He specifically mentioned the Secretary of War, along with other departments, would identify and release 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.”
This announcement follows recent remarks from former President Obama. In a recent interview, Obama had said that aliens are “real but I haven’t seen them.” He also addressed common conspiracy theories, specifically debunking the idea that extraterrestrial life forms are kept at a government facility in Nevada. Obama firmly stated, “They’re not being kept in Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
After all, aliens are a statistical probability
The former president later clarified his comments on social media, explaining that his intent was to suggest that “the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.” He reiterated that during his time in office, he “saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us.”
President Trump wasn’t too pleased with Obama’s initial statements. On February 19, he told reporters that he believes Obama had wrongly revealed classified information. This back-and-forth between the two presidents definitely ramped up interest in aliens, UFOs and extraterrestrial life – topics that are often confined to the fringes of public discussion.
Questions surrounding the U.S. government’s contact with UFOs really started gaining mainstream traction after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report in 2021 detailing dozens of encounters by U.S. Navy pilots with unexplained aerial phenomena, with incidents dating back to 2004. This report was a central point of discussion during a House Intelligence hearing in 2022, where declassified videos and descriptions of these encounters were presented.
Published: Feb 20, 2026 07:00 pm