US President Donald Trump said that he will direct US agencies, including the Defence Department, to begin the process of identifying and releasing government files of aliens and extraterrestrial life.
It is not clear, however, what these files on UFOs are or what information they might reveal.
Taking to his acount on Truth social Trump wrote ““Based on the tremendous interest shown, 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!”
Public interest in aliens has always been high due to them being fuelled by conspiracy theories and just plain fascination.
The Pentagon has been tracking reports of what it calls UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena, for decades.
The announcement came just days after former President Barack Obama said that aliens were "real" in a podcast. However, he said later backtracked and said that he never actually saw evidence of extraterrestrial life during his presidency.
While some observers said that Trump's new interest in aliens and documents were fuelled by Obama’s claims, others on social media suggested that this was, allegedly, an attempt by the president to distract the public from the Epstein files.
One person replied to the announcement on X with a screengrab of an article by The Guardian art released about six months ago that read, “Seth Meyers: ‘We’re just one Epstein story away from Trump announcing that UFOs are real’”.
Meyers seems to have seen Trump's alien announcement coming in July 2025. He told his late-night audience that the Trump would reveal that aliens existed just to distract the public from the fact that he sent a birthday card to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “Whatever is in those Epstein files must be really f***ing bad,” the late-night host said. “They must be finding so many mentions of Trump, they’re going to have to change the name to the ‘Trump files featuring Jeffrey Epstein’. They’re so desperate to distract everyone.”
“I honestly think we’re just one Epstein story away from Trump announcing that UFOs are real,” he added.
Trump's new announcement also comes right after the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in the public office. He was arrested after the DOJ released about 3 million documents in relation to the billionaire financier.
The renewed interest in aliens from the Trump administration has also been confusing, especially since Pentagon officials stated in a 2024 report, that there was no evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life.
Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryde said, “All investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification.”
Trump himself is not sure whether aliens exist. “I don't know if they're real or not,” he said on Tuesday.