A man and a boy sit on a paved sidewalk and draw an alien’s face.
Annie Otzen | Digital Vision | Getty Images
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will direct the Pentagon and other agencies to release government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life.
President Trump said the files identified and released will also pertain to unidentified aerial phenomena and unidentified flying objects, as well as “all other information related to these very complex but very interesting and important issues.”
In a post on Truth Social, President Trump said his actions were based on “tremendous interest” in the issue, but provided no additional details. This comes after he accused former US President Barack Obama of leaking “classified information” about aliens.
“I don’t know if they’re real or not, but I can tell you that he provided classified information,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One.
President Obama said on Saturday’s podcast that aliens are real, “but I’ve never seen them, and they’re not kept at Area 51.”
President Obama added, “Without this huge conspiracy, the underground facility would not exist, and they hid it from the President of the United States.”
Area 51 is a classified U.S. Air Force facility in Nevada that is the center of conspiracy theories that the U.S. government researches and uses the facility to store extraterrestrial materials and technology.
President Obama has previously said that the first question he wants answered in office is “Where are the aliens?”
After Sunday’s podcast, the former US president clarified his position in an Instagram post, saying the universe is so vast that there is a good chance there is life in it.
But he also said there was “no evidence” that extraterrestrial life had come into contact with Earth while he was president.
At the end of 2024, the Department of Defense announced that there were 757 new reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, between May 2023 and June 2024, NBC News reported.
Of these, 21 “deserve further analysis” due to “unusual characteristics or behavior,” the report said, adding that so far there is no evidence to demonstrate that life from another planet is involved in these sightings.
